Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat
Jerusalem Mayor Nir BarkatFlash 90

Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat will come to Golda Meir Boulevard, often called the Ramot Road, on Sunday morning to see for himself how commuters suffer through bumper to bumper traffic if they enter the city via route 443 in order to reach the Har Hotsvim industrial center located on Golda Meir Boulevard or anywhere in the city.

Residents of Modiin, Kiryat Sefer, Samaria and French Hill residents are among those who use Route 443 to reach Jerusalem. The route leads them to Golda Meir Boulevard but for the tens of thousands of residents of Ramot and Givat Ze'ev, Golda Meir Boulevard is the only route into the city. Planned to connect Ramot, Givat Ze'ev and Binyamin to Jerusalem, it has become woefully inadequate as the number of residents in all those areas grows by leaps and bounds.

The Kikar HaShabbat haredi Hebrew news site reported that Barkat and other city officials will arrive at Golda Meir Boulevard at 7:00 AM Sunday to try to work out a solution to the traffic jams that can leave commuters stranded for inordinate amounts of time, including those travelling on public buses. The trip from Ramot to Sanhedria or to the Givat Shaul entrance to Jerusalem takes 8 minutes on off hours but stretches to well over an hour during rush hours which last from before 7am to after 10am.

Deputy Mayor Yossi Deutsch told Kikar that "The problem of traffic on the road has reached unbearable levels. Residents have been suffering (from the traffic) for years."

Acting Deputy Mayor Yitzhak Pindar said that that "the situation is surreal and crazy. It's my opinion that this is the greatest crisis that Jerusalem has seen in recent years."

Worse is yet to come. A new neighborhood between Ramot Aleph and Sanhedria is being constructed and will add close to a thousand families to those trying to get to work in the morning via the boulevard.