Road fixes and research eye better Israeli driving

Honk. Honk. Hoooonk. It’s the sound of the Israeli street. 

Israelis have a reputation for aggressive driving, but according to a 2014 report, 263 people lost their lives on Israel’s roads in 2012, a 40-percent decrease from the number of accidents causing death in 2000.

“There has been a real increase in the awareness of the need for road safety,” says Dr. Victoria Gitelman, a researcher at the Transportation Research Institute of Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.

So what has changed?

First: public transportation. According to Dr. Tal Oron-Gilad, tenured associate professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), there has been a major shift toward Israelis increasing their use of public transport. In urban areas such as Jerusalem, the establishment of the light rail has reduced city traffic. 

There’s also a slogan. A decade-long Ministry of Transportation campaign to “calm the traffic” in Israeli residential areas has resulted in a nearly complete eradication of pedestrian casualties in those areas, says Gitelman.

Another major factor has been Israel’s investment in infrastructure upgrades. Sophisticated technologies, such as rumble strips and forgiving roadside designs that include soft shoulders have helped mitigate the consequences of run-off type road accidents where the vehicle leaves the road and enters the roadside.

A Bank of Israel study found that sharp turns increase the number of accidents by as much as 21 percent. The addition of tunnels that cut through the mountains and remove the ups, downs, and curves in areas like the entrance to Jerusalem off Highway 1, as well as the entrance to Haifa, “is changing driving dramatically,” says Oron-Gilad.