What Transit are they building in your area these days?

They are building a light rail system in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. The first line is already under construction, two others are on late planning stages (and funded) and the rest are in early planning stages and not funded at all.

The history of this project is interesting. It was proposed in the 1930s as an underground metro, when Palestine was ruled by the British. The British didn't want to fund it, for obvious reasons, so it got shelved.

Years later, in the late 60s and early 70s, a new (and more detailed) plan was drawn, and the first "skyscraper" in Tel Aviv (Shalom Meir Tower) was built with preprations for an underground station in its basement - which was never used.

This plan got shelved again, because of the Yom Kippur war which ate all the budget (it's an interesting story, but off topic for this subreddit).

The project than stalled for a while, juggled between different committees in the 80s which didn't do much, and no progress was made.

The project finally started getting on track again in 1997, when they decided to build a light rail system instead of a metro, with two lines partially underground, but the rest at-grade. The government established a state-owned corporation (named NTA) to build and manage the project...

Between 1997 to 2003 little progress was made (mostly on planning). In 2003 a tender was published to pick the contractor that would build and operate the system (they wanted to do it in the BOT method), and in 2006 a company named MTS won the bid. MTS was supposed to get all its funding by 2008, but the global economic crisis and internal budgeting issues meant they were unable to do so.

In 2010, the government decided they had enough with MTS breaking the contract, and nationalized the project to be managed by NTA and funded directly by the state.

In 2013 NTA finally started digging the shafts for the TBMs, and in late 2015 they started digging the station boxes - stations will be built by cut&cover, while the actual rail tunnels will be bored by TBMs.

The TBMs are supposed to arrive in 2016, and the first line is supposed to be operational by 2021.

The proposed system does a lot of things right, the stations are planned in very popular locations, and the first line will be mostly underground in its central segment, and the traffic jams caused by construction finally forced affected municipalities to draw more bus lanes and increase enforcement against cars on bus lanes.

However, it also gets a lot of things very wrong (apart from the never ending schedule slips) and there's a lot of criticism about it. The first line has a predicted 70 million passengers per year, but its layout means it won't be useful for most people inside Tel Aviv itself, and it won't ease traffic too much, and the other lines currently planned don't even have a predicted opening year, nobody knows when they'll start building them and when they'll be done.

Also, the underground stations were initially planned with long platforms so it would be possible to turn the underground part of the system into a full-fledged metro, but the state forced NTA to shorten them for budget reasons... so one of the main criticism is that a light rail system will not have high enough capacity in 10-20 years (considering the rate of population growth) and they should've planned it all as a metro.

Another major thing this project gets very wrong is that it will only be a 6 days service, just like buses are here today, with service ending on Friday afternoon and starting on Sunday morning.

The estimated cost of the first line of this system is 10 billion shekels, which is about 2.5 billion USD.

TL;DR First proposed in the 1930s, construction started in 2013, 2.5 billion USD for 70 million passengers per year - an unimpressive light rail system for Israel's second-largest metropolitan area.

/r/urbanplanning Thread