The road in front of our humble home tells the story of endless regulation.
When the book,Startup Nation, came out, Israel immediately had a new nickname. The fact that the story of Better Place, which is the central player in the book, did not end well did not matter. Better Place sounded more like the name of a funeral home than a very early electric car company. They blew through $800 million in investment capital before going under. Their battery switching stations promised faster recharging times than current plug-in-and-wait options. The term startup nation is true on the one hand: Israel has a lot of them, rivaling San Francisco for startup density. But the government is not as friendly to such companies as one might think. Regulation, taxation, and governmental sclerosis actually make the miracle of Israeli startups much more impressive.
When I look out of my house on the street before us, I see everything that is wrong with modern government. My wife tells me that when her grandfather built the house, the area that today includes the street and two wide sidewalks was part of the property. The young state of Israel took the land and made a street. And for most of the years we have been living here, it was a street like any other, with two sidewalks and little more. Then around five years ago, the city decided to do some work. And like Frankenstein, the final product is a monster. They put plastic bollards on both sides of the street. Not good enough to stop a truck bomb against our neighbor playing music late at night, but just annoying enough that one cannot stop quickly on the sidewalk to drop off groceries in front of the house. There used to be a bus zone to allow for picking up and letting off passengers without interfering with traffic. The bus drivers apparently did not like having to wait to get back into traffic, so the city massively expanded the sidewalk so that buses simply stop in the road and if you are behind them, then you shall wait. A side street used to be wide enough to have two cars at the top, one to turn left and the other right. They filled in that sidewalk as well so as to narrow the street so that only one car can get through. I asked them why they did this as it makes for lines of cars longer. “The spacing between sidewalks was too wide. Someone could get hurt.” In the thirty plus years in the house, I have never seen a pedestrian injured at the crosswalk. They added endless tiles that are supposed to signal to a blind person when he or she is approaching a street. In 30 years, I have never seen an unattended blind person on our street.
As the sidewalks became massive and the bus station moved outwards, driving became unpleasant, and that has been the goal. They have removed parking spaces and made travel more challenging with the singular goal of making people in town give up their cars. This is always the risk of letting an unmarried woman with a cat and two goldfish design your city center. They don’t have a clue what it is to come home with ten bags from the supermarket. They want everyone to move over to the expanded light rail system, but from our house the closest station is a ten minute walk. That’s not bad, but if they think that a person can do serious shopping and then schlep everything home via rail and bus, they are fooling themselves. Jerusalem is heavily orthodox, and families are 5+ per home. People do serious shopping before the Sabbath and holidays. If one does not have a car, he calls for a taxi van to take him and his purchases home. Those with cars need places to park and streets that actually allow for transit and not just for sitting idle endlessly. Recently, the city added crosswalk signs, as if nobody could figure out what those big white stripes from one sidewalk to the next actually meant. They put up new street signs in the middle of the sidewalk so that if you have a baby carriage, good luck to you as you try to get around the new metal poles. They are endlessly adding signs, instructions, and other features that add little more than clutter.
The devolution of our street is the exact state of affairs as regulation goes. Trump I was the first administration that actually made an effort to get rid of useless regulation. Trump II with DOGE and Elon Musk accelerated the effort. What happens in a government office? They sit around and take the 2,000 rules they have on the books for their microsector of the country as written in stone. But sitting around and ordering DoorDash all day does not sound productive enough. So, they think of new regulations and features to add to an already bloated existence. I remember when the colored circles went up on every new glass window or door, so that people wouldn’t run into the glass. I asked a guy who has a coffee shop down the street if it was mandatory, and he told me that it was—though his warning circles are completely bleached out by the sun. Our son worked in a governmental office, and he confirmed that the mentality is one of adding more and more rules and regulations to the existing edifice. The rare few like Trump and Musk actually think that it’s a two-way street, and one can remove regulations. It is no surprise that back in the day the Empire State Building exterior was completed in 13 months, while the Hoover Dam came in under cost and earlier than planned. Today, everything is sclerotic. It takes years to get through zoning and the courts, and the on-site requirements means that nobody dies from falling off scaffolding, though there is a risk of death from old age.
Young countries, like companies, oftentimes, are nimble and can move quickly to capitalize on opportunities. In rowing, there is a frenetic start to a race after which the coxswain screams, “Settle!” and the rowers calm down into a sustainable pace. Israel is moving from hotshot startup to mature country, and the ability to do things is going downhill like in advanced countries such as the US and Europe. A dear friend was at a mall in the US and he was smoking. A mall cop told him he had to put out his cigarette, which he did. The next thing he heard was the security guard reporting, “Yes, the cigarette is out. He put it into a half-full bottle of Snapple.” My friend asked if the guy’s life was so empty that he needed to make such a detailed report on the fate of his cigarette.
Those in government often think that adding more rules and regulations makes life safer and better. They never look at the downside of lost opportunities, increased costs, clutter, and the inability to get a job done in a normal manner. Soon, our street will be host to endless buses as they are taking a major thoroughfare offline to put in a new light rail line.
When Better Place was trying to make it here in Israel, a friend called to order their modified Nissan Leaf. “Do you have a dedicated parking space?”
“No.”
“Then we can’t sell you a car.” And as maybe 20% of Israelis have fixed parking, they could barely sell cars before they finally went out of business. Regulation needs to be a tool to success and not an impediment to a country moving forward
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