The slow train to Bat Yam

An elevated urban light rail transit system will be running in Tel Aviv by the end of 2012, the Metropolitan Mass Transit System (MTA) said yesterday.

The 22 kilometer line, dubbed the Red Line, is slated to run from Petah Tikva to Bat Yam through Tel Aviv.

Another elevated train, the Green Line, which originates at both Holon and Rishon Letzion and runs to Herzliya via Tel Aviv, has been "frozen" for the past decade due to the Tel Aviv municipality's insistence on building the line's northern section underground.

In 1998, the government decided that the two lines would be planned and carried out together, as the first stage in the project to provide a complex non-polluting transportation system in the Dan region.

But Tel Aviv objected to an elevated line winding along Allenby street, the Carmel market, Dizengoff street, Masaryk Square, Ichilov Hospital and the Arlosoroff railway station.

The Transportation Ministry is interested in an elevated line, which is significantly less expensive and faster to build than the underground one, but the city remains adamant.

Meanwhile, intolerable traffic continues to clog the city and pollute the air.

Environmental groups say the city is not advancing a mass transit system as an alternative to private vehicles.

Haaretz has found that the city has advanced 10 plans in recent years to build new parking lots, consisting of some 12,000 parking spaces along the Green Line's route.

"The city's policy is making better traffic solutions less worthwhile," said the Tel Aviv director of the Society for the Protection of Nature, Anat Barkai-Nevo. "The Green Line is essential to the city and visitors to it. Building parking lots along the way could reduce the activity on the line, wasting public funds."

The municipality denied it was holding up the Green Line. "An elevated line is not compatible with the city's expected traffic capacity. In addition, an elevated line would clog the traffic."