Rabia Zaman
alerted me to this story on the Peninsula, about plans to build an
additional 150 petrol stations in Qatar over the next four to five
years: http://thepeninsulaqatar.com/news/qatar/288869/150-new-petrol-stations-planned-for-fifa-2022
A striking fact mentioned in the article was that there were only 23 currently functioning petrol ("gas") stations in Qatar, all of them operated by Woqod, the country-wide monopoly. While complaints of "I never find a petrol station" are rarely (ever?) heard in Doha, the numbers do seem odd.
For starters, not all of the petrol stations could be found on Google Maps. The map of identifiable places I could locate on Google maps can be found here. There is one petrol station still missing (any assistance in locating much appreciated).
Looking at the map above, the petrol stations not only seem to be few, they are incredibly closely packed into a very small area of the country. You can see that almost all of them are in the capital Doha, which accounts for just over 1% of the landmass (Qatar has a total area of about 11,600 square kilometers, so comparable in size to Lebanon).
The real question though is to find out how often one drives in between petrol stations in Qatar. So, how many filling stations are there per km of road in Qatar, and how does that compare to other countries?
A cursory glance at wikipedia and the data taken from its lists of countries by road network size as well as the (very incomplete) information on the number of filling stations shows that Qatar doesn't compete well with industrialized countries:
A striking fact mentioned in the article was that there were only 23 currently functioning petrol ("gas") stations in Qatar, all of them operated by Woqod, the country-wide monopoly. While complaints of "I never find a petrol station" are rarely (ever?) heard in Doha, the numbers do seem odd.
For starters, not all of the petrol stations could be found on Google Maps. The map of identifiable places I could locate on Google maps can be found here. There is one petrol station still missing (any assistance in locating much appreciated).
Looking at the map above, the petrol stations not only seem to be few, they are incredibly closely packed into a very small area of the country. You can see that almost all of them are in the capital Doha, which accounts for just over 1% of the landmass (Qatar has a total area of about 11,600 square kilometers, so comparable in size to Lebanon).
The real question though is to find out how often one drives in between petrol stations in Qatar. So, how many filling stations are there per km of road in Qatar, and how does that compare to other countries?
A cursory glance at wikipedia and the data taken from its lists of countries by road network size as well as the (very incomplete) information on the number of filling stations shows that Qatar doesn't compete well with industrialized countries:
| Qatar | 338.7 |
| United Kingdom | 46.7 |
| Germany | 45.1 |
| Japan | 30 |
No comments:
Post a Comment