Transportation: it’s everyone’s favorite way of getting somewhere else.
But what kind of transportation is best?
Well, that’s a complicated and highly-contentious question that humanity has been trying to
answer for centuries, but the answer is trains.
They’re fast, cheap, high-capacity, energy-efficient, and any decently-sized city that cares about
its residents has some sort of metro system—I’m looking at you…
most cities in America.
But there’s one metro line that stands out among the rest: the Al Mashaaer Al Mugaddassah
Metro line in Saudi Arabia.
Designed to transport 72,000 people in each direction per hour, it has a higher capacity
than any other individual metro line in the entire world—that is, for the one week a
year that it actually operates.
Why only one week a year?
Well, that’s because this train was designed to solve one very unique logistical nightmare.
To explain the problem, though, we need to talk about the city that this subway line
serves: Mecca.
You see, Mecca is the number one holy city in the religion of Islam, just like Jerusalem
is the number one holy city in Judiasm, and Green Bay is the number one holy city in alcholism.
Every year, on the last month of the Islamic calendar, Muslims from around the world come
to Mecca for a religious pilgrimage called the Hajj—over five or six days, they travel
between different sites in the region to perform various religious activities like cutting
their hair, stoning this pillar, and a whole bunch of other stuff that I don’t really
have time to get into, but I hear there’s a great book on it by some guy named Muhammad.
Now, at first, this influx of visitors doesn’t really sound like it would be a huge problem—after
all, Orlando survives a sacred pilgrimage of Disney Adults every single day—but here,
it all comes down to scale: every practicing Muslim is obliged to participate in the Hajj
at least once in their life, and that’s nearly a quarter of the global population.
If you have more than 4 people in your family, then at least one of them has to go—I’m
sorry, but that’s just how statistics work.
As a result, the city has to accommodate millions of visitors over the course of just a few
days, every single year.
Now, Mecca itself is fairly big, and it can support a sizable population of about 2 million
people year-round.
But during the Hajj, their population generally doubles or even nearly triples—basically,
imagine Philadelphia, if, for one week out of the year, Chicago came to visit.
On one hand, they’d probably invent some horrible new kind of pizza, but on the other
hand, people would almost certainly die.
And sure enough, when the pilgrims enter Mecca, things can get pretty cozy, and by “cozy,”
I mean “incredibly dangerous.”
Setting aside the complications with housing, feeding, and providing medical services for
these millions of visitors, trying to transport them between the various holy sites safely
and efficiently is no easy task.
Traditionally, the Hajj has been done on foot, but traveling in such dense groups has proven
to be risky—stampedes are unfortunately fairly common, and usually result in hundreds,
if not thousands, of deaths.
For a long time, the only other option was taking a bus, but with tens of thousands of
buses jamming up the roads—usually stuck in the sweltering heat for hours—it’s
not exactly the most tempting alternative to getting crushed to death.
So, in March of 2010, Saudi Arabia began construction on the Mecca Mass Rail Transit system.
This doesn’t have an exact translation into English, but it’s essentially a mass rail
transit system in Mecca.
Originally, it was supposed to feature 4 year-round metro lines that spanned the whole city plus
one separate line dedicated exclusively to the Hajj, but after the Saudis finished the
Al Mashaaer line later that year, they kind of just… forgot to build the rest.
The Al Mashaaer line—also called the Hajj Metro—is still the only line in operation,
and it runs for just 7 days a year, during the Hajj.
Now, I know I’ve made you nerds suffer through bad jokes and learning about other cultures,
so I’ll finally get to everyone’s favorite part: the section where I explain some technical
details!
The Hajj Metro consists of a four-line parallel loop that runs 11.2 miles or 18.2 kilometers
between 9 different stations in the holy sites of Mecca, Arafat, Muzdalifah, and Mina.
It runs 24 12-car trains per hour in each direction, each of which can carry 3,000 pilgrims;
to put those numbers into perspective, this single metro line was able to replace about
50,000 buses, and to put that number into perspective, that’s as many buses as it
would take to replace the highest-capacity metro line in the world.
A ticket costs 250 riyal—or about 66 dollars—except for the last day of the Hajj, when the price
drops to 100 riyal.
But before you godless train geeks head to Saudi Arabia to check out the cool new train
you learned about on YouTube, you probably should know that it’s illegal for non-Muslims
to enter Mecca at all—if you want a chance to be transported more efficiently than anywhere
else on earth, you’re going to have to convert.
If that sounds like a lot of crowds and lines and you’d rather just stay home, then good
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