In 1979 the tallest building in Dubai was a 149-metre office tower ringed by open sand. The Dubai World Trade Centre sat almost alone beside a two-lane highway running south toward Abu Dhabi. That highway is now Sheikh Zayed Road, twelve lanes wide and walled in glass. A Dubai Open Top Bus Tour follows that same axis, and the compression of history is the point: four decades of construction read as one continuous sequence of facades from an upper deck. The city the route also crosses is considerably older. Al Fahidi Fort, built around 1787 from coral block and gypsum, is the oldest surviving structure in Dubai and has housed Dubai Museum since 1971. Dubai Creek, the saltwater inlet beside it, was dredged in the late 1950s so larger cargo dhows could berth — a decision that financed much of what followed. Abras still cross between Deira and Bur Dubai for a single dirham. The Gold Souk and the Spice Souk sit minutes from the northern bank. Dubai Open Top Bus Tour tours thread these two registers together, the wind-tower quarter and the financial district, without pretending they resemble one another. Each of these Dubai landmarks carries a date. Jumeirah Mosque, completed in 1979 in a Fatimid idiom of twin minarets and a central dome, remains the only mosque in the city routinely open to non-Muslim visitors. Burj Al Arab, finished in 1999, stands 321 metres on a reclaimed island 280 metres offshore, its sail profile drawn by Tom Wright. Palm Jumeirah was dredged from the Gulf between 2001 and 2006 using roughly 94 million cubic metres of sand. Burj Khalifa, 828 metres, opened in January 2010 and still holds the height record. One Dubai Open Top Bus Tour tour crosses all four eras in a single circuit, which is why the format has outlasted most rival ways of seeing the city. Value here is structural rather than promotional. Dubai is a city of long distances: the marina lies some 30 kilometres from Deira, and point-to-point taxi fares between districts accumulate fast. A multi-stop Dubai sightseeing bus pass converts that geography into one fixed cost, which is the honest argument for it. There is no gate fee at Dubai Mall Zabeel Bus Parking — 0 AED at the kerb — and what a visitor pays depends only on whether the pass runs 24, 48 or 72 hours. Recorded commentary in more than a dozen languages, onboard Wi-Fi, and loops linking Dubai Marina, Madinat Jumeirah, the Dubai Mall and the Deira souks make the Dubai Open Top Bus Tour less a novelty than the city's de facto tourist transit network.