New Traffic Crackdown on Delivery Riders Starts 18 October in Kuwait

I came across this today and it caught my eye straight away, because if you order food or groceries online in Kuwait, this is going to affect how fast your delivery shows up starting next week.

From Sunday, 18 October, the General Directorate of Traffic is rolling out intensive campaigns specifically targeting delivery cars and motorcycles. Get caught breaking traffic rules while making a delivery, and your vehicle won’t just get a ticket. It gets impounded for a minimum of 60 days.

That’s a long time for a delivery rider to be off the road, and it’s clearly meant to send a message.

Why delivery drivers specifically?

Speaking on the radio’s Second Programme, Al-Essa laid out the most common violations traffic officers are seeing from delivery drivers: changing lanes without signalling, running red lights, overtaking cars that are stopped at traffic signals, and driving on sidewalks and pedestrian bridges.

If you’ve walked almost anywhere in Kuwait in the last couple of years, none of that will surprise you. Motorcycles weaving onto pavements to beat traffic has become a familiar, and frankly unsettling, sight for pedestrians.

Al-Essa said these practices put pedestrians and other road users at risk and disrupt the flow of traffic generally. This campaign builds on earlier warnings about impounding delivery riders, so this isn’t the first time authorities have flagged the issue. It also comes not long after figures showed Kuwait logged more than 1.1 million traffic violations in five months, which gives you a sense of the scale authorities are dealing with.

It’s not just drivers in the firing line

Here’s the part that might matter most for the bigger delivery platforms operating in Kuwait: companies themselves can face administrative action if their drivers accumulate a large number of violations and management doesn’t cooperate with traffic authorities.

The General Directorate of Traffic has already met with delivery company representatives and shown them video footage of actual violations by their drivers. Companies have also been asked to run awareness lectures for employees covering safe driving and their responsibilities on the road.

So this isn’t only about catching individual riders breaking the rules. It’s also about pushing the companies that employ them to take responsibility for how their fleets behave.

Routes, cameras and signal timing

Al-Essa also mentioned that specific routes have been designated where delivery motorcycles are not allowed at all, and he urged riders to stick to the permitted routes and rules governing where they can go. It’s not yet confirmed exactly which routes these are or where you can find the full list.

On the technology side, about 370 advanced cameras are being used by the central control room to monitor roads, catch violations and support these enforcement campaigns. That monitoring system works alongside the officers conducting field inspections, so drivers can expect to be caught either by a camera or by someone watching in person.

He also touched on traffic signal timings, saying any adjustments at intersections come from studies done by the central control room, which looks at traffic density and vehicle volumes on connecting roads to try to keep traffic moving more smoothly. This wasn’t presented as a new change tied to the delivery campaign, more as background on how the control room generally manages the city’s traffic flow.

What this means if you’re in Kuwait

If you’re a delivery rider, the message is simple: slow down, use your signals, stop at red lights, and stay off the pavements. A 60-day impound isn’t a minor inconvenience. It means lost income for that whole stretch, and if you’ve just had a vehicle released from an earlier impound, the process to get it back isn’t instant either.

If you work for or run a delivery company, this is worth taking seriously at management level too. Authorities have made it clear they expect cooperation, awareness sessions for staff, and a genuine effort to bring violation numbers down, not just a shrug when a rider gets caught.

For ordinary residents and customers, the honest answer is you might see slightly slower delivery times in the weeks after 18 October as riders adjust to tighter enforcement. That’s a reasonable trade-off if it means fewer near-misses on the road and fewer bikes mounting the pavement where you’re walking.

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