Dubai to Abu Dhabi: How to Actually Get There

Every listicle answering this question quotes “about 90 minutes to two hours” and moves on, as if Dubai were a single point on a map. It is not. We measured the drive from four different parts of the city, checked what the bus actually costs and how often it runs against its own timetable, and worked out where the bus and the taxi actually leave you once you arrive.

It depends where you start: four Dubai areas, measured

Nobody publishes this because it means measuring the same trip four times instead of once. The difference between the closest and the furthest starting point is 27 minutes to the mosque and the same again to the Corniche, which is close to half the total journey.

Staying near the Marina rather than Downtown is worth 14 minutes each way before you have done anything else, which over a day trip adds up to nearly half an hour of driving that a Downtown hotel does not warn you about.

The trip does not end at the Abu Dhabi bus station

This is the part that decides whether the cheap option is actually cheap. The E100 and E101 both terminate at Abu Dhabi Central Bus Station, which is not next to any of the places people are actually going.

You take the bus because it is AED 25 instead of a metered fare, and then you get off and still have 13 to 36 km left to the thing you came to see. That second leg, by taxi, is where the saving from the bus ticket gets spent back.

The bus: two real routes, and Saturday is different

RTA’s own booking and timetable pages were not reachable while researching this page, either timing out or returning an empty page, so we are not printing a number we copied from there. What follows comes from Moovit, the transit data platform that publishes RTA’s schedules stop by stop, checked on 19 September 2026.

The gap most people would not guess: the E101 does not run on Saturdays at all. If Ibn Battuta is your nearest stop and you are travelling on a Saturday, the E100 from Al Ghubaiba is the only bus option, not a second choice.

What the bus timetable tells us about traffic that a router cannot

OpenRouteService does not model traffic, so the 74 minutes for Downtown to the mosque and the 60 for the Marina are both a floor, not a forecast. We are not going to invent a rush-hour range on top of that. What we can do is read the one number that already has real traffic baked into it: a bus timetable, written by an operator that has run this route every day for years and has to pad it enough that the bus actually keeps to it.

The E100 leaves from Al Ghubaiba, close to Downtown Dubai, and is timetabled at about 138 minutes to reach Abu Dhabi Central Bus Station. Driving the slightly longer Downtown-to-mosque trip measures at 74 minutes with an empty road. That is not a same-trip comparison, the bus stops short of the mosque and picks up passengers along the way, but a timetable running at close to double a traffic-free driving estimate is real evidence that the E11 is nothing like an empty highway at the times this bus runs. The E101, from Ibn Battuta near the Marina, shows the same pattern on a smaller scale: about 87 minutes against a 60 minute Marina-to-mosque drive.

What we cannot tell you is how much of that gap is stops and boarding time rather than the bus sitting in traffic, because RTA does not publish that breakdown. The size of the gap, not its cause, is the useful number here.

The heat: why the wait matters as much as the ride

Dubai’s bus stations and shelters are air-conditioned, but the last stretch after either bus, standing at a taxi rank outside Abu Dhabi Central Bus Station, is not. What that stretch feels like depends entirely on the month.

A 12 minute taxi wait outside the bus station in January is a non-event at 23 °C. The same wait in August is at a 44.5°C feels-like temperature, on 22 days of the year past 40°C outright, which changes whether waiting for a taxi or pre-booking one before you even board the bus is the better plan.

Taxi: metered, not a fixed intercity fare

Dubai’s taxi fare is a formula, not a flat rate for this route: a flagfall of AED 5 for a street hail by day (6am to 10pm) or AED 5.50 at night, or AED 9 to 13 for an app or phone booking depending on the time of day, according to RTA’s own fare page. On top of that comes a per-kilometre charge that RTA revises monthly against fuel prices and does not publish as a fixed figure on that page.

Third-party sites quote a per-kilometre rate for it, and they do not agree with each other. Rather than pick one of those numbers and present it as this month’s real fare, we are telling you plainly that a taxi for this route is metered and will cost more than the bus, and leaving the total for the meter to decide.

What this comparison assumes

The driving times exclude traffic, waiting at either end and any stop along the way. They are a routing-engine floor, which is exactly why we cross-checked them against a real bus timetable rather than leaving them to stand alone.

The bus fare is the ticket only. It does not include the taxi from either bus station to the actual sight, which the second table above prices at 12 to 30 minutes depending on where you are headed.

Diego Fresno

Spent a trip through the Gulf from 7 to 17 December 2023: Bahrain on the 11th, Dubai and Abu Dhabi over the 13th, 15th and 16th, Doha on the 17th. One trip through the Gulf, not four separate ones, which is the whole reason this site exists instead of a single-city blog. One trip three years ago does not make anyone an expert on a region, which is why every price, floor number and opening time here is checked against the operator's own site before it goes on a page, not remembered from the trip.

Verified: Driving distances and times from four Dubai starting points to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque and the Corniche, and from Abu Dhabi Central Bus Station to four Abu Dhabi sights, measured with OpenRouteService on OpenStreetMap road data on 19 September 2026. The E100 and E101 operating hours, frequency and total trip length, from Moovit's published schedules for each route, checked the same day. The AED 25 intercity bus fare, from Gulf News' 18 July 2024 report. The taxi flagfall rates and the fact that the per-kilometre rate is revised monthly, from RTA's own fare page, also checked 19 September 2026. The Dubai temperature and feels-like averages, from Open-Meteo's ERA5 reanalysis for 2021 to 2025.

Not verified: Real driving time with traffic, which no routing engine models; we used the published bus timetables as the closest available evidence instead of guessing a rush-hour range. The current per-kilometre taxi rate, which RTA does not publish as a fixed number and third-party sites quote inconsistently. Whether Dubai's bus shelters are air-conditioned at every stop on both these routes specifically, which we have not confirmed stop by stop.

Read next: what to do in Dubai and what to do in Abu Dhabi.