Since 2015, the country has not met the goal of reducing the number of road fatalities to less than 300 per year (photo: photo processing, MDA spokesmen)
Since the beginning of the year, 77 people have been killed in road accidents in Israel, a decrease of 6% compared to the same period last year.
An improvement that can be wiped out in one accident.
A report by the Knesset Research and Information Center obtained by Walla reveals that since 2015 there has not been a single year in which the number of deaths was lower than 300 people per year, as set in the target set by the Sheinin Committee, not even in 2020 when there was an overall decrease in the number The victims of the accidents due to the outbreak of the corona virus.
In 2020, Miri Regev presented to the government in 2020, in her first term as Minister of Transportation, a multi-year plan to reduce road fatalities. Despite the agreement of all the professional elements in the ministry that the sections of the plan should be translated into a comprehensive action plan that is at her side Budget and schedules, in practice some elements of the program were included in the budget discussions for the years 2021-2022, but the program as a whole was not budgeted.
In 2022, the Israel Defense Forces presented a new plan to the Minister of Transportation that replaced her, Merav Michaeli, and was intended to reduce the number of deaths and injuries from accidents by 50% within five years, and to place Israel among the top five countries in the world in the field of road safety in relation to the index of deaths per million km driven, so that their number will decrease from 6 to 3 fatalities per million kilometers driven. The program includes treatment in seven main areas:
1. Young drivers: reducing the rate of casualties and the involvement of young drivers in accidents.
2. "Safe city": increasing safety in the urban area, Including in the vicinity of educational institutions, day centers and sheltered discussion centers, through strengthening enforcement and integrating traffic calming measures in cities. Reducing injuries among pedestrians and cyclists and small vehicles. 3. Arab society: reducing the rate of involvement and casualties in accidents. 4. Heavy vehicles: reducing the rate
of
involvement in road accidents among truck and bus drivers.
5. Two-wheeled - reducing serious injury of two-wheeled riders.
6. Enforcement: Strengthening and streamlining the national enforcement system in the urban and interurban space.
7. Intercity roads: setting goals for the treatment of infrastructure and risk centers on intercity roads.
A car accident in the Negev.
An agreement has not yet been reached between the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Finance regarding the Haralbad budget for 2023 (Photo: KBA Spokesperson)
However, a short time later, at the end of June 2022, the 24th Knesset was dissolved. In Government Decision 1864, a budget of NIS 80 million was allocated to promote the first phase of the multi-year plan, when the cluster of Gulf authorities was chosen to be the first to pilot the program.
However, implementation is expected to begin in the second quarter of 2023.
Although many budgets have been allocated in recent years in favor of road safety, the issue of the lack of budget for the implementation of certain projects has come up again and again on several occasions, including the discussions of the Knesset Economy Committee, the response of the various government ministries.
This issue was emphasized even more in the years 2019-2020, when the state budget was not approved and the budgets required for projects were not transferred, and in particular for infrastructure repairs in urban and inter-urban areas, and many projects were frozen.
For example, with regard to the budgeting of treatment at intercity risk centers, only partial budgeting was received.
At the end of 2021, for example, a budget of NIS 130 million was received for the issue, and in 2022 a budget of only NIS 100 million.
According to the Ministry of Transportation, due to the lack of budgeting and the ministry's inability to commit to future payments for the treatment regulation at the risk centers, a large part of the projects have already been frozen.
The Harald Board monitors the implementation of work plans in some areas, but it is not clear whether this is a comprehensive and ongoing monitoring mechanism. For example, regarding the budgets transferred to the local authorities for the purpose of correcting infrastructure deficiencies in their areas: in a previous document of the Knesset's Research and Information Center it was stated that after the budgets are transferred to the authorities, There is no supervision over the utilization of the budget by the local authorities and the actual execution of the repairs. Important programs, such as switching to a digital tachograph for recording the driving hours and travel speeds of truck and bus drivers, and the establishment of an online database for license invalids, have not made significant progress.
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MK Boaz Toporovsky (Photo: Noam Moshkowitz/Knesset Spokesperson)
The chairman of the road safety subcommittee, MK Boaz Toporovski (Yesh Atid), who commissioned the report, told Walla that "we live in a reality that makes headlines every hour and in the shadow of political crises and in the absence of a budgeted body that knows how to integrate the phenomenon, once again the problem of carnage on the roads is pushed to the sidelines Our moral duty, in view of the fact that hundreds of people are killed for nothing on the roads, is to provide an answer. To financially and bureaucratically disorganize the representative body that is responsible for road safety. "Haralbad, the body defined by law
as an entity involved in the field of road safety cannot fulfill its role fully, because it is still flawed With a lack of powers, a poor budget and budgetary uncertainty. Even the full plan submitted by the RLB has not yet been fully promoted by the government.
"Every week in the Knesset plenum I read the names of those killed in fatal accidents and wish for the day when I can leave with a blank page. Unfortunately, it has not yet happened, and it will not happen, as long as we do not understand that war must be declared against carnage on the roads. The State of Israel knows how to win wars, History shows that she won them all. There is no reason that we will lose this war. Every day anew."
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Boaz Toporovsky