Officials working on Mecca’s mass transit programme have confirmed that they expect to award five contracts worth SR33bn ($8.8bn) for phase one of the project in the first quarter of 2016.

Four of the packages will be for lines B and C of the Mecca metro development and include 44 kilometres of track and 22 stations. The contracts will be civil 1 (tunnels), civil 2 (viaducts), systems and finishing, and rolling stock. The fifth contract is for a bus system.

“Metro, BRT [bus rapid transport routes] and mass urban transport systems are an important priority for us in Mecca,” Engineer Ali Abdelfattah, CEO at Mecca Mass Rail Transit Company told MEED.

“We have done all the tendering for the five contracts in Mecca Metro phase one and we are about to sign contracts,” he added.

The contracts are worth SR 33bn ($8.8bn) in total. Land acquisition may cost approximately SR10bn ($2.7bn).

A consortium comprising Spain’s Isolux Corsan, the local Haif Contracting and Turkey’s Kolin said in July that they had been selected as the preferred bidder for civils work on the Mecca metro.

Officials hope phase one of the metro will be live by 2020, at which point construction work on phase two will begin. Line A for the metro is expected to begin procurement in 2016, with 30 per cent of the design for the contractor ready by mid-2017. Contracts for the final phase, Line D, are expected one year after that.

Overall, Mecca metro will include four lines, be about 114km in length, and have 88 stations, 22 of which will be underground. The mass transit system will include 25 bus routes, feeder buses and 15 BRT routes.

In Medina, requests for proposals (RFPs) for the city’s mass transit programme, which is at a much earlier stage, will be released in the first quarter of 2016. The first metro phase to be developed will be the green line.

RFPs will include project management/construction management (PMCM), iconic buildings (stations), the bus network, road design, and a traffic demand model.

Engineer Mamdouh Tarabshi, public transportation programme CEO for the Al-Madinah Al-Munawarah Development Authority, said that the organisation will finalise the design for the tender package for 30 per cent of the metro lines by the third quarter of 2016. Awards for metro and bus packages, which will be made at the same time, will be in mid-2017.

He said the organisation had not yet finalised the procurement strategy for the scope of the packages that will be on offer.

The Medina metro will have three lines: Green, Red and Blue and total around 117km in length. The authority plan’s for the Green line to be completed within three years of the construction contract being awarded, with the Red and Blue lines being finished within eight years of work beginning.

The city estimates that in peak periods, such as Hajj, the metro will transport 115,000 people an hour per direction, with normal load being closer to 60,000 people an hour.

The metro will have 69 stations, half of which will be underground. Stations will need to be long enough to accommodate 10 carriages per train, to cope with the high capacity demand.

Both transport systems are expected to move ahead, despite concerns that budgets for infrastructure work will be scaled back in Saudi Arabia’s budget, which is expected to be announced in late December.