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The highway is the same highway, only the victims' names change. On Sunday it was six workers, whose transit hit a truck that deviated from its race. It was the third fatal accident on Highway 90 in two weeks. About a year ago, a truck driver was killed at the exact same road curve.
Highway 90 is an unforgiving road, which does not differentiate Jews from Arabs, women from men, parents from children. Accidents hardly ever happen anymore due to technical failures; they occur when a driver makes a mistake or acts in a negligent manner. We have more forgiving road, an accident caused by human error.
This is what happens on the road between front-end crashes and road crashes, roads with less sudden and surprising turns, or roads with side rails that absorb the impact. But Israel's longest road, from its northern border to its southern one, is no such road.
Highway 90's 480 kilometers include sections from the Ottoman and British Mandate times. Its most recent "Israeli" sections, to the north of the Dead Sea, were paved after the 1967 Six-Day War, with the knowhow and resources of the late 1960's.
The accident in the Jordan Rift Valley. (Photo: Israel Fire and Rescue Services spokesman)
There is a more peripheral road than Highway 90-the segment where the Sunday's accident happened, along with the Jordan Rift Valley, is the lifeline of the surrounding peripheral communities and the city of Beit She'an, while the southern segment The Arava is the lifeline of the Dead Sea factories, as well as the main road to Eilat.
And yet, only 80 kilometers of this road are a modern, two-lane, two-way highway, with quality asphalt and security railings-like you would expect a central highway in a nation to be startup.
As always, this crisis is about money. The state only adds a second lane to roads through which 15,000-20,000 cars pbad each day. But only where did the recent accident take place. In the more southern parts of the road, there is an average of around 10,000 cars a day.
But these statistics do not include the number of casualties: Since 2003, 233 people died and 700 were seriously injured on Highway 90. We have one-lane road, the chances of getting killed in an accident are 2.7 times higher than we have two -lane road.
Most of the Jordan Rift Valley section of Highway 90 is on the other side of the Green Line. Israel definitely knows how to invest in West Bank infrastructure for security reasons, like the expensive renovations on Highway 60, but Highway 90 is left forgotten. A few months ago, Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz ordered a new statutory plan for the expansion of the Jordan Rift Valley road section, but plans are not enough. There is still no timetable, and the cost will be in the trillions.
The National Roads Company of Israel has expanded to the south, from Eilat to Yotvata, and is building in its northern part. tag of NIS 2.1 trillion.
The following is a brief overview of the current situation in the area of transportation and transportation, which is the subject of 10 kilometers per year, which means finishing the works after 2030.
According to estimates, the traffic on Highway 90 is expected to grow after the Eilat Airport is moved to Ovda, which is 20 kilometers away from the city. When adding to the future closure of Sde Dov Airport in Tel Aviv, the journey to Eilat by plane becomes just as long as the car ride, which means the road is going to be even more packed. In the upcoming holiday season, Highway 90 is going to be swamped with excited families on their way south on vacation. How many of them are going to make headlines, after the next accident?
The crash that killed 8 familiy members on Highway 90. (Photo: Robby Hendel)
Following the horrific accidents of the past weeks, the Transportation Ministry ordered the National Roads Company to begin planning the construction of guard-rails between lanes along dangerous curves of Highway 90 in the Dead Sea region. However, building such a rail without expanding the road itself creates its own dangers. Expanding the road would be expensive, of about NIS 25 million per kilometer.
Israeli drivers bring in about $ 40 billion a year in taxes, but when the need arises to invest in a safe infrastructure – the Treasury has more urgent matters to fund.
"Said Erez Kita, head of Or Yarok, an NGO that works to encourage safe driving in Israel.
"It's a 50-year-old road, and its infrastructure should have been upgraded. It's always easiest to blame the drivers, but not every mistake should end in death, and the infrastructure is meant to protect drivers even if they make a mistake. The Transportation Ministry knows how to make it happen, and it is better to make it happen, "Kita added.
The recent spate of accidents on Highway 90 in other countries, and the possibility of the year 2018 being declared the year with the least crash casualties in half a century.
The Transportation Ministry's spokesman said on Sunday that, "the ministry expresses its condolences and sorrow to the families of the victims, and wishes the injured a quick recovery."
"The claim that a guard rail should be installed along the Highway Highway 90 is absurd and not practical," he added, "the road is being maintained by the National Roads Company, and the ministry's director-general need for railing installations or other safety measures in several sections of the road. The attempt to portray the government as responsible for these tragic accidents, while ignoring the drivers' serious and dangerous mistakes, is wrong and untrue.
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