GOT'EM!

Congratulations are in order to Dubai Police. They said they'd catch the gang responsible for the ram-raid at Wafi Mall and they've been as good as their word.

Three people are in jail, two caught in the UAE and one in Eastern Europe, and the stolen jewellery has been recovered. Police released photographs - these are the two caught in the UAE:

The operation must have been in co-operation with other police forces - I assume Interpol and probably other European police forces were involved. That's good to see and very necessary with modern international crime.

Other suspects are still being hunted from the gang which is said to have committed over 100 operations in Europe.

The full story is in Gulf News, here.

Here I go again...

There's a difference of opinion brewing up between the police and the RTA, according to Gulf News.

They headline the story:

Dubai Police and RTA on collision course
OFFICIALS LOCK HORNS OVER MINIMUM SPEED LIMIT


Brig Mohammad Saif Al Zafein (lef), Director of
Traffic Department and Maitha Obaid Bin Udai,
CEO of the Traffic and Roads Agency.

I'm sure I remember other occasions when they haven't seen eye to eye too.
The proposed minimum speed limit on highways is another example of wooly thinking. It's not thought through properly. It's not the answer to the problem.

But this is an almost insignificant part of the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that the RTA, and the three Master Developers of 'New Dubai', have destroyed the vision for Dubai.

And I don't say "possibly" or "potentially" or "unless they change tack". It's already too late. The damage can't be undone.

I'm talking about the appalling mis-management of the roads, the unbelievably incompetent 'planning'. 'New Dubai' is a fraction of what it will be but it's gridlocked already.

Worse, when you eventually get through the traffic there's nowhere to park.

The pat answer that 'when the infrastructure's complete it'll all be sorted out' simply isn't true. Try to visit a company at Media/Internet City. You simply can't park - there isn't even anywhere near enough space for the people who work there to park.

Underground car parks can't be built, the buildings are already existing. There's no space for multi-storey car parks unless entire existing new buildings are demolished.

Try to visit someone in Dubai Marina. A tiny number of the final total of buildings are finished and occupied, yet it's chaos. There's not even enough space for the residents to park, so cars are on all the footpaths, the roundabouts and blocking the roads. Visitors stand no chance.


Parking at Dubai Marina

Try to visit the restaurants at Phase 1, it's a great location and a great way to spend an evening - there's no parking space.

The stretch of Al Sufouh Road from Jumeirah Beach Residence, and remember that no-one has moved in there yet, to the traffic light junction outside Mina Seyahi is solid for hours morning and evening. It takes nearly an hour to go two or three kilometres.


Gridlock on Al Sufouh Road.

I know this is the result of new roadworks - I wrote about it a couple of days ago. it's yet another example of roads that had been completed, at great expense and great disruption, only to be torn up a few months later. This particular bottleneck will get easier as the roadwork is finished.

But.

The road to & from the vast JBR plus the apartment blocks and hotels opposite it has to cross the Marina sea outlet - and it has a bridge with only two lanes, one in either direction.


A small part of Jumeirah Beach Residence.

A development of about 10,000 apartments and they think a single lane bridge will be adequate! Which genius came up with that?!

The road leading into this area from the other side of the Marina, past the Diamond Towers, is also solid. Added to this congestion, a newly opened flyover on the new Junction 5 is pouring traffic into the small, local, residential traffic light junction outside Marina Heights tower. That's another one that will soon be dug up and changed because their 'plans' didn't work. Although this one has very little space in which do do anything else.


Congestion the other side of the Marina.

It's all very well having 12 lane freeways to speed traffic along, but when it tries to get off it hits a bottleneck. There are towers all around the bottlenecks, and they're owned by individual, mostly international, investors. Unlike locally owned small properties, they can't simply be demolished and the owners compensated.

There's no space now to solve the traffic crisis.

The Metro is another example of the incompetent 'planning'.

People in the residential and commercial areas of 'New Dubai' will be kilometres from a station. But only three stations, at the end of the lines, have parking spaces!

People are not going to walk kilometres to a Metro station, even in the good weather. So do they expect people to drive kilometres out of their way to get to a station with parking facilities? If they did it would only add to the road congestion, not help it. But of course people won't do that - they'll just carry on using their car as before and ignore the Metro.

The whole traffic/parking situation is a disaster and it's the 'planners' who've caused it. And it has, as I said before, destroyed the vision for Dubai.

If people can't move around easily to carry out their business, businesses won't want to locate here. If people can't get to & from work easily they won't want to work here. If exhibitors and visitors can't easily get to exhibitions, and can't park when they do arrive, our conference/exhibition business is damaged. If people can't get to attractions, to restaurants, to shops then those businesses suffer. Tourists won't come if they're going to spend half their holiday in traffic jams.

Look at the traffic & parking chaos if you try to visit a business on Sheikh Zayed Road. We get the same negative reports from exhibitions and conferences at the Trade Centre. I've already mentioned Media/Internet City and Dubai Marina. None of the other vast developments are ready yet, but you can bet they'll have exactly the same problems.

And still we have yet more buildings going up with inadequate parking and inadequate access roads.

What's even more infuriating is that it needn't have been.

They started with a blank canvas, an area of empty desert. They had no historic buildings or streets to preserve, there was nothing there. They had the luxury of empty space to plan on, something that very few planners around the world have.

And they got it competely, disastrously wrong.

The Gulf News story that started me off ranting is here.

I fell off my chair...

I just had to share this one, an AAP story in today's Sydney Morning Herald:

Thousands of Japanese have been swindled in a scam in which they were sold Australian and British sheep and told they were poodles.

Flocks of sheep were imported to Japan and then sold by a company called Poodles as Pets, marketed as fashionable accessories, available at $1,600 each. That is a snip compared to a real poodle which retails for twice that much in Japan.

The scam was uncovered when Japanese moviestar Maiko Kawamaki went on a talk-show and wondered why her new pet would not bark or eat dog food.

She was crestfallen when told it was a sheep.

Then hundreds of other women got in touch with police to say they feared their new "poodle" was also a sheep.

One couple said they became suspicious when they took their "dog" to have its claws trimmed and were told it had hooves.

Japanese police believe there could be 2,000 people affected by the scam, which operated in Sapporo and capitalised on the fact that sheep are rare in Japan, so many do not know what they look like. (Oh come on! Bloody elephants are rare in Australia but we all know what they look like!)

"We launched an investigation after we were made aware that a company were selling sheep as poodles," Japanese police said, the The Sun reported.

"Sadly we think there is more than one company operating in this way.

"The sheep are believed to have been imported from overseas - Britain, Australia."

Many of the sheep have now been donated to zoos and farms.

© 2007 AAP

Bad zoo news

I'm told Dubai zoo's move has been canned yet again.

This really is unacceptable - the zoo is an embarrassment, a blot on Dubai's name, an absolute disgrace in this day and age. It's particularly appalling given the billions of dollars being invested in the emirate.

Can you imagine horses or camels being imprisoned in the way the animals at the zoo are cramped into tiny, unsuitable space? Of course not.

I don't understand how the municipality can let this continue. It's not only damaging Dubai's reputation, it's a missed commercial opportunity - not something of which the authorities are often guilty. A good, modern zoological garden is a tourist attraction, a money-making enterprise.

It's another problem that's being mishandled and needs Sheikh Mohammed's urgent attention.

Chaos at the Marina

If you have to go to or through Dubai Marina over the next few days, this is a heads up that you'll need to allow at least an extra 4o minutes for the journey. If you're visiting a business in the free zone you'll be late if you don't.

Twice this morning, early and late, I sat for over 40 minutes to travel less than two kilometres.

The cause of the problem is the area between the traffic signal junction outside Marina Heights tower and Mina Seyahi.

They've changed the main traffic signal intersection to a temporary roundabout, closed off half the road and traffic going towards the free zone is now on the 'wrong' side of the road, changed the traffic signal sequences and timings.





And a flyover which is part of the monster new Intersection 5 has suddenly opened. I don't know where it comes from but it's bringing extra traffic in to the small traffic signal interestion outside Marina Heights at Phase 1 (the Spinneys entrance).

Naturally, it was all changed overnight with no warning, there are no signs to help so there's a lot of confusion adding to the chaos.

Both sides of the Marina are affected so don't bother going over a bridge to the other side, it's also jammed. I tried this morning.



I guess there will be continuous changes and people will get used to it, so it may get a bit better over the next few days. For the time being it's almost gridlock.

Putting Virginia Tech. into context.

Thirty-two victims and their killer die in one day at Virginia Tech., a horrifying tragedy.

America and much of the world is swamped with days of news coverage, pundits are wheeled out on TV and radio to disect the whole thing.

But. I always have a but.

Put it into context.

That many Americans are shot to death every ten hours. Of every day. Year in and year out.

An average of eight-five Americans die by gunshot every day.

The same number as were killed on 9/11 are killed every five weeks.

Thirty thousand are killed every year.

Go back over the last four paragraphs , read them slowly and think about them.

This is not just armed criminal street gangs, as is often suggested. It's estimated that there are about 250 million guns, from handguns to fully automatic army weapons, throughout American society. That's almost one for every man, woman and child in the country.

Americans For Gun Safety website gives figures for 1998, the latest quoted. In Virginia that year there were 295 homicides, 531 suicides, 33 fatal gun accidents and 13 'other gun deaths', a total of 872. At 12.29 per 100,000 population that's almost as bad as Dubai's road deaths that we complain so much about. That year, 30,708 died by gunshot nationally, a rate of 11.32 per 100,000.

The battle lines are drawn of course - gun control and no gun control spokespeople are out in force.

I was particularly taken with this quote from the Gun Owners of America, who call the school "a victim disarmament zone":

"The latest school shooting demands an immediate end to the gun-free zone law which leaves the nation's schools at the mercy of madmen. It is irresponsibly dangerous to tell citizens that they may not have guns at schools."

Pretty well sums up the thinking in what appears to be the majority of America, or at least by the only people who matter, the ones with power and influence.

And I can't see that the situation will get anything but worse. It's very difficult to change something that's been a part of a culture from its very beginning. It's not impossible, it's happened in other cultures through the millenia, but the people have to want the change.

America is a violent country, created by violence & the gun and it's all ingrained in the phsyche. So in the next decade over 300,000 Americans are going to die at the barrel of a gun.

Astonishingly, they're going to accept it.

Some reading:
Gun deaths per year.

Gun Deaths By State.

Gun Owners of America.

Another first for RAK.

The little northern emirate of Ras Al Khaimah has come up with another doozy, according to Gulf News..

"RAK considers imposition of penalties on victims of fraud."

There's been a spate of fraud cases in the emirate involving black magic and promises of untold wealth. We're told that: "The authorities have been repeatedly urging the public to be careful and never to fall under the fraudulent influence of cheats whose main target is the money of their unsuspecting victims." The warnings having been ignored and: "Some victims blindly follow the claims and instructions of the frauds and they enable the cheats end up successful in their fraudulent strategies."

That's obviously seen as 'aiding & abetting' the criminals.

Now I've always believed that victims of fraud, of conmen, people who pay money up-front and complain when they're cheated, deserve what they get. Stupidity and greed get their just rewards, but I've never thought they constituted a criminal offence.

Read all about it here.