Dubai Walk: 6,000 km of pedestrian routes and 110 bridges by 2040

Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) has launched phase one of Dubai Walk — a systematic rebuild of the city around the pedestrian. The first tranche is modest in numbers, but the programme as a whole reframes the task: a city designed around the car is turning towards the person on foot.

Phase one

• 12 km of pedestrian routes and 5 km of cycle lanes.
• 10 sites to be rebuilt as public spaces.
• 11 locations connected to transport — metro, buses and marine routes.

Where it leads by 2040

• 6,000 km of pedestrian infrastructure across 160 districts.
• 110 pedestrian bridges and crossings.
• Walking and personal-mobility trips from 16% in 2025 to 25% by 2040.

Why walkability is a money question

In cities where pedestrian infrastructure arrived after the buildings, the effect has been measured repeatedly: housing within walking distance of a connected pedestrian network prices above comparable housing without it. The reason is not romance but arithmetic — walkability adds to an apartment everything you can reach on foot: a café, a school, a metro station, a promenade.

For Dubai this matters more than most, because walkability has historically been the weak point. Distances, eight-lane arterials and eight months of heat made a car mandatory. Every bridge and every shaded route chips away at that — moving a district from "you need a car" towards "you can manage without one".

What a buyer should watch

• Transport interchange beats route length. Eleven connection points to metro and buses in phase one is about whether you can walk to a station, not about where it is pleasant to stroll.
• The 160 districts benefit unevenly. The biggest gains go to places where today you can walk nowhere — that is where new connectivity is worth most.
• It is a long project with staged reporting. Like the mangrove programme, Dubai Walk publishes milestones — check the promises against those.

Based on data from Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority (RTA).