Moventia has launched its urban transport service in Mecca with a shuttle bus between Masjid al-Haram (the Great Mosque of Mecca) and Al Haramain Station (the high-speed train station in the same city). This is Phase 0 of the project and includes 35 vehicles. More lines will be steadily launched from now on until full operation is achieved with 12 lines at the end of this year.

Moventia is providing urban transportation in Mecca through the company TCC and in partnership with a consortium of Spanish and Saudi businesses. Overall, the service will include 400 vehicles (240 standard 12-metre buses and 160 18-metre articulated buses) and will create jobs for more than 1,200 people of different nationalities, mainly Saudis, Spaniards, Turks, Pakistanis, Indians, Egyptians and Sudanese.

This contract began in 2017 and Moventia has been managing the deployment stage until now, which includes bus manufacture, the design of embedded technology, employee recruitment and construction of the depots, with garages, control centres, offices and employee housing, among other things. The operation and maintenance stage has now been reached and will continue until 2030.

The Head of Operations at Moventis and General Manager of Moventis for Saudi Arabia, Jordi Castells, said “this partial launch of operations is a major milestone for progress by the project and was successfully carried out before the start of the pilgrimage season, meaning that pilgrims coming to the capital of Islam this year will benefit from a transport system designed and operated to Moventia standards. We hope to have the operation completely up and running by the end of the year to thus bring maximum benefits to the people of Mecca”.