Take advantage of the opportunity, next time you are trudging along in another one of those irritating, everyday traffic jams on your way to work, on your way from work, in your car, on a bus, in the morning, in the evening, entering Tel Aviv, entering Jerusalem, leaving Tel Aviv, leaving Jerusalem, or on another of Israel’s major arteries - make the most of all that frustrating, wasted time, and ponder a few statistics.
Road congestion in Israel is among the worst in the world: four times worse than Denmark and Switzerland, and twice as bad as the UK. In Israel, the percentage of journeys made on public transport is among the lowest in the world: 23-24% in the big cities, compared with an average of 40% in cities around the world. In Israel it has taken the longest period of time to establish the first light-rail line; from the time the decision was made, until it became operational took 16-20 years, as opposed to 5-10 years in cities like Lyon, Barcelona, Washington DC, and others. The gap in investment in transport infrastructures between major cities in Israel and cities around the world is in the tens of billions of shekels, plus. The average speed of public transportation in Israel is significantly lower, by roughly 10 kmph, than public transportation in other world cities.
In short, you understand why you are stuck in traffic for so long: investments in infrastructure in Israel are low, the bureaucracy is its own jam, ego battles in the government offices, alongside ego battles within the local authorities, are a further logjam, and all this, sadly, is not about to change anytime soon.
Transport infrastructures are perhaps Israel's most backward sector. Sub-investments in the fields and foot-dragging on projects, such as the Tel Aviv light rail, are likely to get much worse in the coming years, and time spent sitting in traffic is likely to lengthen significantly. "Globes" investigates just how far behind other developed countries Israel ranks, what the solutions are, and on which projects billions were thrown away, and why.
Financial management in general and infrastructure construction in particular are not matters for off-the-cuff decision making, rather for long-term planning, at least 5-10 years ahead. Israel cannot waste more time or throw away more money on transportation projects that should have been serving the public already long ago.
NIS 170 is the tax you pay the government each time you swipe your card at the gas station after filling your tank with 40 liters of 95 octane. Taxes in Israel add NIS 3.20 to each liter of gas out of NIS 7.36. The government doesn’t understand what the public is angry about. The price of gas is not higher than in Europe, they say. Also there they pay high taxes on fuel. Here, as in in Europe, the justification for the high tax is that travelling by car pollutes, and is a waste of resources. The money that we charge drivers we invest in mass transit systems, the government explains. True social justice.
But if you feel that entering Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and other major cities has become an ever-worsening nightmare in recent years, then we have some bad news for you: in five years you will have to choose between spending an hour more in traffic, and just staying home.
How do we know? Because that’s what it says in the official government forecast, which was written by top experts in the field. “Congestion on the roads is expected to rise to the point that the network of major arteries in cities fails completely in the morning hours,” they write. “Every motor vehicle traveler is expected waste more than 60 additional minutes on average per day as a result of congestion,” “the lengths of the traffic jams will double,” and “the loss of economic productivity will rise to NIS 25 billion each year.” - and that’s just a limited selection from the plethora of expert forecasts, which, incidentally, are based on an overly optimistic scenario, as we will explain.
The strategic plan for the development of public transport in Israel, which was prepared one year ago, analyzed the public transport infrastructure in major Israeli cities for the first time. This analysis provides answers to some fundamental questions that have been troubling us over recent years. Where does Israel stand relative to Western countries in terms of investment in mass-transit systems in major cities? Is it unusual that there is still no light rail (not to mention no subway) in the entire Tel Aviv metropolitan area? What is the scope of damage to economy caused by the level of public transport? Are the government leaders who are currently fighting to build a super-expensive train to Eilat right to do so at a time when Tel Aviv, the capital of Start-up Nation, does not even have a single BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) line like the Metronit in Haifa.
The idea to prepare a strategic public transportation plan in Israel came from Ministry of Finance's Budget Department. “We started with the assumption that whatever we do here in terms of public transport is far less than what we see in big cities in the Western world,” says one of the projects initiators, who was at the Ministry of Finance at the time. “We wanted to check to what extent this [assumption] is correct, and to provide policy makers with an overall picture that would allow them to plan for the long term.” The findings confirmed the project initiators’ suspicions to an extent that even they had not imagined. Some of the figures are hard to digest: 250,000,000,000 - a quarter of a trillion shekels - that’s how much it will cost to close the massive gap in the quality of mass transit systems that has been created over the years between major cities in Israel and those of rest of the developed world. NIS 15 billion - that is the annual damage to the economy in work hours lost to traffic and other losses caused by road congestion.
Road congestion will double
But there are figures that everyone can understand. Researchers checked how much money was invested in public transport, cumulatively, to date, in each city in Israel. The total was divided by the number of residents in each city, in order to establish how much money the government invests per-capita in its residents. The average per-capita in big cities in the West is NIS 50,000. To date, a total of NIS 7,625 has been invested for each Tel Aviv resident, and for each Jerusalem resident, a mere NIS 2,642. The most neglected are Beersheva residents, who have only a cumulative investment of NIS 1,251 per capita, to date, barely 2.5% of what is invested for each resident of an average city in the developed world.
Based on these figures, it is not at all surprising that the public transport system in Israel offers one of the lowest levels of service in the Western world: the average speed of public transport in major cities in Israel is 16 kmph, versus 25 kmph, the average among cities in the developed world. As a result of this, something very troubling has happened: the number of passengers on buses in Israel has not risen since the 1980s. Public transport’s relative share of travel in the greater Tel Aviv area has dropped at an average annual rate of 3%, from 45% in 1984 to 30% in 1996, to 23% in 2008. Over the same time period, the population has doubled, and personal vehicle use has grown fivefold. Already in 2005, Israel had the most crowded roads among similar Western countries, and since then, congestion has risen at an annual rate of 3%.
“Despite the substantial investment in road infrastructure development, the growth rate in road construction does not keep up with growth rate in vehicles, and vehicle kilometers traveled,” says the official Ministry of Transport document from 2012, “A continuation of the status-quo will lead to a doubling of road congestion within 20 years. This would cause a very serious transportation crisis, particularly in major arteries in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.”
The only positive sign in recent years is the train, which has grown its number of passengers tenfold over the past 20 years. But train travel is but a drop in the bucket of total travel: less that 2% of all travel, and less than 10% of public transit travel.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on February 19, 2014
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