O Wondrous Combustion Engine, Hallowed Be Thy Name

As an elderly couple are walking along the street in Tel Aviv, they notice a parking space. The woman steps into the space, stands firmly in the center of it, spreads her arms wide, and says to her husband “Quick, Bernie, I’ve found a parking space. Go and buy a car!”

That’s a smasher, isn’t it? A classic. It cracks me up every time. And that’s just one. I’ve got loads more when they came from. (Where did it come from? It may have been from inside a Xmas cracker, or, possibly from last week’s Purim party, where the jokes flowed like cava, and the cava flowed like... Well anyway, we had so much to drink, as is traditional for the festival of Purim, that jokes like the one above seemed hilarious, and everyone looked gorgeous).

Now if you’ve finished drying your eyes after that hilarious opening, let’s take a sober look at the shortage of parking spaces in our major cities, or, as is known in municipal circles, the council’s transport policy.
What exactly is parking? (A little too philosophical for this time of morning? Possibly. In that case, skip ahead to the joke at the end). Parking is a requirement (for those with cars), an irrelevance (for those without), a waste of space (for city planners), a cost (for everyone), and a subsidy (for tax-paying non-car-owners). I was once rung up by some market surveyor, and as an introduction to several mind-numbing questions, I was told that the subject would cover “Tel Aviv’s transport and parking policy”.
But parking is not transport, and it’s not a policy. Parking is a symptom of a lack of transport alternatives. We could just as well refer to the Ministry of Health and Burial of Operation Failures.
And yet many councils around the country, still stuck in the 1950s, believe the car is the answer to everything.

Today's riddle: How many parking spaces are there at Wembley Stadium? You know, Wembley, in North London, THE premier venue for football events and rock concerts too. The newly rebuilt stadium is state-of-the art, which means each seat has plenty of leg-room and there are umpteen toilets per person, so you should never have to wait long (bearing in mind that you'll be wanting to go at exactly the same time that several thousand other football fans want to go). It is England's national stadium, and the second largest in Europe. Seating and standing together, the stadium can hold 105,000 spectators. So, back to today's riddle, how many parking spaces are there in Wembley Stadium's official car park?

Now whilst the right side of your brain is thinking that one out, let's see what Tel Aviv has recently done for its residents. To great fanfare, the council sent to me (paid for by my money) a leaflet with an achingly funny title “I came, I saw, I parked”. It lists all the latest changes that will make parking easier. I can now park in several more official car parks at night for free, and at others at a whopping 75% discount. It lists similar benefits and perks for the car-owner. If only my council spent as much time, effort, money, thought, care and loving attention on the non-car owner, on those that use alternative means of transport!
On the contrary, it is practically the aim of the council to encourage us all to have cars.
Have you heard the one about... (no, sorry, I was going to tell a joke, but it would have been quite inappropriate)... have you heard about what’s known in Hebrew as תקן חניה (teken chaniya) or “the parking standard”? Basically it’s a requirement when you plan to build a house, an office block, or whatever, that the plans must include sufficient car parking spaces. Or else you don’t get the building permit.
Who determines what is “sufficient?” Good question, my blogfans, you are on the ball this morning. Who indeed?
One friend had a house built in some small town near Jerusalem, and it included a drive with one parking space. The council rejected this. He would have to include two parking spaces to get the permit.
David Azrieli, a seasoned Canadian businessman and mall owner, designed the towers (named after him) in downtown Tel Aviv. He chose the location well, at a transport hub, on top of the Hashalom train station. The original plans included a car park with plenty of spaces. The council (an unseasoned business operator and non-mall owner) told him the car park was too small, and he had to add several hundred more spaces to get his building permit.

Room for one more? Photo: parkinglotss.com

So are you getting the picture? If the government and local authorities spent as much time, money, and thought, on public transport as they do struggling to find more car parking spaces, we could, by now, have had a public transport system comparable to the best in the world. Then maybe we could dispense with the cars, and not even need the parking.
Wembley Stadium, if you were still thinking about it, is well served by London's transport system. It is accessible from three stations, served by three Underground rail lines, two overground lines, and a national rail link. More than 7 bus routes stop in the vicinity. And which is why Wembley, the rebuilt stadium, opened in 2007, has no official car park. It is, as they say on their website, a public transport destination.  

Why didn't the chicken cross the road?

Easyjet, the nofrills airline, recently covered all its flight destinations in a celebratory issue of its inflight magazine. (Yes, I know what you’re thinking. A review of an airline’s inflight magazine? What depths has this blog sunk to?!! But wait, my, friends. We’re talking about a nofrill airline, with no inflight entertainment, no meal, no drinks, no old episodes of Ramzor, no dumbed-down, child-friendly inflight version of Kill Bill. What else has one to do but read the magazine?). Anyway, the front cover of this magazine depicted each and every one of Easyjet’s destinations, from Barcelona to Inverness to Copenhagen. And there I was searching for the iconic representation of Tel Aviv. Looking... looking... Nothing! OK, well maybe some icon of Jerusalem then. Looking.... looking.... Nothing! Guess what Easyjet had chosen as their symbol for Israel.
The Holon Design Museum.
And they’re no fools. The Design Museum is a state-of-the-art museum, designed by internationally acclaimed Ron Arad, opened in March 2010, to rave reviews.
And it’s not in Tel Aviv. Or Jerusalem. Or even Haifa or Rishon. It’s in Holon.
Yes Holon. The city that never sleeps. Sorry, got that slightly wrong. Holon, the city next door the city that never sleeps. Holon (or correctly Cholon, as in Hebrew it is written with the guttural chet חולון The name comes from the Hebrew word חול chol, meaning sand) has done wonders in recent years, ever so subtly creeping up all sorts of leagues. Under the mayorship of Moti Sasson, a Holonite born and bred, the city has been awarded 5 gold stars by the Council for a Beautiful Israel. (If you’re interested, check out the Council for a Beautiful Israel. You can’t miss it, it’s housed in a concrete eyesore in the middle of Tel Aviv’s Hayakon Park. Mmmmm, makes you think. Obviously the word “beautiful” doesn’t quite survive the translation)
Anyway, current mayor Moti Sasson has emphasised children in his revival of the city, and Holon can now boast a Cartoon Museum, a Digital Art Center, a Cinematheque, and a children’s theater, as well as plenty of parks and street art. Sasson himself, in the post since 1993 (which for an Israeli politician, is an achievement in itself) has been instrumental in many of the city’s changes. In 2010, he was named by Britain’s Monocle magazine as one of the 10 “freshest movers and shakers in urban politics worldwide.” Though the city is small (pop. 185,000) the mayor thinks big. As Sasson said, “It may sound bombastic, but we would like [Holon] to be the cultural center of the Middle East.”
Cultural center it may be, but a fine example of public transportation design it is not.
Let’s look at Holon’s brand new Komemiyut station.

As you can see from this wonderful shot, the station floats in a transport island. It is boxed in, slap in the centre of a monstrous intersection, with the site bounded by (going clockwise, from bottom left hand corner) a cemetery, a stadium, the edge of a residential district, and a municipal waste of space. The railroad itself runs neatly north to south down the center of the Ayalon Highway. The station naturally ends up under a bridge which carries the local highway over the Ayalon. So maybe the positioning of the station is a “given”, a fixed point. What surrounds the station isn’t. So let’s see what Mayor Sasson and his Middle Eastern cultural gurus have designed for the traveling public.

For a start no one can claim to work “right by the station”. There are no offices, no shops, no colleges, no institutions, in fact pretty much no buildings right by the station. As I say, it “floats”, as if it was plopped from above in the thick of a spaghetti junction.

Clearly there are people that live nearby. They can at least claim to “live right by the station”. So let’s follow Dorit Meshulam, one of those lucky few, as she winds her merry way home from the station.
She steps off the train, and climbs the 46 steps to the concourse. She leaves the station building (opened in September 2011, spick and span, toilets are impeccable). She turns right and walks 100 meters, crossing the entrance to the bicycle park (spacious, room for 56 bicycles) as she does so. At the lights she crosses a single lane, and continues. After 50 meters, she crosses a further 2 lanes (this is the slip road from the Ayalon Highway). She swivels to her left, and now waits for another set of lights to change. She crosses the 4 lanes to the island in the middle, and finally crosses a further 3 lanes. She is now on the northern side of the bridge. To get to her house--remember she lives in the nearest building to the station--she now needs only cross the northern slip road to the Ayalon. This is a slip road, leading off from the 4-lane traffic heading west at this point, so it’s a wide, fast road, and here we get to see the municipality’s sense of humour: THERE IS NO PEDESTRIAN CROSSING AT THIS POINT.

Well I think the message is clear there. Sure let’s build roads, let’s build railroads. Let’s pour billions of public money at Israel Railways. But where’s the access? Where’s the thought? What possible attention to detail has left the nearest living Holonites (I've ignored the late lamented Holonites who are actually nearer the station) cut off from a station that they can actually glimpse from their bedroom windows. They only have to walk almost 200 meters and cross 11 lanes of traffic and wait for four separate sets of traffic lights. Just to catch a train. That is, if they can get to the other side.