The road to be designed is part of a long highway that crosses almost all provinces of the West Bank including Jerusalem and Bethlehem. As informed by the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation (MOPIC), such a project will support the fact that Palestinians have the right to travel freely and own an independent highways connecting the Palestinian cities.
Many reasons that led to the idea of constructing a new highway were the high speed, the occurrence of traffic accidents on the current road that connects between Nablus, Al-Bathan and Tubas, the presence of sharp curves, the absence of guardrails, disobeying laws of abiding to lane and crossing the continuous line between directions.
This road has witnessed several accidents during the past years; statistics show that not less than twenty accidents occur yearly on this road. Out of the twenty, two accidents are considered to be fatal as reported by the police commission of Nablus.
In year 2009, two fatal accidents occurred causing the death of three people. The succeeding year 2010, another two deathly accidents happened. In the same year, another accident occurred and led to the serious injury of one person. Other three accidents also occurred near the Martyr’s Tomb location near Al-Bathan and led to minor injuries.
The presence of lubricant oils in almost days on the road near Al-Serafi is another major problem. The superelevation of the horizontal curves was executed in contrast to what was designed. Another factor affecting these accidents is the absence of traffic signals at key intersections.
Moreover, the road section connecting Al-Bathan and Tubas is fairly narrow and does not serve the purpose of being a touristic road due to the existence of heavy traffic. In addition, the Al-Malaqi Bridge (between Al-Bathan and Al-Fara’ah) suffers of disobedience to the yield signs at the roundabout by the drivers. This has caused five accidents and resulted from self-tipping of vehicles in the preceding year.
Figure 1.1 illustrates the path of the existing road.