Dubai Metro
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means · The full record behind this page
Dubai Metro opened on 9 September 2009 and was for years the world's longest driverless metro (Guinness, 2012). Its two GoA4 fully automated lines, Red and Green, run 89.6 km with 53 stations and no onboard drivers, controlled from a central operations centre. A 30 km Blue Line is under construction, due by 2029.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →📊 Impact
The Red and Green lines carried 275.4 million riders in 2024, up about 6% on 2023's 260.0 million (RTA annual ridership release, February 2025); RTA's February 2026 release puts 2025 at 294.7 million (+7%). Cumulative ridership since 2009 exceeds 2.4 billion, and the 99.7% punctuality RTA cites is a lifetime operations figure, not an annual metric.
🎓 Lesson
Two of the most-quoted numbers here are of different kinds, and only one of them is a year. The 294.7 million riders is 2025; the 99.7% punctuality RTA cites is a lifetime figure averaged across every day since 2009, so no single year can be checked against it — a rate that spans sixteen years cannot get materially worse in any one of them. What is unambiguous is the scale: those 294.7 million rides are roughly one in three of the 802.1 million RTA counted across all its public transport, shared mobility and taxi services in 2025. The driverless part, sixteen years in, is the least contested thing about this entry — GoA4 with no cab has simply worked. The claims worth reading twice are the superlatives around it, starting with a longest-network record awarded by a commercial record-keeper in 2012 and overtaken since.
Sources
📅 How old is the evidence?
Two clocks, kept apart: when this entry’s sources were published, and what has happened to its record in the atlas. Documented span: since 2009. 5 of 5 sources carry a publication date, from 28 November 2023 to 15 February 2026.
When the sources were published
- Railway Gazette International · pressRailway Gazette (trade)
- Dubai Media Office · city governmentDubai Media Office / RTA (authority)
- Gulf News · pressGulf News (press) · updated 9 September 2024
- Dubai Media Office · city governmentDubai Media Office — RTA 2024 ridership (authority)
- Dubai Media Office · city governmentDubai Media Office — RTA 2025 ridership: 802 million riders across public transport, shared mobility and taxis (15 February 2026)
Show your work What this page rests on and what it can’t tell you · all 7 claims with their sources · the forensic record
Evidence Passport · public beta 7 addressable claims, 5 source dossiers, one permanent baseline. The passport is unreviewed — an AI-assisted structural migration, not a human or expert endorsement. Every revision keeps a permanent copy under revision history.
Inspect the claims, one by one — verbatim text, sources and caveats for all 7
The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.
clm-a7b9d161f6ba2e08
quantitative
Dubai Metro opened on 9 September 2009 and was for years the world's longest driverless metro (Guinness, 2012)
Sources carrying this claim
clm-af303b5ae4441479
quantitative
Its two GoA4 fully automated lines, Red and Green, run 89.6 km with 53 stations and no onboard drivers, controlled from a central operations centre
Sources carrying this claim
clm-662afa3e01e77440
quantitative
A 30 km Blue Line is under construction, due by 2029
Sources carrying this claim
clm-9bca6d0bb141fca4
quantitative
The Red and Green lines carried 275.4 million riders in 2024, up about 6% on 2023's 260.0 million (RTA annual ridership release, February 2025)
Sources carrying this claim
clm-6a61a5c5e280490c
quantitative
RTA's February 2026 release puts 2025 at 294.7 million (+7%)
Sources carrying this claim
clm-6e12cdc56c0b58df
quantitative
Cumulative ridership since 2009 exceeds 2.4 billion, and the 99.7% punctuality RTA cites is a lifetime operations figure, not an annual metric
Sources carrying this claim
clm-f513a30356021723
quantitative
those 294.7 million rides are roughly one in three of the 802.1 million RTA counted across all its public transport, shared mobility and taxi services in 2025
Sources carrying this claim
Forensic record — source dossiers, gaps, hashes and the exact revision this page renders
This layer records what is known about each source, what is still missing, and the exact snapshot this page is rendering. A missing date, archive or hash stays visible as missing.
Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.
Erratum on this revision's envelope. The snapshot, its hash and its permanent link are untouched.
- createdAt previously read 2026-08-29T18:00:00Z. The batching script that produced this revision advanced createdAt into the future to satisfy the strictly-increasing order the validator requires per entity. The value never recorded a real event; the corrected value is the moment the revision provably existed in the repository. Corrected to 2026-08-27T02:45:42Z on 2026-08-27; evidence: first appears in commit a5bb3468d9, committed 2026-08-27T02:45:42Z.
sha256:c0e5e596a84d47f2c752f6169504141fb969b3ff11d193d8c7c6e82307bde9c3
- 7
- of 7 claims mapped
- 5
- source dossiers
- 5
- publication dates recorded
- 0
- archives linked
- 0
- exact locators
- 0
- content captures hashed
Governance facts carried by the record
- Operator
- Roads and Transport Authority (RTA), Dubai
- Actor types
- utility
- Funding model
- public
- Funding description
- Not recorded
- Cost
- Not recorded
- Ownership
- Not recorded
- Decision rights
- Not recorded
- Exit conditions
- Not recorded
5 source dossiers
Dubai Media Office / RTA (authority)
- Stable source ID
src-5f828724135045ad- Publisher
- Name not classified · mediaoffice.ae
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2024-09-08
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-27
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-29
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
RTA statement marking 15 years: 2.4bn riders, 275.4m in 2024, 99.7% punctuality.
Gulf News (press)
- Stable source ID
src-e65e6b4588d2196e- Publisher
- Name not classified · gulfnews.com
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2024-09-08
- Updated
- 2024-09-09
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-27
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-29
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Established-press coverage of ridership and punctuality figures.
- Claims linked
Railway Gazette (trade)
- Stable source ID
src-9772bf15ac115018- Publisher
- Name not classified · railwaygazette.com
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2023-11-28
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-27
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-29
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Trade coverage confirming automated/driverless operation and the 30 km Blue Line extension.
- Claims linked
Dubai Media Office — RTA 2024 ridership (authority)
- Stable source ID
src-19561bd88112f4d9- Publisher
- Name not classified · mediaoffice.ae
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2025-02-02
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-27
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-29
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
RTA annual ridership release for 2024: 747.1 million riders across public transport, shared mobility and taxis, with the metro share broken out.
- Claims linked
Dubai Media Office — RTA 2025 ridership: 802 million riders across public transport, shared mobility and taxis (15 February 2026)
- Stable source ID
src-e1cf0af97608ca0e- Publisher
- Name not classified · mediaoffice.ae
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2026-02-15
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-27
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-29
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
RTA annual ridership release for 2025, the carrying source for the 294.7 million metro figure: the Red and Green lines carried 294.7 million riders in 2025, up 7% on 2024, within a total of 802.1 million riders across public transport, shared mobility and taxis, against 747.1 million in 2024. Average daily ridership 2.2 million. BurJuman (17.8 million) and Al Rigga (13.8 million) were the busiest stations.
- Claims linked
Known limits of this passport
- Publisher names and source languages have not yet been classified; domains are recorded without guessing.
- Existing source notes are descriptive locators, not page- or paragraph-exact citations.
- A missing archive, publication date or content hash is shown as null rather than inferred.
- The project-level evidence grade ranks the strongest source in the entry; it is not a truth score for every claim.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Dubai Metro” — Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/dubai-metro/ (last verified 2026-08-27). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.