Another senior official is leaving the Ministry of Transport: Shai Kedem, head of the Transport Planning Division, announced this morning that he would step down.
Kedem joined the Ministry of Transport almost nine years ago, and, as a transport planner by profession, he served in a senior positions in the ministry’s Infrastructure Planning and Development Administration. Under Michal Michaeli as minister of transport he was appointed head of the Administration, and was considered a professional appointment and won praise for his performance from officials in various government ministries, from the government companies, and in the market.
In recent years, Kedem led the strategic planning of Israel’s transport network, with an emphasis on promoting public transport, walking and cycling paths, and he was an important figure in the process that the ministry underwent in switching from planning roads and intersections for private cars to promoting public transport of all kinds. He holds a first degree in geography from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a second degree in urban and regional planning from the Technion.
"Although I chose to compete for the position of head of the Infrastructure Administration, and also attempted to become deputy director general for infrastructure in the Planning Administration, my true dream, since about the age of 19, was to be responsible for planning transport in Israel. I was so happy to fulfil it. The truth is that I wasn’t sure what could be my next dream," he wrote to his team.
Kedem told the employees that three weeks ago he had been offered to serve as director of the Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal council, but the Civil Service Commission had required a cooling off period of five months, which made the role unrealistic for him. "Nevertheless, despite the uncertainty, and thanks to the internal process that this job offer forced me to undergo, I decided that I was ready for the next challenge," Kedem wrote to the ministry’s workers.
Transport sector sources told "Globes" however that the reason for Kedem’s departure lay in the fact that, in the current state of affairs in the Ministry of Transport, "It’s no longer possible to put things right, and any initiative gets stuck or is blocked. Nothing professional interests anyone there anymore, in a place where professionalism is spurned."
Indeed, Kedem is the latest in a list of senior officials to have left the Ministry of Transport since Miri Regev was appointed transport minister. In the past few weeks, Regev’s people have succeeded in promoting many appointments in the ministry, particularly in the Infrastructure Administration, and the high-quality professional people who grew up in the ministry have left it one after another. Several sources in the sector have described in the past how, under Regev, hardly any professional discussions take place, apart from on matters connected to local authorities that are important to her.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on April 8, 2024.
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