Long wait ends for a bus ride
The ritual Friday-night scramble for a parking space was well underway, but for once, Rob and Netta Geist Pinfold watched it with a smile.
It was late on the Sabbath eve in central Tel Aviv, and swarms of residents who had driven to dinner were cruising for the most precious real estate in the crampacked capital of secular Israel: a legal spot on the street.
The Geist Pinfolds had let their car gather dust for the night. They’d ridden to Ramat Aviv and back in a minibus. And it hadn’t cost them a shekel.
Nor were they alone. Some10,000 Israelis have been riding for free on Friday nights and Saturdays since a new Sabbath-only transit network was rushed into service in November by Tel Aviv and three neighbouring municipalities.
What is revolutionary about the minibuses is not that they’re free but that they’re running at all. For an otherwise modern metropolis, Tel Aviv has long been slowed down by the statutory shutdown of public transportation from before sundown Friday until Saturday night.
Religious Jews abstain from driving and from spending money on the Sabbath, and public transportation has been banned in most places since an agreement before Israel’s founding struck a balance between religious and secular interests.
In heavily religious West Jerusalem, where Sabbath observance is the rule, the pause in bus service inconveniences relatively few.
Not so in Tel Aviv, where Friday nights bring crowds to the cafés and bars lining Rabin Square and Rothschild Boulevard, and the clubs and eateries of bohemian Florentin overflow into the wee hours. The weekly transit shutdown amounts to an annoying and costly speed bump.
Those determined to go out, or to get to and from their jobs pouring drinks or waiting tables, have options — taxis, private shuttles or even the electric scooters that charge by the minute. But taxis charge extra on the Sabbath. Private shuttles, licensed by the state, run on only a few main arteries. And scooting while inebriated is ill-advised; one minibus passenger rolled up a sleeve to show his scar from a drunken mishap.
The new bus service was spearheaded by Tel Aviv’s longtime mayor, Ron Huldai, 75, an old-time Israeli socialist and hard-charging former fighter pilot and air force general. He said Zionism was meant to create “a centre for the Jews and not a centre for the Jewish religion.” He wants his city to be a “model for democracy and pluralism.”
Huldai said he had wanted to expand Sabbath transit since taking office in 1998.
A loophole made it legal. The Sabbath ban covers only public transportation for which riders pay a fare. Nothing prevented a city from using municipal funds to run buses where passengers rode free.
There were objections, of course. Bezalel Smotrich, the transportation minister, said he was “pained” by the bus service.