Riyadh Is Building the Right Infrastructure. Will Its Urban Form Let It Work?
Note from Russell:
Lots of the strategic thinking I share comes from countries in what is known as the “Global North”. However, there are many interesting initiatives in the “Global South” that may offer valuable insights.
This week, Dr Turki Khalaf Almutairi, a Transport & Urban Planning Researcher, provides insights into Riyadh.
Key Takeaways
- Riyadh has built one of the world's largest metro systems, yet most journeys are still made by car, and more than a third of the population lives more than 800m from any station.
- This is not a transport failure but an unfinished plan. Riyadh's own metropolitan strategy is to become a polycentric city, and the metro and bus were built as the transport half of that choice. The urban-form half has lagged.
- The task now is the patient, staged reshaping of the city's form around the network it already has.
- The work is a retrofit of an already-built city: density and mix added around the stations and anchors already in place, and the new giga-projects placed at nodes.
- A central danger is moving too fast: a well-funded programme can raise density ahead of demand, leaving places vacant.
What next?
Do your transport plans integrate with the urban form plans?
Introduction
Riyadh has built one of the largest metro systems in the world, and yet most of its people still travel by car. In its first nine months, the network carried more than a hundred million journeys, and it now moves over a million passengers a day.
Yet more than a third of the city lives more than 800m from any station, and the roads have not visibly eased (Arab News; MDPI, 2025). That gap between the infrastructure the city has laid down and the way its people still move is the question this piece sets out to answer.
And the answer, I will argue, lies less in the trains than in the shape of the city around them. The right place to begin is not with the metro at all, but with the urban form it was built to serve.
The Urban Form Challenge
Consider first what kind of city the metro has been placed in. For half a century Riyadh has grown outward in the pattern set by the Doxiadis plan of the 1970s: an orderly grid of two kilometre superblocks, low in density, generous in distance, and built without apology for the private car (Al-Hathloul, 2017).
The consequence shows in a single figure. Roughly thirty-five to forty per cent of the population lives beyond eight hundred metres of a station, and the densest of those neighbourhoods, in the south and the east, sit furthest outside that reach, often without the pavements to get there at all (MDPI, 2025).
The network has been built for the city's destinations, the offices and the landmarks, but its origins, the homes, have often been left on the far side of a walk that few will make, least of all in summer when the high temperatures make it impossible.
Some of these districts lie on the city's edges; others are dense areas the lines simply pass by. Now we need to provide feeder buses and outer park-and-rides so people can access the stations.
Riyadh did not stumble into this. More than twenty years ago, its metropolitan strategy, MEDSTAR, deliberately set out to turn the city away from the centreless, sprawling form it had inherited and toward a polycentric one, a city of distinct sub-centres rather than a single overburdened core. The strategy had two halves that were always meant to move together: the sub-centres, and the public-transport network that would bind them: the King Abdulaziz Project, which is the programme of metro and rapid-transit bus networks (CTBUH; RCRC).
Riyadh has now delivered the second half with remarkable speed. The first half, the reshaping of the form, has lagged behind. The metro, then, is not a finished project waiting for the city to use it. It is one half of a plan the city has not yet completed.
The Riyadh of the Future
A polycentric structure is not a lapsed idea: it remains the referential framework the Royal Commission carries forward in its current plans for the metropolitan area (RCRC).
What that strategy first set out in detail, more than twenty years ago, was a defined form: MEDSTAR's proposal of a city of five new metropolitan sub-centres, set some fifteen to twenty kilometres from the historic core in different directions, to carry the services and employment a single centre could no longer hold (Al-Hathloul, 2017; CTBUH).
More than twenty years on, those sub-centres have largely not taken the form the plan envisaged. Such a structure works only if the nodes are connected to one another, for a polycentric city whose centres can be reached only through the middle is not polycentric at all; it needs orbital lines, ring routes that let people move between districts without passing through the core.
It needs homes, jobs and services drawn close around the stations. It needs green threaded between the built-up fingers, both to guide where growth goes and, in Riyadh's heat, to cool the ground beneath it. And it needs a balance of homes and jobs within each node, so that the subcentres do not empty at six o'clock and send everyone back across the city by car.
Some of this Riyadh has already begun. The Purple Line runs as a half-ring, letting people circle between the financial district, the universities and the eastern districts without entering the centre.
Line 7 is being built to thread the new giga-projects together, and the Green Riyadh programme is laying the green fabric that the framework asks for.
But it would be dishonest to present polycentricity as a guaranteed cure. The evidence that spreading a city into centres reduces travel is mixed, and one of its most-cited tests found that decentralising jobs, on its own, did not shorten a single commute (Cervero & Wu, 1997).
Polycentricity works only under two conditions, both of which Riyadh must meet: that each node genuinely balances its homes and its jobs, and that the nodes are bound together by transit strong enough to carry the trips between them.
Transforming the Urban Form
It is one thing to describe the city Riyadh wants; it is another to build it inside the city that already exists. A polycentric structure is straightforward to draw on empty land and very difficult to install in a built one, and that difference is the whole of the challenge. Riyadh is not a blank slate. It is seven million people, their homes, their workplaces and their habits, already in place. The work is therefore not master-planning, but retrofit, the patient repair of a form that is already there, and it proceeds by careful intervention at chosen points rather than by redrawing the whole.
This sets a hard limit that the hopeful version of the argument tends to ignore. The city cannot demolish and move its anchors. The universities, the hospitals, the ministries and the malls are fixed capital, and relocating them at scale would cost more, and disrupt more, than any benefit could justify.
The redistribution of employment that a polycentric city needs cannot, then, come from moving what exists. It can come only from two slower sources: intensifying the homes and the activity around the anchors and stations already in place, and the placement of the new anchors, the giga-projects, and the institutions still to be built at the nodes where the network can serve them.
This is a tilt accomplished over decades, not a reallocation accomplished by decree.
Where, then, does the work begin? Not with the whole framework at once, which no city has ever managed, but with a disciplined choice of a few places to start. The method is to read each station as a balance of two things, the strength of its transport connections and the intensity of the life around it, and to concentrate first on the stations that connect well but sit in thin surroundings, for that is where new density earns the most ridership for the least disruption.
Because the metro already has lines along the grid, near-term density should be concentrated along those corridors. From there, the city picks a handful of pilot nodes where land can most readily be assembled, completes the orbital links that let them reach one another, draws homes and services around them, and feeds them with buses and short connections for those who still live beyond the walk.
Then it measures, and only then does it scale. And it watches, for one particular danger. The capacity to build quickly is also the capacity to build ahead of demand, creating not a vibrant centre but a sterile environment full of vacancy. The discipline that matters most here is not ambition but restraint: to let each stage prove itself before the next begins.
Why This Is Ultimately an Economic Argument
None of this is a matter only for planners. Riyadh is remaking itself into an economic capital, and a city's economy turns on how easily its people and its firms can reach one another; congestion is a tax on the very productivity the city is trying to summon, and access is what decides where a company locates and whether it stays.
This is also where the question of the car finds its honest answer. It is fair to ask, as careful readers do, whether the metro will ever beat the car on time, particularly in a future of autonomous vehicles, when the hours spent in a car may no longer feel lost.
The answer is that the metro does not become competitive by being priced against, nor by waiting for the traffic to grow unbearable. It becomes competitive when the city is rebuilt so that the journeys themselves grow shorter and run between connected centres.
A charge on the car has its place, but it follows the restructuring rather than leading it; to price people off the road before they have another way to travel is not policy but penalty.
The autonomous car, far from making this work unnecessary, makes it more urgent for a city that does not gather its life around transit will simply hand its streets to a larger and emptier fleet.
What remains is the patient, unglamorous work of finishing a plan the city began twenty years ago: not more lines, not yet a price on the car, but the steady reshaping of the urban form around the network already in the ground. Riyadh has changed its primary function, from an administrative capital to an economic one, and has funded that change as part of a wider turn toward treating cities as engines of the national economy. The metro is the spine of that ambition. Whether it becomes the spine of a city or remains a magnificent line on the map depends on the half of the plan that is left.
About the author
Dr Turki Khalaf Almutairi is a transport and urban planning researcher (MSc Transport.
Planning, University of Leeds; PhD Urban Planning, King Abdulaziz University, focusing on the integration of land use, transport, and the economics of accessibility.
Contact: turki@turkiplanning.com · linkedin.com/in/turki-almutairi-26157331.
Sources
- Riyadh Metro ridership (100m journeys in under 9 months; >1.2m/day): Arab News
- Station catchments (~35–40% of population beyond an 800 m walk; south/east underserved): Planning TOD in Riyadh, Sustainability (MDPI, 2025)
- Doxiadis supergrid history, and MEDSTAR’s five proposed metropolitan sub-centres (15– 20 km from the core): Al-Hathloul, 2017, Current Urban Studies
- MEDSTAR and the shift from centreless to polycentric Riyadh: CTBUH, From Centerless to Polycentric
- King Abdulaziz Project for Riyadh Public Transport (metro and bus): Royal Commission for Riyadh City
- Riyadh’s polycentric strategy as the current referential framework (Comprehensive Strategic Plan / Land Use Plan): Royal Commission for Riyadh City
- Evidence that decentralising jobs does not, by itself, shorten commutes: Cervero & Wu, 1997, Environment and Planning A
- Riyadh Metro Line 7 (threading the giga-projects): AGBI