Friday, October 31, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
Jerusalem, October 30 - The transportation situation in Israel's capital city had deteriorated to such an extent, observers noted this week, that even such a change as blocking a major downtown artery for the next several years has had a positive effect, since improvement remained the only possible direction.
Despite a dearth of main roads in the city center that still allow private motor vehicle traffic, bus lines in the area somehow have managed to follow the most inconvenient routes conceivable, with roundabout approaches to seemingly-straightforward destinations, as if the designers had set as their goal the inconveniencing of as many people as possible. Now, however, the closure of King George V Avenue to even taxis and buses, for purposes of constructing a tunnel for one of the new light rail lines, has cut off the roundabout portions of several bus routes through the center of town and forced them on more direct paths.
City officials apologized for the changes. "We know that the public expects only obtuseness and difficulty from us," acknowledged Kishinu Oref, a liaison for the Jerusalem Municipality with the Kfir Corporation, which holds the contract to operate the city's light rail system. "Implementation of the multi-year plan to hinder movement in Jerusalem with major development projects carries with it the occasional unavoidable consequence of certain movement becoming more, instead of less, convenient. We try to minimize and mitigate such occurrences, but it is unfortunately impossible to eliminate them entirely."
Bus routes that once approached the north-south King George V from the west, then made abrupt turns a block or two in advance and proceeded back west, then north, then east again, before finally reaching King George again and proceeding south, must now drive directly onto the avenue from the west, erasing an entire detour that, in rush-hour traffic, added up to fifteen minutes of travel time; the same curtailment of the winding route occurs now in the opposite direction.
"We aim, in the long term, to make living in Jerusalem a completely untenable proposition," explained Mayor Moshe Lion. "This manifests in housing affordability and availability; unresponsiveness of municipal services; spotty traffic signal maintenance; irregular repainting of lane markers and crosswalks; trash collection timed to coincide with the most traffic-intensive hours of the day; not to mention loud, disruptive cultural events that tie up entire neighborhoods and prevent people from either leaving or getting home."
"It's nowhere near a hundred percent effective," he admitted. "Some people still like it here."
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