Getting around
Getting Around the UAE: One Road, Seven Emirates
The United Arab Emirates is small — you can drive its entire inhabited coast in a morning — and almost all of it was built within the last fifty years, which means it was built around the car. That produces a country that is extremely easy to move through and surprisingly hard to walk in. Add a summer in which outdoor distance becomes genuinely punishing, and the practical rule for planning a trip here is that you should assume a vehicle for everything except the parts of Dubai the metro reaches.
Updated 2026-08-16
One road, and where the seventh emirate sits
Six of the seven emirates sit in a line along the Gulf coast, strung together by a single motorway corridor: Abu Dhabi at the south-western end, then Dubai, then Sharjah, Ajman and Umm Al Quwain in quick succession, and Ras Al Khaimah at the northern end near the Musandam peninsula. The middle three run into one another almost without a gap — the drive from central Dubai into Sharjah is a change of emirate that feels like a change of district.
The seventh, Fujairah, is the exception and the reason the country is more varied than it looks: it lies on the other side of the Hajar Mountains, facing the Gulf of Oman rather than the Persian Gulf. Getting there means crossing the range, which is the only genuinely scenic drive in the country and takes under two hours from Dubai.
Hold that shape and the distances stop needing to be memorised. Abu Dhabi to Dubai is roughly an hour and a half; Dubai to any of the northern emirates is between forty minutes and an hour and a half; Dubai to the east coast is about two. Nothing in the country is a long journey. What makes journeys long is traffic on the corridor at rush hour, which is substantial and predictable.
Driving, and what to expect on the road
Hiring a car is the default for anyone leaving the two main cities, and it is straightforward: the roads are new, wide, immaculately surfaced and well signed in English as well as Arabic, and fuel is inexpensive by European standards. Most visitors drive on their home licence or an international permit — confirm which applies to your nationality with the hire company before booking rather than at the desk.
The driving culture is the part worth preparing for. Traffic moves fast, lane discipline is looser than many visitors are used to, and being tailgated in the left lane is normal rather than aggressive — move right and let it go. Speed and red-light cameras are everywhere and enforcement is automated and reliable; fines attach to the vehicle and reach you through the hire company afterwards. Tolls on the Dubai corridor are also automatic and billed the same way.
Two practical points. Parking in central Dubai and Abu Dhabi is paid, app-managed and genuinely scarce at peak times, so a hotel with parking is worth more here than in most cities. And a four-wheel drive is not needed for any of it — the mountain roads are sealed and the only place it matters is off-road in the dunes, which is a guided activity rather than something you do in a hire car.
Metro, taxis and the buses between emirates
Dubai has the country's only metro: two driverless lines, cheap, spotless and air-conditioned, running along the main corridor and reaching the airport, the downtown and the marina. Where it goes it is excellent and often the fastest option. Its limitation is shape rather than quality — it is a line, not a net, so anything a few streets off it needs a connection, and in this climate that connection should not be assumed to be a walk.
Taxis are the backbone everywhere else. They are metered, plentiful, inexpensive and easy to hail or book by app in all the main cities, and for a visitor moving around Abu Dhabi or between districts in any emirate they are usually the sensible answer. Ride-hailing apps operate alongside them.
Between emirates, an intercity bus network runs frequent, cheap, air-conditioned services along the corridor — Dubai to Abu Dhabi and to each of the northern emirates — from central bus stations. It is a genuinely usable way to travel between cities without a car, and it is invisible to most visitors, who assume the only options are taxi or hire. There is no intercity passenger rail network in operation between the emirates at present, so road is the surface option in every direction.
Airports, and the heat as a planning constraint
Dubai International is the main gateway and one of the busiest airports in the world; Abu Dhabi's is the second major hub, and both are close to their city centres with metro or taxi links. A second Dubai airport at Al Maktoum handles some carriers, and Sharjah and Ras Al Khaimah have their own airports used mainly by budget airlines. The point that matters when booking: the two big airports are about ninety minutes apart by road, so arriving into one and departing from the other is entirely workable but is not a transfer to leave to the last hour.
Then the constraint that governs everything else. From roughly June to September, daytime temperatures sit well above 40°C with high humidity on the coast, and outdoor walking stops being a mode of transport. A three-hundred-metre stroll between two malls is not a stroll in August. Even in the comfortable months, from November to March, the country's layout means the walkable stretches are the engineered ones — the Marina walk, the Corniche, a souk district — with highway in between.
The practical consequence is to plan door-to-door rather than point-to-point, to check that two things which look adjacent are actually connected on foot, and in summer to build the day around indoor spaces with short vehicle hops between them. That is not a workaround; it is how the country is designed to be used, and it works well once you stop resisting it.