Technology transfer of urban highways and interchange design in the 1960s: The case of the Ayalon Crosstown Expressway, Israel

This paper reconstructs the design history of the Ayalon Crosstown Expressway in Tel Aviv, a project that initiated the technology transfer of American and European transport planning methods to Israel. It examines the unstable, evolving dynamics between agents pushing the technology such as the World Bank and international traffic planning firms, and local institutions pulling or opposing it such as the city, the highway company, and various competing governmental departments. The five successive plans developed for that highway by Canadian, American, French, and British planners offer themselves to comparative analysis of national design philosophies of urban highway systems. Through a close reading of the different geometric plans of one bifurcating interchange, the paper analyses how the technology was adapted to fit the Israeli political, administrative, and economic environment, and identifies a shift in highway planning rationality and techniques for governing mobility at the American source of innovation.