About us

About "Transportation our way"

If you came from a European country, Australia, South Africa, Asia, or a metropolitanarea of the USA, you probably asked yourself why the transportation in Israel is so poor. Why isn't the celebrated Jewish genius able to run a respectable transportation system? The answer is that the decision makers don't care about it! But there is another reason to this failure. The people using the public transport simply don't do much for changing the situation. We can understand these people. There are other, more important things to deal with than how to travel to work or engage in leisure activities. In fact, the ministry of transportation, the municipalities, the public transport companies, and other decision makers know it. And they don't make much effort to improve the situation. And if they do, as in the case of transport re-organization in the Greater Tel Aviv area, the plans are made behind the scenes, and without heeding remarks or objections from regular passengers. As a result, public transportation in Israel is awful. The buses are few and far between, lots of them are overcrowded, there's barely any transportation at nights or weekends. Buses are often late, and some of bus drivers are arrogant and even violent.

In early 2011, a small group of regular passengers decided that enough is enough! So, we founded "Transportation our Way" (TOW, "Tahbura Baderekh Shelanu" in Hebrew), the only organization of public transport users in Israel. As a non-political, voluntary organization we're open to the participation of everyone who thinks that the transportation in his/her area is inappropriate. Everyone can write to us, our phone is open for most of the day and we're ready to help to anyone as much as we can. However, we're not able to do it all alone. So we encourage people to act under our supervision.

Our main activities

* Running this blog. Most of the blog is in Hebrew, but those who want to translate some posts to English are welcome.
* Introducing detailed information about the re-organization in public transport system in the Greater Tel Aviv area. Much of the information is exclusive.
* Meetings with the decision makers for improving the transport problem.
* Focusing on the transport problems, such as congestion reports, lack of transportation at in nights, short green lights for buses in the bus lanes etc.
* Focusing on the problem of poor transportation in many towns and areas in Israel.
* Media support of independent initiatives.
* Cooperation with environment-protecting organizations on tipping the initiative in favor of public transport passengers

Our people

The founders

Danny Comisar – Founder and Chairman of "Transportation our Way". Chief editor of the blog and spokesman of the Initiative.
Itai Haim – Co-founder and the partner of Danny in managing of "TOW". An operative coordinator.
Ilya Kogan – Editor and writer of informative and guidance posts in the blog. Representative of the initiative on public transport forum on the "Tapuz" website.

Central activists

Dima Course – Manager of Russian section of the site, and spokesman that focuses on Russian media.

In addition, we're cooperating with several advisers, and with environment-protecting and political organizations that deal with transportation issues.

"Transportation our Way"-  motto

TOW is a nonprofit, non-political and independent initiative.
TOW is founded for public transport passengers in Israel. For this reason, the participation of regular passengers is crucial for making it actionable.
TOW prefers cooperation with decision makers over confrontation.
TOW believes that effective public transport has to run 24 hours a day and to cover most of the areas. That's the only way to persuade people to choose public transport over a private car.
TOW believes that quite often running bus lines is not enough for an effective system. High transportation accessibility to the neighbourhoods, efficient bus lanes, electronic schedules at the bus stops, adhering to the published timetable, a pass that is valid at all companies in the area (like the Oyster card in London) and more. These are the extras that make much difference.
TOW is trying to break public transport stigmas. We claim that transportation at nights and in areas that are considered affluent might be profitable if there is real availability of transport in these areas.
Despite what was said above, TOW is not against private vehicles. We believe that you may have a car for leisure or family activities but travel by public transport to work. This is common for most of Europe and we don't see any reason it can't be in Israel either.
TOW is environment-friendly. However, if there's a collision between transportation and environment issues, for us the transportation will prevail. This is the difference between us and typical environment-friendlyorganizations.

Transportation our way – towards a revolution in thinking about public transport.