DHAHRAN — The ongoing expansion and maintenance works at the King Fahd Causeway that coincided with the brief vacation period in Saudi Arabia have caused vehicle congestion and traffic disruption along the causeway for more than five hours on Monday. Passengers complained about the difficulties faced by them because of traffic jams, Al-Watan newspaper reported. Many passengers expressed their surprise over the choice of the timing to start maintenance works during the peak traffic hours during the short vacation period at the end of the second semester of schools in the Kingdom. The passengers demanded that the tracks shall be reopened immediately and that the maintenance works should be postponed to a later date. The King Fahd Causeway Authority (KFCA) has started the expansion and maintenance works of the areas for travel procedures with the aim of increasing the capacity and improving the experience of customers crossing the bridge. The ongoing work will be implemented in several stages. The work of the first stage will be completed within three months, and the rest of the stages will be completed successively until all works are scheduled to complete within a year, the authority said in a statement. It is noteworthy that the causeway, linking Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, had set recently a new record for crossing the highest number of passengers in its history. More than 136,000 passengers passed through the causeway on March 4. The number of passengers on that day reached 136,498, making it the highest number in the history of the bridge since its construction. This number exceeded the number that was recorded on January 11, 2020, which witnessed the crossing of more than 131,000 passengers.
