Moving two million people through one city in a matter of days is one of the hardest transport problems anywhere on earth. That is the challenge Makkah in Saudi Arabia faces every year, and for decades the answer was diesel: thousands of coaches shuttling pilgrims between hotels, mosques and the holy sites, with all the congestion and fumes that came with them. That is now changing, and rather faster than most people outside the region realise.
The shift matters to a surprising number of British travellers. Tens of thousands of UK Muslims make the journey each year, most of them booking umrah packages all-inclusive of flights, hotels and transfers, and the transport element of those trips is quietly being electrified. For anyone who follows the EV sector, what is happening in Makkah is worth a look: it is one of the most demanding real-world tests of electric public transport currently running anywhere.
The Middle East’s first electric BRT
The centrepiece is Masar, a bus rapid transit network launched in late 2025 and billed as the first fully electric BRT system in the Middle East. Operated by Electromin, it runs along the Masar corridor, a key route linking major transport hubs with the area around the Grand Mosque, and it has replaced diesel buses on one of the city’s busiest roads.
The specification is sensible rather than showy. The buses run in dedicated lanes, with two main stations and eleven stops along the route, and the network has been designed to carry more than five million visitors a year. Onboard there is air conditioning, wi-fi and USB charging, with digital screens giving live updates in several languages. There is also a hydraulic kneeling system for level boarding, which matters enormously when a large share of your passengers are elderly, using wheelchairs, or travelling with small children. Dedicated lanes and higher-capacity vehicles do the rest, cutting the delays that have long been part of the experience.
An electric metro at the holy sites
Masar is not the only electric operation. During the Hajj season, the Al-Mashaaer Al-Mugaddassah Metro carries pilgrims between Mina, Muzdalifah and Arafat on a fully electric line run by Saudi Arabia Railways. Its impact on road traffic is striking: officials say it has removed roughly fifty thousand bus journeys a year from within the holy sites, easing congestion and cutting emissions at exactly the moment when both are at their worst.
Between the two holy cities, the Haramain High-Speed Railway does much the same job on a larger scale, moving pilgrims between Makkah, Madinah and Jeddah by electric rail rather than by coach along crowded motorways. Madinah has been trialling autonomous electric shuttles in the courtyard at the Quba Mosque, too, which suggests the direction of travel is not stopping at buses.
Why the pilgrimage is such a good test case
From an operational point of view, this is about as tough as electric transport gets. The vehicles run in extreme heat, which is hard on batteries and harder still on the air conditioning they must power. Demand is extraordinarily peaky, with millions of passengers concentrated into a few weeks. And there is almost no room for downtime, because a bus that fails to arrive is not a missed shopping trip but a missed prayer. Anyone booking Ramadan Umrah Packages will know how intense that peak becomes, with the mosque full through the night and the roads around it under enormous pressure. UK operators such as Islamic Travel build their transfers around those conditions, and better local transport makes a genuine difference to how a trip runs. If electric fleets can cope here, they can cope almost anywhere.
The wider Saudi picture
None of this sits in isolation. Electrifying pilgrim transport fits neatly into Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, which pairs an ambitious expansion of religious tourism with commitments on emissions and urban development. The Kingdom wants to welcome far more pilgrims each year, and it cannot do that on diesel coaches without choking the city it is trying to improve. Electric buses and rail are, in that sense, less a green gesture than a practical necessity.
There is a commercial dimension as well. Saudi Arabia has been investing heavily in electric vehicles more broadly, and a high-profile, high-volume deployment in its most visited city is a useful shop window for that ambition.
What it means on the ground
For the pilgrim, the technology is largely invisible, which is rather the point. What they notice is a quieter ride, less waiting about, a bus they can board without climbing steps, and cleaner air on streets that were previously thick with idling coaches. For the operators running the network, the appeal is more prosaic: predictable journey times, lower running costs and fewer vehicles standing idle.
It is worth keeping the scale in perspective. Diesel coaches still do a great deal of the heavy lifting around Makkah, and a corridor plus a seasonal metro line is not a fully electric city. But the direction is clear, and the pace over the past couple of years has been quick.
A very old journey, a very new fleet
There is something fitting about one of the world’s oldest journeys becoming a proving ground for some of its newest transport. The pilgrimage has always demanded solutions at a scale nothing else requires, and it is now doing the same for electric mobility. For the EV industry, Makkah is a case study worth watching. For the millions who travel there each year, it simply means getting where they need to be, a little more quietly than before.