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Crowded vehicles and road works that block lanes: Why are traffic jams in the country worse than ever?

The blow of the traffic jams, which was severe even before the corona, only escalated during the plague.

According to the CBS, 62% of Israelis come to work in a private car, a significantly higher number compared to countries like ours.

So when will we stop standing in traffic jams?

The first buds of change we will see in about 3 years

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• traffic jams

• Vehicles

Keenan Cohen

Sunday, 17 October 2021, 03:09 Updated: Monday, 18 October 2021, 06:55

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We do not have the exact time, but we have a date - September 29th.

The day after Simchat Torah, the last of the Tishrei holidays, which was also the day that marked the eruption on the roads.

An outburst that if you too stood in a traffic jam this morning, just like last week and the one before, you should not find it in the graphs of WAZE travel data, it appears on the desperate faces of the drivers around you.

Because if we spent most of September in traffic between highs and lows on the roads, since September 29 the trend is clear and points in one direction - up.

On the one hand, this is a kind of routine to which we have become accustomed in recent years, an increase in traffic congestion with the end of the big holiday in early September and a similar phenomenon after the holidays, but this year the situation is worse due to some factors exacerbating road congestion.

More on Walla!

This is not the price: free public transportation is not the answer to the endless traffic jam

To the full article

More on Walla!

• Rushing to disaster: 190,000 new cars have congested Israeli roads since the beginning of the year

• Local authorities and technology companies will share information to reduce traffic jams and accidents on the roads

• Saving from the first moment: How to start saving in four simple steps

Traffic congestion on Road 2 (Photo: Reuven Castro)

It was worse, we're getting worse

To put things in order, we will take the 2019 data from the Central Bureau of Statistics regarding the working habits of Israelis.

62% of them did it in the private car, this is a high number but not one that puts us above the world average in an unusual way.

In the UK as of 2018 it was 68% who used a car to get to work and in the United States it is 84% ​​who get to work in a private car.

But there are two main differences, in contrast to England, the United States, Spain and Germany, where the number is also a little over 60%, Israel is a significantly smaller country and is characterized by employment centers in the Dan Bloc.

In other countries, city centers are a network lined with efficient public transportation on the road, on designated lanes, and on tracks above and below ground.

Even when comparing countries with a population density per square kilometer similar to ours like Belgium and the Netherlands, Israelis made more use of their private car and less use of public transport. How much less? Only 17% (train and bus) compared to almost 40% in the Netherlands.

But there is one more difference , More than the means of transportation we use, we change the amount of time we spend traveling from place to place, and in this respect we can only envy.In 2019, the United States and England had the average arrival times for work - 27.6 minutes and 29 minutes for the British on average. The entire European average stands at 33 minutes and remember the Dutch? Those who are really close to us in density per square kilometer?

They were the Europeans who suffered the longest travel times - 37 minutes on average.

Traffic jams on Ayalon lanes (Photo: Reuven Castro)

37 minutes on average is a figure that residents of Petah Tikva, Rishon Lezion, Netanya, Hadera, Kfar Saba and others can only dream of. To get to Tel Aviv at 9:00, everyone stood this morning for periods of between 50 minutes and more than an hour. By the way, all this on the assumption that an extraordinary catastrophe did not catch them on the way.

All of these pre-corona figures, however, have changed significantly over the past year with more onerous factors making our conduct on the roads with the private vehicle unbearable. Take, for example, the work model from home, on which quite a few factors pinned hope that it would bring about a change in work habits in Israel, and release traffic loads from the roads. So while some companies, especially in the high-tech field, allow employees working days remotely, in general, there is no real change in the perception of showing up in the office of the Israeli worker who continues to move every morning to and from Gush Dan, usually alone by car.

A second phenomenon that has exacerbated traffic jams is the fact that traffic jams are less restricted in the hours we have known in the past.

On some of the roads - and the Ayalon lanes are the clearest and most prominent example of all - these are no longer congestion limits limited to 8: 00-9: 00 in the morning, but extend from 7:00 to 10:00 and sometimes even very active traffic can be seen on the arteries.

The same thing was recorded in the afternoon, when the rush hours for those leaving Gush Dan begin to be built as early as 3:30 PM and continue until 7:00 PM.

Since the beginning of the year, 264,909 new vehicles have hit the roads (Photo: Reuven Castro)

A second factor that leads more and more Israelis to prefer the private car is the decline in motivation to travel by public transport during Corona's year and a half. At first it was the fear of getting infected and being exposed to Corona patients or the fact that the volume of transport was significantly reduced and since the roads were vacant, whoever could, preferred to buy a used car and make use of it. And since this car is already in his possession, he continues to use it even as the roads become more and more congested and he does so for two reasons.

The first is that studies have already shown that it is much more difficult to change habits of using a private car for public transport despite the higher costs and hassle of standing in traffic jams. The second reason is that on the train, for example, the momentum of development and construction in public transport, which is supposed to make it much more efficient, means that for more than a year we have been informed once every few weeks about closing, changing, shutting down or restricting train traffic. Usually within a time span of weeks at best before the change, making it difficult for passengers to produce long-term and stable planning of its use.

Another factor that increases congestion in the central area is also related to the long-term course of changing the face of transportation in the Gush Dan area. From Glilot in the north to Rishon Lezion in the south and along the Ayalon routes, the works are being promoted to the highways for public transportation. These will serve as hundreds of shuttles that will exit the huge parking lots where drivers are supposed to leave tens of thousands of cars and commute into the city through them. During the works, a situation arises where the travel lanes become narrower due to the work area at the margins, the margins themselves become narrower and allow less "lane" for the two-wheelers who load the existing lanes. But throw on the speed of movement itself.

In addition to these, there is also the issue of the buying frenzy of the new cars in Israel.

As of this writing, 264,909 new vehicles have hit the roads since the beginning of the year.

These joined an all-time high with nearly 3.2 million vehicles moving on the roads by the end of 2020 according to the Central Bureau of Statistics.

Transport Minister Michaeli (Photo: Reuven Castro)

And the figure that in previous years has slightly balanced the roadblock in new cars - the number of cars deducted from the roads has decreased significantly in the last two years.

According to a Walla!

In 2017, 100,000 cars were deducted, in 2018 127,365 cars were deducted and in 2019 101,530 cars fell off the roads.

These numbers were halted when in 2020 70,214 cars got off the road (due to the small number of passengers, accidents and thefts) while this year, as of mid-October, 76,029 vehicles got off the roads.

That is, if we subtract from the 264,909 new vehicles the 76,029 cars that came off the roads we will be left with 188,880,000 cars, and just to produce a simple illustration of this figure, imagine all those cars standing bumper to bumper, with an average length of about 4.5 meters per car and here you go " Theoretical traffic jam "of 850 km. Only from the new cars added this year.

Traffic jams are less common in the hours we used to know (Photo: Reuven Castro)

The change on the horizon, the horizon is far away

So when will we stop standing in traffic jams? The question of the million dollars or rather the billions of shekels that the economy burns in this position. According to the optimistic scenarios, the first buds of change we are about to see in about three years.

The Ministry of Transportation's five-year plan, announced by Transportation Minister Merav Michaeli last week, talks about a massive shift in budgets from paving new roads to public, cooperative and alternative transportation. The intention is to put in place a fast, efficient and available public transportation system before the entry into force of the Gush Dan congestion charge. The ambition is that these two moves will contribute to reducing the use of the private car on those congested roads. Beyond these, cautious hopes can be pinned on the red line of the light rail, which will connect Petah Tikva in the east to Bat Yam in the southwest, which after its recent delays has been set for July 2023.

In the longer term of a decade or more, the "metro" subway, the first of which will enter service in 2032 in the most optimistic scenario, is also expected to start operating.

In the meantime, other than taking a deep breath and not expecting to get to places in a reasonable amount of time - there are no real solutions for private car users.

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