הקווים הירוק והסגול: מתי הרכבת הקלה מגיעה לרובע 4The Green and Purple Lines: When the Light Rail Reaches District 4

Anyone who has lived in District 4 in recent years has been living inside a double construction site. To the west, a tunnel was dug beneath Ibn Gvirol. Inside the district itself, along Arlozorov, tracks were laid at street level. The two projects ran in parallel, caused the same traffic jams and the same dust, and most people treated them as one large nuisance.

But they will not finish together, and the gap between them is two years. Beyond the timelines there is a second story here that almost no one talks about: the street the railway runs along is about to undergo a change far deeper than the addition of a track.

Why the Purple Line comes first

According to an update presented by the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality in July 2026, work on the Purple Line is due to finish in less than a year. Test runs without passengers will begin during 2027, and commercial service is planned for 2028. On Arlozorov the tracks can already be seen in place.

The head start is not a coincidence. The Purple Line is the only one of the three whose stations are all at street level. It has no tunnels and no underground stations, so it is less exposed to the kind of delays that dogged the Green Line throughout the past decade. It also runs through the district rather than along its edge.

In terms of destinations, the Purple Line will connect the district to the eastern metropolitan area: Ramat Gan, Givatayim, Kiryat Ono, and later also the Sheba Medical Center and Bar-Ilan University.

The Green Line is bigger, and later

The Green Line will be the longest in Israel: 39 kilometers and 62 stations, from Rishon LeZion and Holon in the south to Herzliya in the north. In Tel Aviv it runs through a twin tunnel about 4.5 kilometers long beneath Ibn Gvirol, Carlebach and Begin Road. At full operation it is meant to carry roughly 275,000 passengers a day, with a train every four minutes.

For residents of the district it opens an entirely different direction: north to Ramat Aviv and Tel Aviv University and on to Herzliya, and south toward Holon and Rishon LeZion.

Its opening is staged. The southern segment, from Rishon LeZion to Levinsky station, will begin operating in December 2028. The stations within the district will open only with the full line, in July 2030.

The station worth remembering

Across the entire network only five interchange points between lines are planned. One of them falls exactly on the western edge of the district.

The other stations relevant to the district are Yehuda HaMaccabi and Rabin Square on the Green Line, and Ichilov and the Arlozorov Terminal on the Purple Line.

And what about the street itself

Alongside the railway work, a separate plan to renew Arlozorov Street has been approved, including wider sidewalks, bike lanes and the conversion of the open ground floors to commercial use. It changes the character of the street far beyond adding a track, and we covered it in a separate article.

The cost, and what is still unknown

Alongside the benefits there is also a cost. Building the three light rail lines involves felling roughly 7,200 trees across the metropolitan area.

It is also worth keeping the timelines in proportion. The Green Line was originally planned to open in 2026 or 2027, meaning the accumulated delay now stands at about three years. The Purple Line was also pushed back by a year. These dates have already moved once.

And what about the metro

A question that comes up often. The metro is a separate and far later project, with a horizon of the early 2030s and beyond. Anyone planning a purchase today based on transit access should rely on the light rail, not on the metro.