Here in Jerusalem, the rail-related focus might be devoted primarily towards the construction of the inaugural intra-city light rail line, but there’s another train headed our way: the long-anticipated high-speed Israel Railways line from
Tel Aviv. The line, which will hopefully some day replace the hideously slow and outdated
current inter-city train, ending at a city entrance depot across the street from the Central Bus Station rather than at the current Malcha station, has been beset by constant delays, from the
simply bureaucratic to the bizarrely “only-in-Israel” (how many
construction projects in other countries get delayed because workers
keep uncovering ancient Jewish graves?).
Plans hit a major snag about a year ago, albeit the kind of snafu that Jerusalemites can celebrate, when The
Council of National Parks and Nature Reserves filed to block the train from traversing the Judean Hills via a series of bridges over the Yitle
Stream, with environmental advocates preferring that the Israel Railways employ a
13-kilometer tunnel instead.
The
campaign against the harmful (and no doubt aesthetically horrifying)
Israel Railways plan was spearheaded by the
Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), a group
responsible for much of the green space currently surrounding the city.
SPNI’s other recent environmental endeavors in Jerusalem include
defeating the much-loathed Safdie Plan for heavy development in the Jerusalem Hills and failing to prevent speculative drilling for the Judean Desert’s 2.4 barrels of make-believe oil. Hey, you win some, you lose some.
Since the launch of the lobbyists’ campaign, they’ve appealed to government bodies and the hearts of the public alike, via street protests, petitions signed by leading intellectual figures and even emotive YouTube videos.
It’s been about six years since the plans for the inter-city train upgrade were announced, which were then estimated to take five years to complete, in the context of a national rail upgrade project budgeted at 20 billion NIS. But the latest estimates are now claiming that even if there are no further delays, including those caused by the objections of the green lobbyists, the Jerusalem line will not be launched until 2016 at the earliest.
Image of a recent train overpass-themed protest at Jerusalem’s Bridge of Strings courtesy of Eran Ayalon for SPNI.
