A consultant to the light rail says the project is successful and becoming profitable almost two years after its first run
By JUDY SIEGELLight Rail521(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
Although it opened three years late and cost significantly more than planned, the Jerusalem light rail is a success and becoming profitable, says electrical engineer and consultant to the project Moshe Lebel.While it was planned to carry 40,000 to 50,000 passengers a day, he says, it is used daily by a whopping 120,000.“It is incredibly quiet and comfortable, much more than the bus system,” he says. Of course, that isn’t to say that no mistakes have been made over the years, he tells In Jerusalem in a recent interview at The Jerusalem Post’s new Jaffa Road offices, where the bells of light rail cars can be heard from below. “The consortium did not include a buy-back provision in which Israeli goods would be used instead of foreign ones. So the air conditioning was made in Spain, rather than the better air conditioning systems planned in Israel and manufactured abroad,” he explains. “So the cooling is not always enough for Jerusalem’s climate. There were times when we thought the whole project would fail, and the consortium was not good at distributed, integrated systems. We found people who were experts in this aspect and saved the project.”Lebel received a graduate degree in applied physics at the Hebrew University and also studied industrial management at Tel Aviv University. He has launched and managed two companies – one making microwave and radar parts, and the other computerized examination systems. Besides having served as a professional examiner of R&D projects in the Trade and Industry Ministry’s Chief Scientist’s Office, and as an adviser to the Defense Ministry on local and foreign industrial firms, he has taught at the Jerusalem College of Technology and Bar-Ilan University’s BESA Center for Strategic Studies, though now he works as an independent consultant. In 1999, he began to supervise electromechanical systems for CityPass’s light rail network.The first CityPass line, of a planned eight, started running nearly two years ago, with riders paying nothing for the privilege; a few months later, it began to charge. The light rail in Warsaw, which is about the same length as Jerusalem’s – 14 kilometers – took 13 years to build, while here it took eight.Lebel had hoped to do it in five, but the topography – solid rock, hills and valleys and meandering streets – is different than that in any other light rail system. There were scary predictions – that four or more pedestrians would be killed in light-rail accidents in the first year – but no one was killed. It was also feared that there would be 30 crashes involving the trains in an average month, but as it turns out, there are three or four mostly minor ones, Lebel says.As for future developments, the company will be adding a station in Neve Ya’acov, 2 km. beyond the current end stations in Shuafat and Pisgat Ze’ev. And on the southern end of the line, which ends at Mount Herzl, there are concrete plans to take it to Hadassah University Medical Center in Ein Kerem, though this is problematic.“It won’t be difficult to take it to the intersection at Moshav Ora, but the road going to Hadassah is very narrow. Either it would have to run on an addition lower than the current road, which could pose a safety problem if the train goes very fast, or it would have to reach Ein Kerem through a tunnel in the hill on the other side,” explains Lebel.He says the Chinese – who are already digging tunnels here – or Europeans could do it. “But the Chinese do it well at a quarter or less of the price the Europeans charge. If the decision takes a lot of time, the Chinese digging equipment will be taken out of the country, and it’ll cost a lot more to bring it back.”If no satisfactory solution is found for the Ein Kerem extension, the existing route to Ein Kerem, which entails taking the light rail to Mount Herzl and then a bus from there, will have to continue, he says.He notes that planners of the Dan region light rail “are making the same errors that the CityPass project did. They should have consulted the Jerusalem planners to avoid the problems they faced.”Lebel has also noticed that customers usually do not take the printed receipts that come out of the pay machines at light rail stations, often throwing them on the sidewalk.“This is because it was decided from the outset not to have any waste bins inside or outside the train, for security reasons,” he says. “But I think it would be better to have a small basket of strings – like a basketball hoop – to hold unwanted receipts. It would be see-through and small, and no bombs could be hidden there.” •
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