Public Transport That Punishes the People Who Use It
This is a cleaned-up, edited version of a dictated first-person statement. It serves as the case-study foundation for the public transport policy area.
This is a minor policy area, but a telling one. Israel has an unsustainably high rate of car ownership and, with it, chronic traffic congestion. The obvious solution is public transport — and yet here in Jerusalem, where I live, public transport is becoming almost impossible for the average person to use.
A city dug up in the name of transit
Section titled “A city dug up in the name of transit”The sheer amount of construction that has been necessitated — ironically, to expand the light rail — has been carried out concurrently with a vast swathe of high-rise construction, much of it investment property. Between them, they have made it barely possible to navigate the city, whether on foot, by public transport, or in a private vehicle.
Marauding inspectors over a dollar’s fare
Section titled “Marauding inspectors over a dollar’s fare”To add insult to injury: any time I have taken the bus or the train in Jerusalem, I have been met with marauding gangs of inspectors, who often check tickets three times on a single ride — checking for fare evasion of maybe one dollar.
Nothing says the priorities of the city, and of the Ministry of Transport that regulates the bus companies, are messed up quite like harassing the people who are trying to make sustainable commuting decisions, precisely for doing so.
It also sends a horrible message to tourists. There have been many accounts in Facebook groups of tourists who do not understand Hebrew, whose very first impression of Israel is being shouted at by an impatient and often hostile ticketing official for not understanding the machine or the validation protocol. It is petty, backward, and harmful.
A microcosm of the larger failure
Section titled “A microcosm of the larger failure”This is a microcosm of the bigger issue. Noise pollution belongs here too: in central Jerusalem, unnecessary honking is effectively unpoliced. The city has shown no forward thinking in actually adopting and implementing measures against it. But even if it did, that would only be a responsive measure to the underlying, impossible situation — far too many cars on the road, in far too small a space.
We need to prioritise public transport and make it genuinely usable. If we cannot have free public transport, or subsidised public transport, we can at least make the experience of using it as bearable, as human, and as dignified as possible.