The Gulf’s roads are built, but six governments still decide who can drive on them

The roads connecting the six GCC states are built, but each government still decides which drivers and trucks can use them. Every truck crossing a GCC border has to clear three sets of rules at once, covering the cargo, the vehicle, and the driver, says Antonella Teodoro, senior consultant at MDS Transmodal. Any one of them can hold up a shipment, but the bigger risk is the three falling out of step, she tells EnterpriseAM.

Of the three, customs is the one the GCC has integrated furthest. Saudi Arabia finished automating TIR procedures at all its customs ports in 2024, linking clearance electronically to the international transit system. Driver visas, vehicle-entry rules, and operating rights are still set country by country.

Carriers ran into that split during the regional disruption: IRU said in March that TIR was supporting essential movements between Saudi Arabia and Qatar through fast-track customs procedures. By August, Expeditors was reporting reduced trucking capacity into and out of Qatar because of national driver-entry restrictions. It also reported higher rate pressure across the region as equipment was repositioned and freight flows shifted. To freeup trucks already in the region, Saudi Arabia relaxed its own truck-age and entry rules.

Six stamps

The driver rules carriers ran into have been on the GCC’s agenda for more than two decades. Interior ministers agreed in 2001 that truck drivers and their assistants should get entry visas at border posts to make intra-GCC trade easier. In 2003 they agreed drivers should be allowed to stay for at least a week. Most member states implemented those decisions through their own procedures, the GCC Secretariat says.

Those national procedures are still visible at the driver level today. Qatar gives GCC-resident truck drivers an on-arrival visa at its land border: either a one-week single entry, or a three-month multiple entry with stays capped at a week per trip. Oman runs its own truck-driver visa, and the UAE offers 30-, 60-, and 90-day multiple-entry visas for truck drivers. Clearing one border doesn’t give a driver the right to cross the next.

The trucks face their own national limits: Qatar requires foreign-registered trucks to get permission before picking up a return load. It restricts that load to cargo heading to the state where the truck is registered and bars foreign trucks from carrying goods between two points inside Qatar. Oman requires foreign trucks to arrive loaded unless they hold an empty-entry permit from its Bayan customs system, and requires permits for trucks transiting the country or carrying exceptional loads. The GCC’s unified land transport law keeps host-country approval in place for several of these movements, so the region’s trucks don’t work as one interchangeable fleet.

Waiver season

The Saudi package started with the trucks themselves. Saudi Arabia temporarily raised the maximum operating age of freight trucks to 22 years, including trucks from other GCC states. It also let GCC trucks enter empty to collect outbound goods, refrigerated cargo included.

Saudi Arabia also opened its ports and airports as a pickup point for food bound for neighboring markets. The Transport General Authority allowed empty GCC refrigerated trucks in to collect food and perishables arriving through Saudi ports and airports for onward delivery to other Gulf states. The Kingdom announced storage-fee exemptions of up to 60 days for GCC imports and exports as part of the same package.

Operators added trucks and corridors of their own over the same period. DP World has moved around 500k TEU through its GCC road and rail network since March and now runs c. 3k truck movements a day after adding 700 trucks. It opened fast-track bonded corridors linking east-coast gateways to Jebel Ali and Sohar. It also used Jeddah Islamic Port’s South Container Terminal as an alternative Red Sea routing point and opened a 100k sqm empty-container depot in Dubai to make equipment easier to position.

Fleet size alone doesn’t tell you how much capacity the region has. A truck adds to cross-border capacity when it’s available, suited to the load, positioned where it’s needed, permitted on the corridor, and able to arrive on time, Wolfgang Lehmacher, former head of supply chain and transport industries at the World Economic Forum, tells us.

Meter’s running

When a truck or driver can’t continue, the shipment usually still arrives, just later and at a higher price. Shippers should measure the hit as a rise in total logistics cost rather than in the trucking rate, says Yasmine Rashed, associate professor of transport economics at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport. That covers time and reliability losses, inventory and disruption costs, and extra transaction and compliance work, she tells us.

The extra cost builds up in waiting time and workarounds: Shippers end up paying for waiting, additional handling, replacement trucks, subcontracting, empty repositioning, or underused assets, Teodoro says. Small administrative problems can carry an outsized cost because they interrupt a trip planned as one continuous run, she adds.

Larger fleets are better placed to carry those costs than small carriers. Permits, customs registrations, and local support act like fixed compliance costs, which a big fleet can spread across more trucks and driver pools in more markets, Jenan Hasan, economist at Transport Intelligence, tells us. Smaller carriers have fewer people, vehicles, and local relationships to redeploy when the original plan falls through, she adds.

Pass the parcel

The usual fix is to hand the load to someone who can finish the trip. A backup plan works when it costs little in switching and delays and doesn’t change the shipment’s legal and transit status, Rashed argues. For sealed containers, that usually means swapping the driver or tractor without opening the cargo. Hazardous liquid loads are different, because transloading them adds safety, contamination, and permitting risks, so the likelier fallback there is another authorized driver or tractor, she adds.

A local carrier across the border is one way to do that: Once goods clear customs, a local partner can collect the cargo in its own truck, so the original driver and vehicle don’t have to continue, Hasan says. That mirrors the border handovers common in other cross-border trucking markets, she notes, though Transport Intelligence doesn’t have data showing its standard practice in the GCC.

How often shipments need a handoff is a good measure of how integrated the market is. Each extra driver, carrier, or transfer keeps the cargo moving but adds cost, coordination, and potential delay, Teodoro says. The more often operators have to step in, the less the GCC’s roads work as a single market, even when the goods arrive where they were supposed to.

The next marker comes in March: Saudi Arabia has already extended its 22-year truck-age waiver once, to 26 March 2027 (Okaz). If Riyadh renews it again or writes it into permanent rules, the extra capacity stays on the road after the pressure eases.