15/5/97

Waste of NIS 6 m. is a ballpark figure

    Why Jerusalem needs this tunnel I can't understand.
    No, not that tunnel.
    If you drive down Hazzaz Road, with Wolfson Towers on your right and Sacher Park on your left, you come to Bezalel Street. (If you got to the Statue of Liberty, you've gone too far.) At Bezalel, you turn right to go to Shalom Felafel, or turn left onto newly-built Maar Road, to drive through the capital's latest architectural marvel: the Maar Tunnel.
    Or is it a bridge?
    It's a huge waste of money, that's what it is.
    As popular wisdom has it, a tunnel is something that goes through or under, with the assumption that there's something above or around it. It's a concept so basic I'm sure they don't even explain it in Tunnel Building 101.
    If you're lucky enough to get a red light at Bezalel, take a quick look at the tunnel. It's a handsome piece of work - faced with expensive Jerusalem stone, with a pretty design up front. It's four lanes wide and 120 meters long, well lit and utterly overdone. You know what's above it? Its own roof.
    For the benefit of readers who don't live across the street, a brief description of the environs would be helpful. Sacher Park (or, to softballers trying in vain to claim a little space, Soccer Park) is a lovely green stretch littered with broken glass for half a year following Mimouna celebrations. A year ago the municipality ran a road through it to link up two sectors of the city. The road, a good idea in itself, cut off a tiny chunk of the park from the remainder, but it hardly mattered, because that northern tip was not used much.
    Somebody at City Hall decided it was worth spending NIS 6 million to maintain the continuity, and a few more gruschim to build a children's playground on the northern tip, I suppose to justify the need for the ground-level tunnel.
    I thought I'd call City Hall for the usual good explanation...
    "Hello, I'd like some information please."
    "Thank you for calling City Hall. Can I help you?"
    "Yes, it's about the Maar Tunnel."
    "Quite a scandal, isn't it, sir? I'm sure the mayor will want to apologize personally. If you don't mind waiting for just a moment I'll put you right through."
    No, you're right, it didn't happen quite like that.
    "Hello, City Hall?"
    "What!"
    "I'd like --"
    "Wait!"
    "Hello? Hello?"
    "Nobody's here. Everybody's busy. Call back tomorrow."
    "Whom should I call to ask about the cost of building the Maar Tunnel?"
    "Who are you?"
    "A taxpayer."
    "Then it's none of your business."
    That's more like what we've come to expect, but it's even further from the truth. An exceedingly helpful lady named Ariela at the municipality's Spokesman's Office took down all my questions and promised to call me back. And she did. She then got me in touch with a spokesman for Hevrat Moriah, which together with Minerav Co. developed and built the road.
     "The tunnel was a condition of the Municipality for building the road. They wanted to maintain the park's continuity," the spokesman explained. Why not just reduce the park's size by about 5 percent by ending it at the road, and save the money? The city, he answered, wasn't prepared to consider that option.
    Alright, then: why couldn't they build a much more modest footbridge, if it was so critical to connect Sacher Park with its forlorn appendage? (The Moriah spokesman gave a figure of NIS 3 million for such a structure.) The playground could have been set up on the other side, though even that's negligibly necessary: the park already has a playground.
    Six million shekels. Was there nothing more urgent to spend it on?
    Maybe they could recoup the expenditure with a bit of shrewd direct taxation, like setting up a toll booth on top of the tunnel, and charging toddlers a shekel each to get to the playground. At the rate it's used, let's see ... 30 shekels a day, six days a week (we'll let 'em use it free on Shabbat) ... it can easily be paid off by the year 2638.