City Getting Desperate With New Pretexts For Street Closures

City officials hesitate to admit that they aim specifically to make people’s lives miserable.

Jerusalem, October 31 – Recent measures to restrict vehicular traffic in a downtown area of the capital have called attention to what observers deem a worrying phenomenon: the municipality appears to be running low on excuses to inconvenience business-owners, commuters, shoppers, and residents, and now resorts to increasingly-flimsy justifications for those measures.

The Municipality of Jerusalem put into effect in September a policy it insists is experimental: the closure on Thursdays of a major downtown artery to westbound traffic, and the closure of the same artery in both directions all day Friday – rerouting public transportation to the next major artery to the south.

Municipal officials offered as a rationale for the move an effort to facilitate the safety and convenience of the increased numbers of shoppers and tourists who visit the Mahane Yehuda open-air market toward the weekend, many of whom must brave congested Agripas Street at the market’s southern end. But the operators of business in the area warned before the plan’s implementation that it will impair deliveries and accomplish little.

“At some point, city officials are going to have to come clean and state outright that they aim specifically to make people’s lives miserable,” insisted political analyst Taggid Limash’kha. “Certainly that’s what the municipalities in Tel Aviv and elsewhere have done. It removes the pressure to have to find a barely-plausible excuse for the inconveniences.”

Jerusalem planners and decision-makers, however, refuse to admit, perhaps even to themselves, that they aim more to experience the thrill of exercising power by immiserating tens of thousands of people in myriad petty ways.

The Agripas Street closure represents only the latest iteration of bureaucrats flexing their paper-pushing muscles at the expense of the city’s residents and entrepreneurs. The decades-long project to construct a light rail system throughout Jerusalem has so far resulted in one working train line, at a cost of narrower, blocked, and potholed roads all across the city – as the planned extension of the existing line, and the construction of infrastructure for two other lines, have fallen far behind schedule, and even the comparatively brief extension of the already-operational line will not become operational until at least the middle of next year – to say nothing of the unknown day, in the distant future, when a second light rail line begins to operate, let alone a third line that has confused traffic but so far seen no construction.

City officials hope that by 2030, they can make Jerusalem entirely unlivable.

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