Tel Aviv Mayor: Scrap Morasha park-and-ride project

In recent years Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai has led a public campaign against building park and ride infrastructures on the outskirts of the city, where drivers can park their cars and take free shuttle buses on fast lanes into the city, or pay to drive on the fast lanes. This is a controversial issue, which has even managed to break the consensus among the government ministries involved in the project. Tomorrow (Tuesday) there will be a discussion on the issue at the National Planning and Building Council. What is the controversy about and why is Huldai doing to block the move?

What is the focus of the controversy?

The fast lanes project, at an estimated cost of NIS 5 billion, will be built by the government in cooperation with the private sector, with the aim of adding toll lanes, shuttle buses and public transport at the entrances to the Tel Aviv metropolitan region. This is modelled on the project that already exists on Road 1, which includes the Shappirim parking lot and the “fast lane” on the road. The project will open in two phases, with the first phase including Road 2 and Road 20 expected to open this year.

The second phase, which Huldai opposes, includes Road 5. According to the plan, parking lots with thousands of parking spaces will be built alongside the roads at the Morasha Interchange, just northeast of Tel Aviv. The project has been controversial for years, with supporters believing that it is a way to provide transport to isolated and suburban areas where effective public transport cannot operate, while opponents say the project will perpetuate dependence on cars, encourage the purchase of more vehicles, and increase congestion on the roads.

Why is Huldai now intensifying the fight against the Road 5 fast lane? Tomorrow (Tuesday) there will be a discussion at the National Planning and Building Council. As part of the discussion, the establishment of three park-and-ride parking lots along Road 5 – at Kesem, Tikva and Morasha will be discussed. As stated, this is the stage in the project that Huldai opposes, and he wrote this in a tweet on social network X.

He wrote, “More than a billion shekels from the public purse is about to go down the drain. Why? Because the State of Israel wants to establish a huge and unnecessary park-and-ride parking lot at the Morasha interchange. This parking lot will not only not help solve the congestion problems in the center of the country, but will actually make them worse.

“Instead of encouraging Israeli citizens to use public transport, these parking lots will require the public to own a car and leave the house with it every day to get to the parking lot. Such a move will actually increase the congestion problem all the way to the parking lot and harm existing public transport.” Huldai tweeted.

What is being done in Tel Aviv to stop the plan?

The mayor’s tweet is just part of a broader campaign. Huldai told “Globes” in December, “About a million people travel on the Ayalon Highway every day. Let’s say 400,000 cars enter Tel Aviv. What good do these parked cars do? Does this deal with congestion? Is that what those giant monsters are for, ruining the landscape? That the state spent a fortune on? And they say this is a contribution to public transport?”

At a Globes conference last month, Huldai also attacked planners and government officials sitting in the audience, and demanded that the project be canceled. He also reiterated his claims in a letter he sent to Transport Minister Miri Regev, calling the project an irresponsible expense.

These are just the public moves. Behind the scenes, the municipality is actively engaged, holding many talks with representatives of the National Planning and Building Council in efforts to influence their position. Huldai spoke with accountant general Yali Rothenberg, under whose responsibility the tenders for the project’s implementation are being published, at great length over the past week and has managed to break the consensus in the government ministries.

Why is Huldai heading the campaign?

This is the biggest professional struggle that Huldai has waged in recent years. The Tel Aviv Municipality does not recall many such precedents. Many wonder why he is waging such a resolute campaign, given that the parking lot will be built outside the city and most likely after the end of his term. The Ramat Hasharon Municipality, for example, could release the land for construction if a parking lot is not built, but what is Huldai’s interest?

Others claim that Huldai wants to leave behind a legacy and the area chosen for this purpose is transport. This was reflected in efforts made by the municipality and the fact that the city was a big construction site covered in dust before the most recent local elections to move forward as quickly as possible on urban transport projects. It is also possible that this struggle by Huldai is related to another struggle – for control of the metropolitan region, due to the government’s attempts to promote metropolitan authorities, whose management in the metropolitan region will be by a vote of members and not by the mayor of the largest municipality, as previous versions of the bill included.

Who supports the project, who is opposed, and what are the reasons?

The planners from the Netivei Ayalon company, which is in charge of the project, believe that the Morasha park and drive project is necessary because the structure of the neighborhoods in the Sharon region does not allow for the development of quality public transport and forces commuters to use cars. On the other hand, the Public Transport Authority and Ministry of Finance Budget Division have tried to formulate a comprehensive examination of the need for parking lots due to the fact that many planners and transport experts agree with the municipality’s position. There was also no agreement in discussions held at the Ministry of Transport, as the Public Transport Authority did not justify the project in contrast to the Infrastructures Administration.

Ministry of Transport Director General Moshe Ben-Zaken favors the project and wrote to Rabbi Nathan Elnathan, chairman of the National Planning and Building Council, ahead of this week’s discussion that “a licensed parking lot is an integral part of the project and its approval is essential for its success.” He also wrote that “the professional opinions conducted, including by Netivei Ayalon, indicate the necessity of the project, its feasibility, and its direct contribution to reducing congestion.”

Opponents of the project mention the parking lot built in Shappirim along the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway (Road 1), which was initially marketed as a resounding success. However, after construction of the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv high speed rail link, the project turned out to be less successful than promised. The latest State Comptroller’s report even showed that shuttle buses have been abandoned and many passengers do not use them, the number of passengers has fallen by 34%, and the rate of daily users of the fast lane using the buses has dropped from 50% to only 14%. The number of journeys on the fast lane is not rising, and although the project was built in collaboration with the private sector, the public is subsidizing trips on the toll road, which not all of the public benefits from, through state coffers to compensate for the missing journeys to the tune of NIS 170 million over five years.

The principled struggle has also become an almost personal struggle for professional prestige. The planners have also reduced the number of parking spaces from 6,000 to 3,000 and are already supporting the construction of a bus terminal near the parking lot.

Past experience shows that a compromise will eventually be reached, but canceling the parking lots completely actually undermines the economic model of the project and jeopardizes the existence of the construction tender, and this may be one reason for the unwillingness to back down over the project.

Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on March 10, 2025.

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