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Subject: In Israel, Roads Are Deadly, but Is Anyone Paying David
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 92 08:47:18 EST
Message-ID: <25.1992Oct31.084718@AmeriCast.com>

In Israel, Roads Are Deadly, but Is Anyone Paying Attention?<By
David Hoffman=Washington Post Foreign Service=

JERUSALEM - Yoram Ben-Porat and his family were preparing to make
a left turn from the highway north of Eilat in their Peugot one
day this month.

Seven cars were behind them, followed by a 76-foot-long dual
tractor-trailer. The truck pulled into the left lane at high
speed, passed all seven cars, and crashed into the turning Peu-
got, instantly killing Ben-Porat, 55, the president of Hebrew
University; his wife, Yael-Cohen, 42; and their son, Yaheli, 5.

The driver of the truck, a 21-year-old on leave from the army who
survived the crash, said he had been warned that day that the
truck's brakes were failing, but he had not had them fixed.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, hundreds of politicians, academ-
ic colleagues and friends came to Jerusalem to pay homage to the
Ben-Porat family. President Chaim Herzog asked plaintively in his
eulogy how long Israel would suffer such "superfluous" losses.

The Ben-Porat tragedy is being repeated every day on Israel's
highways. Nearly four times as many Israelis have died in traffic
accidents so far this year as have been killed in the entire
Palestinian intifada, or uprising, that began five years ago.

Yet, according to political analysts, the carnage on the high-
ways, in which more than 400 Israelis are expected to be killed
this year, is not a top national priority. The subject grabs
headlines in the tabloid newspapers whenever a prominent person
is killed or a particularly awful accident occurs, and there have
been laws passed and periodic legislative debates. But Israel's
political leadership and the public have shown little sense of
urgency.

Some analysts said the road accidents and relative indifference
reflect deeper currents running through Israeli society. The
country is straining to modernize and Westernize, and people are
purchasing far more imported cars from Europe and Japan than ever
before. But at the same time, they say, Israel remains a country
whose resources are mobilized around the potential war threat,
and its leadership has not yet begun to make the massive public
infrastructure investments required to sustain the more advanced
lifestyle that many aspire to.

"There is no real public rage," said Nahum Barnea, a columnist
for Yedioth Aharonoth, the country's largest circulation newspa-
per. "Here, all the consumer issues are overshadowed by the
Arab-Israeli conflict."

Hanoch Smith, a veteran pollster, said that over the years he has
surveyed Israelis' top concerns about the country, but "road ac-
cidents don't even rate. . . .  There is much more on quarrels
between the religious and the secular, between Arabs and Jews."

Many Israelis argue that the problem is not only roads and safe-
ty, but also behavior. They say Israeli drivers are overly ag-
gressive, impatient and often reckless. A Police Ministry offi-
cial involved with highway safety lamented, "The average driver
is very aggressive and thinks he is king of the road. Although we
have rules and road signs and lights, still, he is not very law
abiding."

Shalom Hakkert, director of the Transportation Research Institute
at the Israel Institute of Technology and one of the country's
top highway safety specialists, said the behavior of Israeli
drivers has often been used as an excuse by politicians to avoid
the costly improvements necessary to save lives.

"The attitude of blame the accidents on the driver . . . con-
vinces everyone that we drivers are to blame, something is wrong
with us," he said in an interview. "It frees the politicians from
blame for what they should be doing to make our roads safer."

According to Hakkert, Israel's road accident record is not the
worst in the world, as many Israelis believe, but is not as good
as some of Europe's more developed nations. International com-
parisons are tricky because each country has different kinds of
roads and varying numbers of cars and drivers, but he said
Israel's record in recent years is worse than that of the United
States if measured in terms of fatalities for miles traveled.

Hakkert said Israel's safest roads are four to six times as ha-
zardous as similar roads in Europe or the United States.

"For about 20 years, hardly anything was developed in infrastruc-
ture," he said. "We have regressed to an almost undeveloped coun-
try, but motorization has increased at a rapid rate; every 10
years the number of motor vehicles doubles."

Moreover, Hakkert said, Israel has not emulated Europe and the
United States in traffic engineering. Instead of quiet residen-
tial zones with low speed limits and well-built freeways to carry
fast traffic elsewhere, he said, Israelis still race through
neighborhoods at high speeds while few freeways have been
built.<02:22 10-31C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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poration (usa@AmeriCast.COM)