Elad’s blog

Since I have a girlfriend that lives in Haifa, I find myself sleeping there from time to time. As a side efect, I occasionaly drive from Haifa to Hertzliya in the early morning (usually, when it happens, I leave Haifa around 06:00, and get to my work - hopefully - around 08:00, after the normal morning jams on the coastal road). I did this, for example, yesterday, on Sunday morning.

I generally like the first part of this drive, before you reach the traffic jams. Descending from the Carmel on Freud street gives you an excellent view of the sea in the early morning, which is different every time. Yesterday, for example, it was distinctly grey, with this nice mist floating over it and slowly lifting up, as the sun - which just rose behind me, on the mountain, casted its low, flat, early morning light. The beach was full of kids in tents who were just disassembling their LAG BA’OMER camp fires, celebrating the achievement of staying awake all night (there is this special age, when teenagers just try to stay awake to see if they can do it). The whole atmosphere is quite, which is a good way to start your week.

Or is it. In the seven minuts or so that it took me from Elina’s appartment to the exit from Hifa, I saw three different drivers that ought to be removed from the road. One crossed a junction in red light; two others slalumed at ridiculous speeds the entire Freud descent, moving from side to side between the relatively few cars that drove there in this early hour, reaching very high speeds (I estimate, over 120-130Kmh), crossing lanes without warnings, and generally trying to commit suicide.

Not that it helped them. A truck got stuck at the highway and blocked one lane just north of Caesaria; a car accident near Hertzliya joined the party, and these two added to the normal Sunday morning traffic jams to make my journey last almost three hours, instead of the normal one-hour drive it should have taken had the road been free. At least part of it was under fog, so the quite atmosphere lasted a bit longer.

This morning I heard about this motorcyclist, who found himself lying injured on the Azur junction yesterday, while many cars passed without anybody stopping to help him; eventually he died. Last week, the mass demonstration that was held on Thursday evening in Tel Aviv (yes, yes, the one against Olmert, with some 100,000 or more participants) didn’t reach top news the following morning because during the evening hours - between the demonstration and the closing time of the papers - seven people got killed on car accidents. They joined I don’t know how many others that already died this year; the typical figures are between 450 to 600 annual deaths at road accidents, out of a population of seven milions. You can calculate the percentage yourself, if you’re not afraid by the results.

Israelies are generally very proud of the vitality of our country. It is for a good reason: I saw very few places in the world that can compete with Israel in things like the intensity of life, the pace at which things happen, the seriousness in which things can be done once we decide to do them (actually, I had a very interesting conversation about this with one Peter, an Australian I met in Vanuatu one and a half years ago. He was a former photographer for an aussie TV channel and covered war zones for them; he spent a lot of time in many middle eastern countries - Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and of course - Israel. I remember clearly his distinction between Israel and the surrounding countries - “Once you decide to do something,” said he, “you do it properly.” -”You’ve never been to Cairo, have you”, he added. No, I haven’t. Egyptian allies will have to wait until I am more welcomed there.)

By now it is a general concensus in Israel that road accidents are avoidable; the public opinion has changed dramatically in the last few years on that field; from considering it someone else’s problem I think that more and more people start to treat it as their own personal issue. The time is ripe to change things. Even the popular and easy excuses (blame the poor road infrastructure, this is always correct) no longer holds. Campaigns start to compare road accidents with terror activities (actually, I like that: I think that the most effective way to avoid car accidents would be if people are afarid to drive and think over and over before entering their car if it is really necessary). Yet, people drive like crazy, and many people die immaturely.

What we need is a pivot. The one bright idea that will start the avalanche. I believe that once we find it, all the in-depth work that was recently done on the issue of road accidents will suddenly bear fruits. The amount of road accidents can be lowered dramatically - not step by step, but simply cut down by a large amount. We just need to find the missing piece. Any idea what it is?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 6:21 and is filed under Life, Opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.