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Opinion | Extract the rural space from the traffic jam Israel today

2021-10-27T21:02:16.432Z


In the almost complete absence of public transport, the reality in the rural area is of endless traffic jams within the localities, daily delays of transportation and a general sense of siege


An hour and a half - this is the average amount of time it took me in recent days to get from my home in Moshav Hogla to my place of work, the Emek Hefer Regional Council.

Number of kilometers: seven.

A full 90 minutes - and this is when I drove, like many residents and residents of Emek Hefer - through the fields, trying in every way to shorten the length of the trip so long.

Normally, without special traffic jams, this trip takes between five and seven minutes (!).

The traffic jams in the post-Corona days have become a national scourge, but in the countryside it is a real paralysis.

In the almost complete absence of public transportation, the reality is of endless traffic jams within the localities, daily delays of transportation to schools, loss of half working days and more, and a general sense of siege.

The rural space is very different in its characteristics from the city, also in terms of transportation.

The Emek Hefer Regional Council is spread over an area of ​​about 130,000 dunams, including 41 localities and about 43,000 residents, to which about 7,000 students from the Ruppin Academic Center in the valley were added last week.

Therefore, in the Hefer Valley, and in the countryside in general, one must travel to receive almost any service - supermarket, medicine, education, classes and activities, and certainly the workplaces, to which we travel on the long roads that we all pass - roads 2, 4 and 6.

If until recently the serious problem was getting to the workplaces in the central cities, in recent weeks the Hefer Valley itself has become impossibly congested, and it starts with leaving the house literally.

The only solution to this situation, in the still visible range, is good, efficient and extensive public transport.

However, in the vast majority of rural areas there is almost no such transportation.

Here, in the Hefer Valley, we started a pilot of a flexible transportation service, "Quaker", a few months ago.

However, this is only a solution within the valley, and in addition - the service is not extensive enough for a significant change to take place.

And the really difficult problem: there is not a single train station in the Hefer Valley (as in many other councils in the rural area of ​​the State of Israel).

The nearest stations are in Hadera and Netanya, and as you can already understand, getting there involves huge traffic jams, and it is very difficult to find parking next to them.

We had great hope here in the Hefer Valley: for 20 years we promised to build a train station here as part of the Eastern Railroad project.

For this purpose, many of our residents even expropriated land.

But right at the last minute, we found out that the Department of Transportation overturned the decision.

In the face of the loud shout we raised, the government ministries admitted, not to mention of course, that the injustice was indeed great.

But - that's how it was decided.

There are economic priorities, and we'll get along somehow, no?

So this is it, no.

The damage is not only to us, the residents of the Hefer Valley, or only to the residents of the rural area, but to the balance between the center and the periphery of the State of Israel.

This is an injury that can have serious, economic and demographic consequences.

Without adequate solutions, the situation will continue to deteriorate.

The traffic jams will lengthen.

We will continue to fight, to make our voices heard, to demonstrate, to sound the warning sirens, in the hope that in spite of everything, someone - in the government, in the state or in the Ministry of Transport - will still wake up.

Source: israelhayom

All news articles on 2021-10-27

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