Dubai's unmanned automated subway: what does it look like to drive

Visiting Dubai can often feel like you are jumping on a time machine. The city is emerging from the desert, seemingly out of nowhere, with every sparkling skyscraper, landmark and new building more futuristic than the previous one.

The Dubai subway system, old of a decade, is no different. The bullet-shaped stations are suspended above the ground, like golden space pods, and the trains cross the center of the city, skirting skyscrapers after skyscrapers.

This is not just the form and aesthetics that make the futuristic metro, but also the underlying technology.

The entire Dubai Metro, consisting of 49 stations and 46 km, is fully automated and unmanned, making it the third largest system of its kind in the world, after Singapore and Vancouver. The red line of the city, which runs through the heart of Dubai as an artery, remains the world's longest driverless underground line.

And it gets bigger. The city is currently building a third line, called Route 2020, which will link southwestern Dubai to the World Expo site, which Dubai will host in 2020. The city is also building extensions of existing red and green lines.

Read more: I took the super-fast train from China that could get from New York to Chicago in 4 1/2 hours – and it blew me away

The practical result is that the automated metro has quickly transformed local travel – previously a battle on congested highways in a car-dependent city – into a seamless, fast and incredibly reliable travel experience. As long as you travel in the city, it is much more convenient than driving, as I discovered during a recent trip to Dubai.

Although Dubai is far from the only city to have a fully automated metro, most other similar systems are found in Asia and Europe. In the United States, automated trains are currently limited to airports and a few very limited lines in Miami, Detroit and West Virginia.

The best of the US subway systems is probably still the New York subway, but even this system is falling apart.

Traveling in the Dubai Metro is a totally different experience, as I recently learned when I took the red train to get downtown: