Home
About this Site
The Big Trip
About Dubai
About my Job
Thoughts
Photo Gallery
Contact Info.
In February, 2005 I attended the Canadian Association of Planning Students� annual conference in Toronto. Before I left, I emailed about 20 resumes to numerous consulting firms and municipalities in the Toronto area. Cansult was one of the companies which offered me an interview. Several weeks later, I was offered a position as a transportation planner at one of Cansult�s overseas offices - in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Cansult is a multi-disciplinary development management consulting firm. There are approximately 110 people working in the Dubai office, consisting of planners, architects, civil, transportation, and structural engineers, AutoCAD drafters, financial specialists, project managers, and other support staff. There are a number of nationalities represented in the Dubai office, including several from Canada, Scotland, and England, with the majority originally from countries such as India, Iran, and Lebanon.
The company�s headquarters are in Toronto, with overseas offices including Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, Sharjah, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates; Muscat, Oman; and Doha, Qatar.
I joined the company on May 14, 2005 and have been working on a variety of projects, mainly traffic impact studies, parking demand forecasting, intersection and access design, etc. To "warm me up", my first project was reviewing developer�s site layouts for three large private schools in Dubai � consisting of between 1,000 and 1,500 students each. As transportation specialists, Cansult was retained by the developer to review the original site layout and make recommendations. As part of a team, I played a role in ensuring there were enough parking spaces to match the Dubai Municipality parking bylaws, as well as calculating the site-specific parking demand which would be generated by school staff, visitors, and by parents and school buses dropping off and picking up children. In addition, using AutoCAD, we had to make a model illustrating the turning radii of buses � to prove our recommended site layout would allow enough room for buses to maneuver. Dubai Municipality prohibits the reversing of buses on school property, which was a consideration in our parking lot and access design. Also taken into consideration was vehicle circulation, pedestrian safety, road access, and traffic calming measures.
I've also assisted in a "trip generation" exercise for a site in Doha, Qatar - another wealthy Middle Eastern city with a construction boom on at the moment.
I've learned how to use Synchro/Sim Traffic, and Vissim - traffic-simulation modeling programs where you can plot roads and highways, intersections, bridges, railways, parking lots, etc on a computer, then assign a certain number of vehicle trips, types, and speeds to each road. You then hit PLAY, and the model simulates vehicles moving and turning. The programs are designed with driver behavior in mind, such as acceleration and braking speeds, changing lanes, turning, speeding and so on. These programs are useful for designing access points to new developments, to determine where access points would be best placed, and how to best design these accesses - should they be roundabouts? Traffic lights? An elevated interchange? And so on. They are also useful for optimizing traffic signal timings. You can test each of your potential designs in the model, press play, then watch how the traffic is affected, which in turn affects the recommendations you give in your consultant's report.
I've also worked on traffic impact studies for several components of Dubailand, which is destined to become the world's largest theme and sports park, consisting of multiple stadiums, amusement park rides, horse riding trails, a golf course, 5 star hotels, apartments, a business park, museums, galleries, spas, shopping, sports facilities, eco-tourism, a full-sized simulated dinosaur enclosure, pyramids, the world's largest indoor ski slope, an amphitheatre, the world's largest mall, and much more. The site will cover some 2 billion square feet, which is approximately the size of Dubai's existing built-up area! Cansult has been asked by the various developers in Dubailand to make recommendations for efficient and safe road and highway design, parking requirements, access, public transit, emergency vehicle response, and the like. This place is supposed to attract some 15 million tourists per year, and cost US$5 billion to develop!
The developers over here are very wealthy, and are sometimes very unreasonable, insisting on, for example, 140 storey tower, even though our study found it would generate way too much traffic for the surrounding roadways to accommodate, which would mean problems for the entire city if it was constructed. The clients change their minds frequently, and change their site plans, number of floors, etc. Although that is indeed annoying, the most frustrating part is that they don't communicate too well, and we often don't realize that a building has been moved or changed until we submit our report to them, and they give it back asking why we used out-dated drawings, etc! A good learning experience anyway.
The office is located in Dubai's Sultan Business Centre, a five-story tower inhabited by engineering firms, research institutes, travel consultants, banks, construction companies, jewelers, and best of all: an all-you-can-eat Indian/Iranian/Chinese buffet for the equivalent of CDN$7! Next door, is Lamcy Plaza, one of the largest shopping centres in the city, which has every kind of shop, service, and cuisine you can imagine. Very good prices here!
As Friday is the Islamic day of prayer, most people have a combination of a Thursday/Friday or Friday/Saturday weekend - some only have Friday off. I have Thursday and Friday off, making my work week Saturday to Wednesday for 9 hours a day, for a total of 45 hours per week - a fairly long work week from a western point of view. The time flies however, and I enjoy the work!
