Shani Ashkenazi, 04.01.2020

What Tel Aviv looks like at the end of the decade / Illustration: Eyal Unger, Globes

The light rail, the metro project, Eilon roofing, Givat Amal towers, demolition of a site square, plan 3700, the Tama 38 flyover and more - looking at the Tel Aviv horizon and the plans at the entrance, seeing cranes and construction sites - and many of them. The white city is changing. You are appealing when real estate, infrastructure and transportation projects are reshaping it.

In the coming decade, the city's population will live within a huge construction site, with entire streets and complexes soon to be excavated for the continued construction of the light rail, and in the more distant future for the metro excavation. "It may be a little reminiscent of the tremendous transformation Paris under the Baron Usman projects in the mid-19th century, until it was reborn as a modern city," says Dr. Nati Merom, an expert on urban interdisciplinary center in Herzliya. By 2030, you will pass through a lot of dust, noise, excavations and traffic jams. It may be inevitable in a renewable city, but we must not forget that this is also the price that residents will pay for the next decade. "

The light rail, for example, whose infrastructure work for its purple and green lines will soon hit the center of Tel Aviv, will make life in the city more complex in the coming years and make it complicated. The process currently underway due to the light rail work on Jerusalem Boulevard is an example of a tiny one: arrival in a complex area, businesses have difficulty sustaining themselves and residents in the area suffer from the noise and transportation difficulties created. Already, the start of the Red Line's activities for 2021 has been postponed, and the purple and green lines will probably not start operating before 2025.

The planning and execution of the Metro project - which is unknown when it started when NIS 150 billion is budgeted - will take no less than 12 years. The fourth railroad is expected to start operating in 2025, adding about one-third of Israel's train capacity, to about 40,000 passengers at peak times.

The current transportation changes are trying to catch up with the accelerated population growth in Israel in general and in Tel Aviv in particular - the city is growing - in the population, its built up areas and the income levels of its residents. The city's population is expected to grow from 433,000 residents in 2015, to 535,000 by 2030, and from 252,000 non-residents (about 60% of employed) to 356,000 out of town by 2030. By 2040, it is expected to add 3-4 million square meters to the commercial and employment areas of the Ayalon Basin. It is estimated that this will add at least about 200,000 more daily visitors, which will require the creation of tools that will reverse trends and reduce private car traffic.

"The traffic jam problem will continue to accompany us"

The big question is whether the major transportation projects, if completed in the next decade, are a satisfactory solution to the surge in the number of residents and workers in Tel Aviv. "By 2030, we will be able to move through partially functioning mass transit systems. In addition, public transport will be electric, smarter, and better serviced, and the shortage of drivers will be overcome by high-capacity autonomous buses," says Meital Lehavi, the Tel Aviv Municipality and deputy transport manager Mayor. "Tel Aviv will be networked for bicycles and sprinkled with moderate-traffic streets throughout the city. We will see fewer vehicles moving around the city, but unfortunately the traffic jam problem at city and city entrances, due to a reduction in road capacity, will continue to accompany us."

To solve the same problem, the City of Tel Aviv is trying to expedite the end of the private car era, indicating that after a process of transportation changes, "most of the city's residents will use sustainable mobility, along with planning the bus network that operates in the city to operate light rail lines. Puts pedestrians a priority. "

As part of the reversal of the trend, and the announcement that the municipality will stop prioritizing private vehicles, the municipality is working to pave more bike lanes and reduce parking spaces in the city. “We are currently working on updating parking policies, which will be based on parking pricing and / or characters and / or areas, with the intention of reducing demand and subsequently clearing parking spaces for sidewalks, bicycle paths, public transport routes, tree planting and more," the Tel Aviv Municipality says Spring. The city currently has approximately 168,000 urban parking permit holders, which have approximately 35,000 parking spaces in white and blue; About 16,000 parking spaces in beachfront mansion parking lots; And about 15,000 gray free parking spaces.

If traffic in the city with a private vehicle becomes less tolerable in the next decade, the city will emphasize alternative, tiny means of transport, and will allow better connectivity between metropolitan modes of transport. "When people travel by light rail they will need complementary means to reach the destination. Buses, taxis and two-wheelers. Not everything is really on its track," says Lehavi. "Since building an employment with a very low parking standard inevitably seems to be mobility by alternative means, there will simply be no choice. Life on the road would show otherwise that technology will produce measures that only some of us now imagine. Someone imagined 'Wiz' or 'Mobileye' or collaborative transport a decade ago, Or the autonomous vehicle and its implications? "

Scooters returning to the loading position alone

These things connect Oded Kotuk, architect and city planner, which marks the beginning of the era of scooter and micro-mobility. He said, "If the major projects end this decade, many more people will be able to get to and from Tel Aviv in reasonable travel time. But keep in mind that travel demand is also going to be very high. It's a tight battle between how many people want to go to the city and expand the possibility of getting there.

"Neglecting the private vehicle will happen if there is a combination of some public and private solutions. The scooters are part of the solution basket, and people are pointing. It's a tool for short and medium movements, it won't replace the light rail. If you come with the train to one of the stations, bicycles or scooters are A good option.

"In the next decade, cities will learn how to regulate, companies will learn how to perfect the service, and a new layer of public-private transport can be created here, a new stage in the evolution of transportation. This will happen through the addition of infrastructure - dedicated trails, and the allocation of road right to slow traffic.

"From the technology side, today, in some parts of the world, people are working on scooters that can move alone, which can reach their own loading positions and moorings. In addition, in Tel Aviv today there are companies planning commercial experiments on autonomous vehicles. If the experiments become a collaborative service and transport a large number of people, it can to be a very big story in a decade. The municipality is studying well what is being done in the world and the formulation of policy on the autonomous rabbi begins. "

Transport management within the metropolis is also likely to change.

"The public bodies, whether the municipality or the metropolitan authority if one day, or even the state, needs to understand and manage what movements are done, for example, through a changing right of way. Imagine there are lanes in the city where the permission to enter vehicles is according to the traffic situation If congestion accumulates - only buses or shared-service vehicles can enter them. If traffic declines - the curb can be unloaded. This will be in the app that will include all services and allow us to plan the trip in advance, pay for it and understand the implications of the choice. It's a big step, and it's slowly happening in the world. "

The hotels will be strengthened, trade will weaken

Alongside improving transportation, in the coming decade, the state will need to find ways to increase housing units (housing units) in Gush Dan and Tel Aviv will expand accordingly. In the last five years in Tel Aviv, an average of 2,708 housing units have been built each year, D. The news is being built in high-rise, expensive towers for a well-established population. Even the buildings that enter the TAMA 38 proceedings may eventually push the city's young and diverse population out of the city center.

The Tel Aviv municipality also declares that it wants to become one of the most popular tourist destinations in 2030, so that within a decade the tourism industry will bring in NIS 10 billion a year. By comparison, in 2018, tourism revenue in the city was between NIS 5 billion and NIS 6 billion.

According to city statistics, in 2010 there were 50 registered hotels in the city, and according to data from the hotel association today there are 110 hotels in the city, but many more unlisted hotels are operating in the city. In recent years, more and more boutique hotels are popping up in the city, replacing residential buildings in the heart of the city - just at this moment the licensing department is handling 23 such requests, when it comes to a transformation encouraged by the municipality. Alongside this, in the thriving city of the Airbnb industry, which operates in Israel with great intensity and uninterrupted - between May 2017 and April 2018, 17,000 properties were offered for rent through Airbnb in ​​Tel Aviv. In the Yemeni Kerem neighborhood of the city, 10% of the apartments are leased as Airbnb, and the trend is increasing.

The big demand for real estate in Tel Aviv raises the question of what the city's horizon will look like at the end of the decade. According to Lehavi, "We expect an additional five million square meters for employment; 300,000 employed people; dozens of over 50-story towers; 100,000 residents - approximately 30,000 in the northwest of the city in plans 3700 and Sde Dov, in Jaffa and south approximately 10,000 housing units, as well as in the eastern neighborhoods of the city, downtown and north of Yarkon.

"The density of housing units per hectare will increase. The city center, thanks to the UNESCO White City Declaration and Conservation Plan, will remain textured and will mostly back up to a maximum of 6.5 stories. But the mantle will see more towers, intensive and dense construction of urban renewal projects. Predicted by the strengthening of the hotel and employment and perhaps the weakening of trade due to the development of online commerce and the possibility of buying online. "

"Disintegration of a culture that has existed for 100 years"

Whether it is the living fabric of it or the businesses operating in its territory, it is possible that the trends currently taking place in the city will transform Tel Aviv in another decade. "Although light and metro lines will allow Tel Aviv to reach comfort and speed relatively quickly from the satellite and suburban cities throughout the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, it will also contribute to the pushing process of the less affluent residents, who will move to cheaper cities on the outskirts of the metropolis," says Dr. Merom. By 2030, it will become even more central to the metropolis, but also much more socially expensive and homogeneous. It may not be exactly 'city of the rich', but it will be, even more so today, the city of the top deciles. This is at a time when the metropolitan fringes are the popular suburbs, and beyond the social periphery of third Israel.

This trend already has a presence in the field; About 28% of the city's residents are aged 18 to 35, and from 2008-2017 there has been a 7% reduction in the number of young people in the city. The monthly income and expenditure per capita in Tel Aviv is 50% -60% higher than in Israel. There are fewer low-income households in the city (17% in deciles 1-3, compared with 30% in Israel) and more households in the upper economic classes (35% in deciles 9-10 compared with 20% in Israel).

According to Dr. Talia Margalit, senior lecturer at the Tel Aviv University School of Architecture, if there is no serious policy change, this is just the beginning. "The approach here is one that is expensive and high-build and based on people coming to work in the city by train, when very few apartments are being built. Affordable, probably in comparison to the world.

"In the forecast of business as usual, Tel Aviv will go up and down, and I think you'll lose it, too. Many of those who live here today and those who have since given the city its special character will be impossible to live here, because of the cost - renting and buying apartments. "Spring is going to have to make a super effort to keep the middle class here, and it is doing very little today. We are in a situation where the margins, those who had money to buy an apartment here or families who passed apartments from generation to generation, are shrinking."

It is a process that is happening in major cities of the world.

"In such cities in the world, the richest and poorest live - migrant workers, refugees, and people who remain in poverty-stricken areas on the outskirts of the city. The harm to them is very large, but it is also the middle class. It will be a radicalized city - a shaky middle class, tourism-based, foreign investment and it will be a rich population, it will be a rich core of the Dan bloc and the middle class will spread out.

"This will not be the same Tel Aviv where flip flops go and live in condominiums. It will be a much sturdier and more rigid city, by price. There are situations in history where diskette has changed in urban planning, and it should be open to that that can happen. Spring has a very great faith in the righteousness of the road, even if they see the problems.

"To maintain the diversity that makes this city what it is, dramatic moves are needed; more public housing, much more affordable housing, more educational institutions, more office buildings for small businesses and beginners, and not just office towers that big companies and strong businesses can accommodate."

Perhaps this process will actually make the cities near Tel Aviv the next.

"Maybe, but as far as Tel Aviv is concerned, it will be a catastrophic loss. It will shoot you in the foot. That's the thing with the gentrification. People with money are attracted to color, diversity and a sense of freedom and authenticity, and then smuggle all these into other places. When it happens in the neighborhood, it's a shame, when it happens in a whole city it is very sad, in the case of Tel Aviv it is a breakdown of an entire culture that has existed for 100 years.

"The loss is first and foremost of the city itself. The essence of this city is its bohemian, and its 'projections' - the things that are Tel Aviv. Take it from it and get something that is less fun, and actually less attractive to tourists and investors as well. It will not be the same ".