97% of Muscat's Trips Are by Car. Dubai Is Now Spending $9.5 Billion on the Same Habit.

If you drove to work in Muscat this morning, you were probably alone in the car, and you probably had no realistic alternative. Muscat's own traffic study found that 97% of daily trips in the capital are made by private car. Dubai went down that road two decades ago, and it is now spending billions trying to keep up with the traffic. Oman says it wants a different ending. Here is the evidence for that, and what is still missing.

Dubai's mistake: building for cars first, fixing it later

Dubai did build a metro, and it is busy. Public transport, shared mobility and taxis carried 802.1 million riders in 2025, about 2.2 million a day, and the Metro alone carried 294.7 million, according to the Dubai Media Office.

But the Metro arrived in 2009, after the city had already spread out along highways. The cars kept coming. In January 2026, Roads and Transport Authority chief Mattar Al Tayer put annual vehicle growth at 8 to 10%, and Dubai committed to more than 70 transport projects worth Dh35 billion, with at least one major road project every month for three years, Gulf News reported.

That is the trap: once a city is shaped around cars, every new lane fills up, and residents pay for it in time, fuel and tolls.

Muscat's honest starting point

Oman cannot claim to have avoided car dependence. It has more of it. Preliminary results from the Muscat Area Traffic Study 2025, which surveyed more than 250,000 participants, found 97% of daily trips in the governorate are by private car, and 71.9% of those trips carry a single person, Oman Observer reported.

Nationally, Oman had 1,851,469 registered vehicles at the end of 2025, up 5.6% in a year, according to National Centre for Statistics and Information data reported by Times of Oman. That is slower growth than Dubai's, but still fast.

The bus network is small. Mwasalat carried just over 5 million passengers in 2025 on 12 routes in Muscat and two in Salalah, according to ministry figures cited by the Oman Observer. That works out to roughly 14,000 riders a day, by our calculation.

What Oman is doing differently

The first difference is an admission Dubai took years to make. Muscat Municipality chairman Ahmed bin Mohammed al Humaidi said in November 2025 that "more roads inevitably mean more cars", and pushed public transport, carpooling, flexible hours and better links between homes and offices instead, Muscat Daily reported.

The second difference is that the plan puts transit first. The Greater Muscat Structure Plan, launched on 7 May 2026, aims to put 80% of residents within walking distance of public transport, raise public transport use by 20% and build a 55 km light rail system with seven main stations, according to the Oman News Agency report carried by the Oman Observer. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning describes the plan as built on an integrated multi-modal network, including metro lines, alongside 313,000 new homes.

The point is to put new homes and jobs along the rail line from the start, instead of adding the rail line after the sprawl, which is what happened in Dubai. It is also part of why Muscat stays cheaper to live in, a gap we looked at in the four decisions behind Dubai being 52% more expensive than Muscat.

The idea is reaching the public too. On 14 October, the housing directorate in Muscat ran a "Happy City Journey" at the Royal Opera House Muscat, with seven stations modelled on the proposed metro route from Al Seeb to Ruwi, Oman Observer reported.

Who is building it, and what is still missing

Three bodies matter. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning owns the city plan. The Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology leads the metro and buses. Mwasalat runs the buses day to day.

In June 2026, Oman and France signed a memorandum of understanding covering the Muscat Metro. The first line is described as about 55 km from Sultan Haitham City to Ruwi, via the airport, Ghala and Al Khuwair, with around 42 stations, Gulf News reported. An earlier January report described a 50 km line with 36 stations, so the design is still changing.

Now the gaps. The metro's official cost was not publicly specified when this article was written, and no contractor or opening date has been announced. In January, the transport minister said the project would be announced within about two months, while about RO1.2 billion was going into roughly 1,120 km of roads under construction in 2026, according to the Oman Observer. For now, Oman is still building far more road than rail. You can follow how spending is spread across regions on our governorate development tracker.

Why this matters for ordinary Omanis

For families, it is about time and money: a second car, more fuel, and hours stuck on the Muscat Expressway. For young people, a metro could put a job in Ghala within reach of a home in Seeb without needing a car loan first. For expats deciding between Muscat and Dubai, it is a quality-of-life question that will be settled in the next decade.

Muscat still has room to choose, because its population of about 1.5 million is forecast to nearly double by 2040. Dubai shows what happens if it doesn't. The plan is on paper. The test is a construction contract with a date on it.