“The field of traffic infrastructure is generally a very low-tech field, in Israel and in most countries in the world,” said Hilla Haddad-Chmelnik, VP of Strategy and Innovation at Netivei Israel, the national transportation infrastructure company. “My job is to build a new team to plan the future of road infrastructure using the technology of the Start-Up Nation.”
Haddad-Chmelnik’s division was created a year ago in an effort to increase the use of technology in Israel’s transportation systems. She spoke to The Jerusalem Post ahead of next week’s EcoMotion conference for smart mobility, where her team will share the plan they have been developing.
“When I started, I first had to identify the issues that need to be solved,” she said. “I learned early on that we needed to change the way we describe our needs. If you publish a tender for a road project, and say that I need X materials and Y resources, it assumes that you know what the project needs, and limits the market’s ability to bring a new approach to the solution. I found that by instead describing the problem we wanted to solve, we started to learn about new technologies that we didn’t even know about.”
“I’ll give you an example,” Haddad-Chmelnik said. “Painting the lines on roads costs NIS 250 million every five years, and there is a set rhythm of how often each line is repainted. When we asked about making the process more efficient, some engineers suggested using a better paint that would last longer. But then we asked if we could create a system to quickly find out the status of the lines on all 8,000 km. of Israel’s roads so we could focus our resources better.”
“When we asked that way, we got a number of different solutions. Mobileye said that its cars, which are already traveling Israel’s roads gathering data, could send line paint status reports. A different start-up said it could provide aerial footage that would allow us to easily analyze the lines from many roads in an area. Nexar said it could provide data gathered by its smart-dash cams. Now we had a whole different understanding of our options. I can tell a number of similar stories.”
Haddad-Chmelnik offers an overview of the state of Israel’s transportation infrastructure following the coronavirus pandemic.
“As the crisis started last year, we began to map out how we expected the changes to affect us,” she said. “Before the pandemic, the government had the general goal to reduce the increase in the number of private cars on the roads, and push people toward using public transportation, carpooling, and micro-mobility solutions like bicycles and scooters. However, during COVID, public transportation use plummeted, partly because people were afraid and partly because Israel made the decision to reduce usage of buses and trains.
In many other countries around the world, they made the opposite decision, increasing the frequency of lines to manage the crowds better. Meanwhile, carpooling ended because it was not allowed, while micro-mobility usage jumped – in many places, there was a shortage of bikes because demand was so high.”
Post-corona, Haddad-Chmelnik sees a different set of trends emerging. “We expect that the rise of working from home will reduce the number of private cars on the road. We expect that the government’s policy of allowing all state office workers to work from home at least one day per week will help make sure that this standard is adopted by the general workforce.”
Meanwhile, the use of electric vehicles is on the rise. “Europe’s economy depends on the auto industry, and it is putting a lot of money into expanding electric-vehicle product lines as a way to stimulate the market,” Haddad-Chmelnik explained. “This is a trend that started even before COVID, and now that the numbers are jumping, Israel needs to respond and be sure that we provide the proper infrastructure for this. If roads are going to become a place where people are going to need to be able to charge their cars, then we need to work with government ministries to be ready to provide that. Whose responsibility will it be to make sure that roads across the country are equipped for charging stations? Israel needs to ask these questions now, or there is a risk that we can fall behind the rest of the world, and lose our market for electric vehicles to other countries.
“It used to be that this scenario was forecast for eight to 10 years into the future, but COVID has pushed the timeline to two to three years out,” Haddad-Chmelnik says.
As cars get smarter and more connected, similar questions will arise for Internet connectivity.
“Super-fast 5G Internet will be needed on all the roads,” she said. “We probably have 15-20 years before we have fully self-driving cars, but there is a growing need to connect cars to control centers. If 5G is going to one day become as integral to transportation as asphalt, will this remain in the domain of the Internet service providers, or should it become the responsibility of the companies that manage the roads? We are preparing Netivei Israel for the possibility that we will be tasked with providing road electrification and communication in 10 years.”
Now, Netivei Israel is testing how to make it all work together.
The nonprofit Israel Smart Mobility Living Lab launched a new platform this week that will enable tech companies to cooperate and share data with government-owned companies and municipal authorities, to face challenges like reducing car accidents and traffic congestion, improving road infrastructure, and reducing air pollution.
The initiative, which uses data from app users, traffic cameras and other sources, comes from a consortium of tech companies and government organizations including Nexar, Moovit, HopOn, Adasky, Cognata, Netivei Israel and the municipality of Ashdod, among many others. The Israel Innovation Authority has invested $1 million in the organization, which was also supported by the Fuel Choices and Smart Mobility Initiative.
“We need a way to understand the whole picture of what happens when we use all of these technologies together,“ Haddad-Chmelnik said. “This project, which will soon begin on a road in Northern Israel, will help us create a prototype of a 2030 road so we can simulate how all of the different aspects will interact.”
The system will be set up over the next six months and will gather data throughout 2022, said Haddad-Chmelnik. More details will be revealed during EcoMotion Week, which gathers many of the world’s leading companies in the Smart Mobility field, taking place May 18-20.