Fourteen kilometers an hour. That’s the average speed at which you have been travelling in the afternoon peak hours (15:00 to 19:00) on the most congested section of the Ayalon Highway southbound since the end of the Jewish holiday season. The speed is more like what you would expect on an urban road with traffic lights than on a multi-lane autostrada that is meant to take people from the north of Gush Dan to the south. No wonder, then, that transport planners have discerned a new traffic pattern: navigation apps take drivers via Hamasger Street in Tel Aviv, on which there is a single lane for private vehicles, rather than on the major highway that has been widened more than once since it was first built.
On the most congested section on the Ayalon Highway, from Holon to the Hashalom interchange, the average speed in the morning hours is 30 km/h, and in the evening it is just 24 km/h. In the other direction, from Glilot to Hashalom, the average speed in the morning is 46 km/h, and in the evening it is 14 km/h.
What about the least congested periods, such as on Saturdays? In the past, it was possible to travel quickly and efficiently in these periods, but that is no longer the case. At low traffic hours, speeds do not exceed 30 km/h northbound and 40 km/h southbound, other than at midday.
Theoretical speed limit - 90 km/h
On the Ayalon Highway, the average speed is supposed to reach 90 km/h, but that speed is only achievable at night. The deterioration in travel speeds on the Ayalon is not a surprise. Every driver and passenger in Israel has felt it over the years, to the point where journey times have become very uncertain. This affects not just drivers who cannot plan their journeys, but also public transport users in the absence of dedicated lanes, and bus route planners are helpless when every journey can have a different arrival time.
Structural failure
"Every road, and in fact all transport infrastructure, is designed to carry a certain quantity of traffic at every hour. Because of changes in demand for transport over the day, there will generally be periods when traffic is substantially lower than capacity, and other periods in which there is peak demand, usually the times when people travel to work and home again," explains Prof. Erel Avineri, an infrastructure expert at Afeka College.
"From this point of view, traffic congestion is not a bug, but a feature of the system. The expectation is that if such traffic congestion is limited in time and not extraordinarily great, the transport system can absorb it and recover afterwards. Congestion of this kind is known in advance and journeys can be planned on the basis of its predictability.
"Besides this, there are additional reasons for congestion: extreme weather conditions, maintenance work, road accidents, or a failure of the control system and the traffic lights. Congestion caused by these factors can’t always be foreseen."
But, says Prof. Avineri, there is also traffic congestion that is not limited to peak hours or explicable by unusual events. "On a large proportion of the roads in Gush Dan, we see traffic congestion for most hours of the day and most days of the week," he says. "These patterns indicate a structural failure in the infrastructure systems. The rise in demand causes all systems to be overloaded and incapable of meeting the required standard of service."
A situation in which the roads are full to their planned capacity means that even when traffic is flowing reasonably freely, any minor incident throws the system out of balance. "A vehicle that stops at the roadside, or a lane that is temporarily closed off, has an impact on a transport system coping with demand close to its full capacity, such that it is impossible to predict what the congestion will be like," says Avineri, adding that the changeability and uncertainty are so great that "even artificial intelligence systems are incapable of providing sufficiently useful predictions of traffic congestion."
The inability to predict traffic congestion, journey times, and arrival times, Avineri says, harms all economic activity, "from arriving at work, to holding meetings, operating service and health centers, to harm to critical infrastructures and security."
Lack of coordination
Prof. Eran Feitelson, chair of the Department of Geography at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explains that the level of motor vehicle ownership is low in Israel in comparison with countries with similar levels of income, but it’s rising. "The population in Israel is growing significantly, contrary to what is happening in other countries," he says. "We are unusual for population growth among developed countries. In Japan and the Netherlands, the population is not growing at such a rate, and even if the rate of vehicle ownership is rising or his higher than ours, that doesn’t make the situation more severe as it does in our case. And of course, what contributes to the rise in the rate of vehicle ownership is the fact that we have no public transport at weekends and on festivals, not to mention the degree to which public transport here falls short."
The Israeli way of life is different from that in other places, he says, with the data indicating lively activity on the roads even at night, and Israeli society has changed in the past few decades, with both partners in a household going out to work and travelling.
More than anything else, Prof. Feitelson attributes the problem to the lack of coordination between residential construction and transport infrastructure. "A phenomenal quantity of housing units is approved here, and a large proportion of them are in neighborhoods that we call ‘towers in the park’, that is, a huge number of high-rise apartment buildings on parking lots with no pathways, connections to infrastructure and public transport, or mixed use. So we inevitably get traffic congestion, because the only way out of there is by car. And when everyone travels by car and tries to time their journeys in accordance with the congestion, then the congestion changes as well."
Infrastructure in Israel is built without long-term, holistic planning, he says. "You can’t build whole cities based on the use of private vehicles and then not understand why people don’t choose public transport. This reinforces that uncertainty."
"Public transport in Israel creates frustration"
Prof. Guy Hochman of the School of Psychology at Reichman University was involved in efforts by the Ministry of Transport to give incentives to drivers to travel at off-peak hours. "Decision making in conditions of uncertainty is something that we do all the time," he says. "But as soon as we start to sense that the situation is out of control, it becomes a kind of learned helplessness. Besides the frustration and besides the fact that you feel that you have no ability to effect change or do anything, it’s a situation that creates very low psychological wellbeing."
The way to the solution, he says, lies in developing public transport and dedicated preferential lanes. "People who travel on a bus that gets stuck in a traffic jam abandon it in favor of their private car, because they feel more in control in it. In the end, people do what is easiest and most convenient for them. People prefer to travel by private car not because they want to, but because they have no choice."
Future partial solutions
In the past few years, the state has invested billions of shekels in public transport solutions. In fact, 1% of Israel’s GDP is devoted to it, which is a similar level to that in other OECD countries. But the other week, the State Comptroller warned that this was not enough, given the shortfall in transport infrastructure in Israel and the huge gap versus these countries, and also Israel’s greater rate of population growth.
Even the infrastructure under construction, such as light rail lines, railway tracks, and the Metro project, will only be completed years from now. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Transport is avoiding making far-reaching changes by tactical means, such as marking road lanes for public transport. Where such action has been taken, which is chiefly in Tel Aviv, in recent years there has been a turnaround in the way people travel to work. For the first time, the proportion of those traveling by private car has fallen below the proportion traveling by other means of transport.
Prof. Avineri says, however, that even that is insufficient. "All the solutions revolve around the approach to planning. In cities more crowded than those in Israel, such as Vienna, Paris, and London, most of the time traffic behaves as it should thanks to correct urban planning, transport infrastructure with significant capacity, reduction of the uncertainty by means of public transport lanes, public transport that operates punctually, keeping the public informed, and reduction in the use of cars in the urban space."
Change in the way that residential neighborhoods are planned and constructed in Israel has been talked about for years, but in practice life on the roads leading to them and surrounding them has become more and more difficult and challenging.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on November 2, 2025.
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