Beersheba, which has much more available area than Israel's other cities, should absorb the extra development and become a metropolis, the environmentalists and planners say. But this requires good transportation. In the meantime, things that exist in planning terms do not exist in terms of implementation, and that's the problem. It is one of six roads which cross the country in an area 20 km wide, between the sea and Judea and Samaria. Avnimelech also wants more public transport.
More roads means more cars and more cars means more accidents, more noise, and air pollution.
Avnimelech also notes that the 1.1 million cars on the road need parking places - often different ones for day and night. Not all the possibilities mooted for solving the land scarcity are well accepted by the environmentalists looking towards the future. The impact on coastal erosion would be huge, he says, and adds that not enough thought is give to maintaining projects rather than just building them. Technology is a tool. Warburg says there's a tendency to rush towards technological fixes.