Major changes are underway deep inside Tel Aviv’s Ibn Gabirol Street. Tunnel boring machines have passed under the intersection with Nordau Street and reached what will become the Arlozorov station. The Green Line of the Tel Aviv Light Rail will extend from Rishon LeZion in the south via an underground section in Tel Aviv to Herzliya in the north.
The Tel Aviv Metropolitan Transportation Authority says work has slowed because of the war, but even before October, work on the Green Line and the Purple Line (from Tel Aviv to Or Yehuda and Givat Shmuel) had been delayed. The delays in construction of these lines are affecting residents of the greater Tel Aviv area and those who work there, who are in dire need of a mass transit system, while the roads are becoming increasingly congested.
Even after the postponement, the target date was very ambitious.
The steering committee of the transport and finance ministries was supposed to meet to approve an additional delay to the light rail project, but the meeting itself has been repeatedly postponed. Meanwhile, the government feels that the new target date will not be significant even when it is set.
The steering committee is expected to announce that the Purple Line will officially begin operating at the end of 2027 (after being postponed from 2025 and then 2026) and the Green Line will officially begin operating at the end of 2028 (after being postponed from 2025 and then 2027). But sources close to the progress of the work say that these dates are also very ambitious.
“When you set a date for the end of the year, everyone understands that the real date is at least the middle of the following year. The Green Line won’t open before 2030,” says a source familiar with the details. Even if no one remembers the delays after the lines are up and running, postponing the opening date means more harm to residents, public transportation users, drivers and business owners. One need only look at the devastation of Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv to understand this.
Reasons: Water and electricity infrastructure that no one knows about.
NTA is responsible for the first part of the project, known as Infra 1, which includes land clearing, excavation, infrastructure, etc. The second part of the project, known as Infra 2, involves the laying of tracks, systems and trains, and is being implemented in cooperation with private sector concessionaires. For the Green Line, Electra, Dan and Alstom were finally able to close financing for the project after many delays due to the war. For the Purple Line, Shapir Engineering was able to close financing before the war.
The reasons for the delay are many, but perhaps the most significant is what happened in the first stage – the difficulty of coordination between the infrastructure bodies in Israel. Thus, during the excavation work on the Green Line, communications, water and electricity infrastructure was discovered that no one knew existed. It was not mapped, and the companies responsible for the project were unaware of its existence. On the Purple Line, on Ben Yehuda and Arlozorov streets, the project managers waited months for the Israel Electric Corporation to connect the systems to electricity. The list goes on.
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Even municipal elections slowed things down. The Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality feared public criticism over the disturbances and easy access to the streets where work was being done. The NTA news agency says the war brought the infrastructure sector to a standstill because it relies almost entirely on Palestinian workers while international companies sent their employees home.
Another factor, though disputed, was the delay in opening bids for the second phase of the project, following Transport Minister Miri Regev’s opposition to the expropriations at Kfar Shalem. The expropriations were finally implemented after Regev was replaced by Merav Michaeli. The delay was exacerbated by the project’s difficulties in securing funding for the Green Line.
It is also difficult to ignore the NTA’s ability to manage projects. Despite the tremendous efforts of its employees, it is not achieving its goals. The control company, which was set up by government ministries, reported last year, even before the war, its concerns that the transmission shafts and station areas were not completed on time, that the time intervals (the intervals for breakdowns and delays) were too low, and that the milestones were not well defined. It also warned that diverting all the company’s resources to the Red Line would harm the goals of the Green and Purple Lines in the future. In recent years, the NTA has been questioning the conclusions of the control company, which has often been right in its assessments, as the State Comptroller commented on this.
Even in Jerusalem, most projects have been delayed, and not just because of the war. The opening of the Green Line in the capital has been delayed until 2026, and the opening date for the section running through Bar Ilan Street has not been set, due to riots by ultra-Orthodox protesters protesting the line’s construction in the neighborhood.
The opening of the Red Line extension in Jerusalem has been postponed until November this year, although it was supposed to start operating last year. The Blue Line is in disarray after international companies that won the tender abandoned the project due to the war and its effects.
These delays add to a series of delays in other projects: the fourth railway line along the Ayalon River, which was supposed to ease the railway congestion in the center of the country, the train electrification project that has been delayed for at least two years, and the construction of Railway Line 431 from Rishon LeZion to Modi’in, which has been delayed due to a major dispute between Israel Railways and the Shikun and Binui companies, which are building the project.
Result: reduced spending and no increase in productivity.
Due to all these delays, the Transportation Ministry’s spending forecast has also been reduced. Since 2020, government spending on transportation infrastructure has been around NIS 20 billion annually, but the ministry’s implementing companies have not been able to reach this ceiling. The budget forecast for 2025 will remain at NIS 20 billion, compared to the original plan to increase spending to NIS 24 billion.
Spending must increase to boost productivity. A report published by the Bank of Israel in January 2023 stated that Israel currently invests about 1.5% of GDP annually in transportation infrastructure, and that investment must be doubled in order to close the gap in the ratio of public capital stock to GDP and in the quality of infrastructure between Israel and other advanced countries by 2050.
The National Infrastructure Law, enacted as part of the Economic Arrangements Law of 2023, was intended to remove barriers and harness all state bodies to accelerate infrastructure projects, but its implementation has yet to be felt on the ground. Government ministries expect spending to reach NIS 30 billion by the end of the decade, due, among other things, to progress on the metro project. But progress on existing projects says something about the ability to accelerate the metro project, and financial investment alone will not necessarily help.
“We are proud to have brought in international bodies” responses
The National Railways Authority said: “Despite the complex reality, work on the purple and green light rail lines is proceeding at full speed (as can be easily seen in every block of Gush Dan above and below ground).
“The Steering Committee is supposed to update the line schedules, in accordance with the contractual agreements signed with the concessionaires, which oblige them to adhere to the specified stages from the moment of receiving the order to start work – and this update has not been done yet.
The original timelines did not take into account how long it would take for franchisees to close the financing (about a year for the Purple Line and 18 months for the Green Line), in part due to the impact of international and geopolitical issues.
“However, NTA is proud of its success in bringing leading international groups to Israel to establish the light rail and metro networks despite the difficulties and challenges created by the war: shortage of professional manpower, dealing with professional bodies abroad, imports and more.”
This article was published in Globes, Israeli Business News – en.globes.co.il – on August 8, 2024.
© Copyright Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2024.