Qatar’s Transport Sector Driving Sustainable Growth

Doha: Qatar’s transportation sector continues to grow and provides safe, integrated and environment-friendly transportation and mobility system. It reinforces environmental sustainability, and supports economic growth to achieve national development requirements said experts during a panel discussion, yesterday.

Ministry of Transport organised ‘Sustainable Transportation and Legacy for Generations’ Conference and Exhibition which brought together the transportation sector’s experts who discussed achievements of Qatar’s transportation sector. They also highlighted some of the latest technologies and innovations around sustainable and clean transportation.

Addressing the panel discussion entitled ‘Private Sector’s Active Engagement in Developing the Transportation System’, Director of Transport Planning at Qatar Rail, Raimund Hanauer provided insights on the integrated transport and contribution to sustainability goals of the country and gave the Doha Metro Network overview.

“We are the backbone of the public transportation system, our network covers wide variety of city”, he said. Speaking about sustainability of the Metro system, Hanauer noted that the more popular a public transportaino system is automatically it becomes more and more sustainable. The more people use the public transport the more energy efficient and sustainable it gets for each individual journey.

“When we look at Doha Metro with its supporting network of Metro link buses and Metro Express operated by our strategic partners from Mowasalat, we can see that we get huge coverage and we almost cover every part of the city already. We are still in the process of increasing the number of Metro link routes together with Ministry of Transport to cover the remaining gaps in order to provide access to public transport and Metro for everyone,” he added.

Speaking about the World Cup operations, he said, Doha Metro was one of the key enablers for the success of FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 as all major venues were connected to Metro.

Sharing the legacy of achievements, he pointed that 17.4 million passengers used Doha Metro during World Cup, 120,000 car trips were avoided per day, 51 percent passengers used Doha Metro, 8,500 tons of CO2 was avoided.

“We have played our part in order to make this one of the sustainable World Cups ever. We have a lot of initiatives in terms of sustainability. All our trains are electric, the technology is very well developed and is energy efficient.

The session also focused on ‘Park and Ride’ project which offers modern parking facilities with high efficiency on major and vital geographical areas in Qatar, alongside Metro stations, as the project aims to encourage the use of the sustainable and state-of-the-art transportation systems to ensure traffic flow, reduce traffic congestion and carbon emissions, as well as provide the essential support to the public transportation network and commissioning of Doha Metro.

The first day also saw a panel discussion on ‘Switching to Electric, Sustainable Transportaion.. Future Prospects’ which highlighted developments at the level of electric transformation in public transportation sector, as well as autonomous vehicle strategy in Qatar through diversifying smart transportation means and help create a smart, secure, integrated and sustainable movement available for all through adopting modernity, securing infrastructure and bolstering network communication for data sharing.

The session discussed the contributions provided by Kahramaa through the strategy of electric vehicles and charging and its infrastructure to be the nucleus part of regulating the operation and installation of charging stations through Tarsheed national program.

It also noted the accomplishments of the electric charging stations during the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 tournament, including the installation of 100 chargers nationwide to operationalize a first carbon-neutral global tournament.

The event saw participation of officials from the Ministry of Transport, Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation (Kahramaa), Msheireb Properties, Mowasalat (Karwa), Qatar Rail, Fusion Group Holding, and GBM Qatar.