Israelis have enough dangers to worry about, let's not make road safety one of them - editorial

As the Gaza war nears its ninth month and the number of IDF fatalities continue to rise while the number of hostages being freed is at an impasse, it’s difficult to look beyond the daily grim reality.

But there are a myriad of ongoing issues that Israel needed to deal with before October 7 that still need to be dealt with, even amid a war.

One only has to spend a few minutes driving in the country to realize that what takes place on Israeli roads is not normal. Speeding, utter disregard for other drivers, weaving, and road rage are all part of the daily ritual (never mind the scourge of public urination on roadsides, but that’s the subject of another editorial).

Since the establishment of the state, some 33,000 people have been killed on the road, with those injured, some of them permanently, certainly in the hundreds of thousands.

“Israel’s roads are a ticking time bomb… Behind every dead person and every injured person is a family whose life has been destroyed. In addition, the economic cost of road accidents reaches about 16 billion shekels a year,” State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman wrote last week in a scathing report on Israel’s road safety.

Englman asserted that successive governments have kicked the can down the road, only paying lip service to the deadly problem and failing to fight road accidents over the years. While the rate of such accidents in Israel has increased over the last decade, it has decreased in leading European countries.

 “Budgets for the National Road Safety Authority have been cut, many positions in the traffic police are unfilled, and the government is not meeting its targets in this area,” Englman noted.

Progressively getting worse

The report reveals that while the number of fatalities in European countries decreased by about 22% in the last decade, it increased by 16% between 2012 and 2022 in Israel.

According to data provided by Or Yarok (Green Light), an NGO devoted to road safety, this upward trend has continued into early 2024, with the number of fatalities being about 25% higher than last year during the same period.

“The data show that the various measures taken by governments over the last decade have not had a significant impact on the scale of the phenomenon and have not succeeded in reducing the number of fatalities and injuries in road accidents,” Englman stated in his report, adding that the responsibility falls among many governmental bodies, including the Transportation Ministry, the National Road Safety Authority (NRSA), the Traffic Division of the Israel Police, the Education and Health ministries, the judiciary, and local authorities.

In 2021, the Transportation Ministry and the NRSA prepared a national road safety plan (the “50 by 30” plan), which set a target to halve the number of serious injuries in road accidents in Israel by 2030 compared to 2019 figures. But it did not include cost estimates or budgetary sources for the actions.

The comptroller’s report also reveals that since establishing the NRSA, the budgets it is responsible for implementing and allocating to other entities have significantly decreased, from about NIS 382 million in 2008 to about NIS 141 million in 2022. The report further claims that the effectiveness of enforcement in Israel is not optimal, partly due to a lack of resources.

The comptroller also examined police enforcement activities in the field and found that the data indicate that police enforcement over the past decade have not helped lower the number of accidents and casualties.

Who hasn’t witnessed speeding cars slow down momentarily when they see a police car on the side, only to return to their driving violations as soon as law enforcement is out of sight? GPS systems like Waze also contribute to the problem by notifying drivers when they’re approaching a speed trap.

We Israelis have enough to worry about, with bloodthirsty enemies on our borders hoping to annihilate us. We don’t need to contribute to the death toll through inexcusable behavior on the roads.

The deaths of our soldiers are heart-wrenching. There’s no reason to compound the suffering with needless carnage on the nation’s roads.