PHOTOS from Israel (Jerusalem, Tiberias, Haifa)

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Here are more teasers from my most recent website update.  These photos were all taken during my various travels during the Sukkot holiday in early October.

We start off in Tiberias, a city in Northern Israel along the Sea of Galilee.  Tiberias's local bus services are operated by Connex (veolia) as opposed to Egged.  When I was there in 2007, the Connex fleet was Mercedes-Benz O 405s, but it is now mostly composed of newer MAN NL-313s. 












Egged still has a presence in the city, especially at the Central Bus Station since it still provides intercity services.  First, some overview shots of the CBS itself:

Main CBS Entrance:



Bus Departure Platforms:



Egged buses within the terminal:

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We now head over to Haifa, Israel's third largest city, situated on Mount Carmel overlooking Haifa Bay and the Mediterranean Sea.  Local bus service in Haifa is operated solely by Egged using a fleet of 12 meter (40 foot) MAN NL-313s and Mercedes-Benz O 405s.  Since I was last in Haifa in 2007, they have made considerable progress on the Metronit, a BRT system using exclusive bus lanes that are painted red to distinguish them from regular travel lanes.  The bus lanes are there and are used by existing services, but I believe Metronit operation itself is still a few years off.  Metronit will be operated by double articulated buses, almost 75 feet long with two articulated joints. 

However, in the meantime while we wait for Metronit to commence, here are photos of current operations:





This bus is displaying a special P/R reading on its destination sign wishing riders a happy Sukkot:












The Haifa HaMifratz CBS opened in 2002, as a partial replacement to the old Bat Galim CBS. It serves intercity routes from the North and Galilee regions, and is next to the Haifa-Lev HaMifratz Railway Station.  Here are two photos of that bus station (the first photo in this post was also taken at that station):

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I took a long walk through Jerusalem on the one day of Chol Hamoed Sukkot that I was actually there (since I spent the rest of Chol Hamoed traveling elsewhere, as shown through the previous two posts).  I got lucky in that I was able to photograph a MAN artic with an orange LED sign as a result of holiday traffic since I missed my first photo opportunity (I wasn't ready for this bus to show up and didn't even know about it).  The resulting photo isn't the best, but it still shows the sign well enough.  This is the only bus that I know of in the Egged fleet to have such a sign (though I saw an intercity bus today that I think might have one as well). 

Enough chit-chat, time to get to the photos:



This bus has a message on its destination sign wishing passengers a happy Sukkot:






Here is the bus with the orange LED sign (incidentally, the route number is still on the left side of the bus, some non-Egged equipment in Netanya with orange LED signs shows the number on the right side, which is a bit more logical since Hebrew is read from right to left):


















And as a bonus, a few extra photos from August and September that I have yet to share here: