World Jewish News

Transportation pilot programs aim to address traffic burden in Israeli cities

When planning to drive from Jerusalem to Netanya for a bar mitzvah on a Thursday night in early November, Avi Tuchmayer knew the start of the weekend traffic meant the drive could take a lot longer than the usual hour-and-a-half. Accordingly, he left extra time and wasn’t surprised that the trip took nearly two-and-a-half hours, and made it to the party on time.

Heading home, however, Tuchmayer said he was stunned to hit bumper-to-bumper traffic on the trip back to the capital, at a time he’d expected the drive to go smoothly.

“I knew we’d have a tough time getting through Tel Aviv at 5:30 on a Thursday afternoon,” Tuchmayer said. “But we left Netanya at 11:00 pm to come home, but traffic on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway had come to a standstill. During one stretch, it took us more than 30 minutes to drive about three kilometers.”

Tuchmayer is hardly the only Israeli driver to say that traffic in the country is becoming unbearable. Up-and-down the coastal plain, major highways leading in-and-out of major cities can be clogged at any time of day or night. At rush hour, the 40 kilometer drive from Ashdod to Tel Aviv can easily take an hour-and-a-half. Near Jerusalem, residents Gush Etzion to the south of the city, Ma’aleh Adumim to the east and the Ramot neighborhood in the city’s northwest say the traffic leading into town has turned a 15 minute drive into a 45 minute journey, or longer.

To deal with traffic jams that have become a national plague – 250,000 new cars have hit Israeli roads so far in 2017 – the ministry of environmental protection has unveiled two pilot programs to reduce both urban and intercity traffic. One, Car2Go, will create a car-sharing program for in-city journeys in Haifa that will function similar to bike sharing setups that have become popular in recent years in major world cities including Tel Aviv, New York, Paris and more.

According to the Environmental Protection Ministry, Car2Go will place 100 Renault Zoe electric cars around the city, and the city of Haifa has set equipped 300 parking spots with charging posts. Forty cars hit the road Tuesday, another 40 will be introduced at the beginning of December with the remaining 20 coming online in January. The five-seat cars can travel up to150 kilometers on a full charge.

The Ministry said in a release that similar programs in other cities have cut the number of private cars on local roads by between four and 14 per shared car. The program, a joint initiative of the Environmental Protection Ministry, JNF and the City of Haifa, will cost NIS 20 million, with cars available for use 24/7 at a cost of NIS 1.2 a minute.

Environmental Protection Minister Ze’ev Elkin said the program would begin a transportation revolution in Israel.

“We are declaring a revolution today in the electric car sector,” Elkin said. “Haifa is the first pioneer, but we will expand this program to the north of the city,” thus turning the entire Haifa Bay metropolitan area into a united market for shared electric cars.

“This is an important project that will help local residents and visitors with parking, it will reduce the use of private cars and help reduce pollution… I congratulate the city of Haifa for serving as the first test case for this project and hope it will come to other areas of the country as well,” Elkin added.

In addition to the Haifa pilot program, the Ministry also announced an NIS 8 million plan to reduce private car use in major cities. The program calls for expanding bicycle-sharing programs, including Tel Aviv’s Tel Ofan and introducing shuttle services to industrial zones in Jerusalem, Holon and Bat Yam and restrictions on high-pollution diesel vehicles in Jerusalem and Haifa.

The program will also place additional bicycle locking posts in Jerusalem, Kiryat Yam, Netanya, Tel Aviv, Yokneam and Nes Tziona, for a total cost of NIS 18 million.

The issue of traffic congestion has taken an increasingly central role on Israel’s national agenda in recent years. A year ago, an OECD report said there were 2,700 vehicles per kilometer of road in Israel, in contrast to the overall OECD average of 773 vehicles per road kilometer. Experts say the time spent in traffic currently costs the Israeli economy NIS 20 billion annually, and add that the country lags behind the public transportation infrastructure that is common in other Western countries.

“Try finding a parking spot in downtown Zurich or Berlin or London,” said Dr. Robert Ishaq, a researcher in the Department of Transportation & Geo-Information at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and a senior advisor to Optibus, a Tel Aviv startup that develops software and technology services to optimize public transportation systems. “In those cities, there are about 150 parking spots per 1000 people who work in the downtown area. In Tel Aviv, it’s about 450 per 1000 workers.”

Ishaq told TPS that reducing the number of urban parking spots, as well as charging high fees to private cars that want to enter a downtown area are effective ways to reduce the number of private vehicles on the road. That, together with large-scale investment in public transit, is the recipe for reducing traffic.

“In order to drive down the use of private cars, you must make it far more ‘painful’ to drive than to take public transit,” Ishaq said. “ That essentially means two things: Make sure there is effective, cheap public transportation, backed up by policy decisions to limit possibilities for private cars in downtown areas.”

Ishaq praised the Haifa and shuttle pilot programs, and praised the transportation ministry for “waking up” in recent years to addressing the issue of overbearing traffic. He noted that the ministry has invested billions of shekels around the country on bus lanes and traffic lights, light rails, railroads and other mass transit infrastructure to increase the efficiency of commuting via public transportation.

But he added that the ministry’s attention to the problem came years too late, making it difficult to deal with effectively, as well as prohibitively expensive: 75 percent of Israeli commuters currently take their cars to work, as opposed to just half of commuters in other Western cities. Bringing Israel in line with that ratio would run approximately NIS 200-250 billion.

Despite the investment, however, it remains to be seen whether the current moves to reduce traffic will remain limited to Haifa and other local initiatives, or whether the government views the issue as one of national importance.

“The fault is in the state’s explicit policy, which in transportation has favored reliance on private vehicles over public transportation,” former MK Manuel Trajtenberg, who is also a professor of economics, told the Knesset Science and Technology Committee earlier this year. “We are very far in the framework of the amounts under discussion from starting to close the gap.

EJP