Minister of Transport Miri Regev recently announced she will promote a plan to build a second level on Road 6 at a cost of NIS 5 billion "to reduce congestion." But the plan does not yet have any budget and similar planning and attempts have actually ended in many more traffic jams.
According to the Ministry of Transport the project will include an additional level with two lanes in each direction, with a public transport and car pool lane. "According to the findings of an initial study by the Cross-Israel Company, in the first stage the project will focus on the busiest sections, where additional lanes are expected to bring significant easing of congestion in the south direction, from the Baka-Jat interchange to the Horashim interchange, on a section of about 32 kilometers; and in the north direction, from the Nachshonim interchange to the Eyal interchange - a section of about 16 kilometers.
"In total, about 48 kilometers of new, high-speed journey elevated lanes will be built, which are expected to significantly improve transport accessibility in Israel," the ministry said. They say that such highways operate in the US, Japan and UAE. As a result, the Ministry of Transport promises a doubling in journey speeds.
Background: The highway has become congested and slow
Road 6, which opened as a toll highway in 2002, promised uninterrupted and fast travel without traffic lights, but over the years it has become slow and congested.
The State Comptroller's report published in November 2024 explained that "due to the large increase in the use of Road 6, which continues to steadily increase, there are traffic jams along it at certain times of the day, despite the widening that has been carried out on it."
The report also explained that the rate of traffic on the road was rapid, growing 8.8% annually from 2003 to 2017. In the following two years, growth fell to 4.6%, simply because there was no longer room on the road and the level of service on it decreased. In total, during this period, there was a 273% cumulative increase in traffic on the road.
The State Comptroller recounts that over the last decade the government promoted adding lanes in certain sections in exchange for extending the operator's concession.
The Cross-Israel Highway Co. has proposed widening the road again because otherwise the speed would drop even more, while the Ministry of Finance, on the other hand, claimed that road widening does not provide a solution to congestion in the long term because it only creates more demand that must be regulated in various ways, such as increasing the cost of travel, encouraging drivers to switch to public transport, and car-pooling, and the additional lane is being promoted as a public transport and car pool lane.
Now a public debate is resuming on the widening of Road 6 as a solution to traffic jams. The project has no economic feasibility and is not budgeted for, and it is not clear whether, from a legal perspective, it is possible to extend the concession period in exchange for undertaking such a large project (unlike widening a road for a public transport lane).
From a transport perspective, the project cannot solve traffic jams, but simply delays congestion for a short period of time, after which it worsens.
"This is not a coherent transport policy," a senior government official told "Globes."
"In Houston, they really built two floors for the highway and it reaches 26 lanes at its biggest, it's huge - and that didn't solve the traffic jams either," said Dr. Yoav Lerman, an urban planning expert at Planet Urban Consultancy.
"The question is what problem do you want to solve? If you want to help people reach their daily destinations such as work, school, etc. and you want to do it efficiently and economically, you need to invest in public transport, and walking and cycling where relevant.
Environmental rights organization Adam Teva Ve Din head of planning Yael Dori says, "If you want to let people travel a little faster for a few years on Highway 6, then you can expand it and it will work for a certain period of time, and then the traffic jams will be worse because all the residents in the area will understand that to get anywhere they need a car. An additional level of Road 6 in the center of the country is clearly encouraging the car over public transport, and in fact expresses a regressive policy and will make the situation here much worse than it is today. Instead of investing in public transport, even a tenth of this amount to upgrade the service so that people can really give up their cars and switch to public transport, they are promoting a step that lacks logic."
"These are NIS 5 billion that will be of no use because all the experts in the world already agree that adding lanes for cars does not solve the problem of congestion for more than a maximum of two years, and the congestion on the roads and at the entrances to metropolitan areas will remain. We also need to remind the minister that a large population here does not travel by car, and this is the opposite of transport justice."
A suburban road instead of a national road
Dr. Lerman explains that the traffic jams on Road 6, and especially on its central section, were created by its conversion to a suburban road instead of its designation as a national road. "If you want to reduce traffic jams on the road, you need to raise the price of the trip. This will mean that people traveling within Gush Dan will use it less, and those traveling from the north and south will benefit because they will jam the road less.
"This way those traveling from the north to the south will pay the same price, but those who have an alternative will think twice about leaving Road 4 and moving to Road 6."
The eastern railway track from Hadera to Lod will also run along Road 6 in the coming years, which will be a parallel track to the existing coastal railway, and it will be used mainly for freight traffic that will, perhaps, be able to remove a few trucks from the road.
However, the handling of cargo in Israel, which among other things jams Road 6, is still dragging on and a national master plan has not yet been implemented.
The second dimension to the problem of widening Road 6 is the expansion of the suburbs. Since the road was built, many towns have been built and expanded around it, yet one of the goals of building the road was to disperse the population of Gush Dan eastward to Modi'in, Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal and other places. Over the years, highways have also been built connecting to the road, attracting more traffic.
Thus, widening the road will simply encourage the development and expansion of new suburbs, contradicting Israel's need for more densely populated cities, which will help develop mass transit systems.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on August 10, 2025.
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