At a televised news conference, Transportation Minister Miri Regev made a festive announcement regarding the launch of the railway line from Kiryat Shmona to Tel Aviv. Furthermore, she informed us that the railway line from Dimona to Eilat was “becoming a reality.” However, until this happens, it will take at least another 12 years, as well as an investment of billions of shekels.
The state continues to “care for” its Negev and Galilee residents, who waste precious hours of work while driving to Gush Dan, the greater Tel Aviv area, instead of bolstering Kiryat Shmona and Beersheba to serve as regional anchors by promoting quality income sources for their residents. Instead, money must be invested to increase employment, education, and advanced medical services in those cities.
For years, the State of Israel has spent millions of shekels building infrastructures to “bring the peripheries closer to center” while not addressing a solution to the entire transportation crisis. The state has forgotten that, first and foremost, there is an acute need for dealing with the peripheral transportation infrastructures themselves.
Investing to create a normal life for residents
The state is still actively engaged in various attempts to fight the heavy traffic congestion in the central region by establishing public light-rail transportation and paving lanes reserved for public and cooperative (rideshare) transportation. Meanwhile, in the peripheries, the state is only investing in roadways and railway lines to the central region – that do not provide a normal life in the peripheries themselves.
Even the outlook according to which the periphery must be brought closer to the center contains a basic, fixated fallacy. It’s time to break out of that trite pattern of thought, according to which the central region and the greater Tel Aviv area are the most essential, and to stop calling other areas peripheries.
In other words, the so-called peripheries need independence that highlights their various uniquenesses. The time has come for a real, national plan – one that offers the residents of the peripheries a bit more than just less time wasted in traffic jams or a slightly faster train to Tel Aviv.
The government must take action to support each regional, metropolitan hub by significantly improving its own educational and health services, and developing unique, independent mechanisms that raise the quality of life, empower the citizenry, and promote economic growth.
Only in this manner will the residents of the South and North reside in leading, advanced, and innovative cities, rather than finding themselves spending their precious time on the highways or in the trains en route to “the state of Tel Aviv.”
The writer is rector and founder of the Shamoon College of Engineering.