Jerusalem Bus Maps: Lack Thereof Results in 4 User-Made Maps plus Official Ones

[WMATAGMOAGH]

If you've looked at any of my photo posts from the past 16 months or so, you'll have probably realized that I've been in Israel, and specifically in Jerusalem, for most of that time.

Israel has a very low rate of car ownership for a developed country, with only about 324 vehicles per 1,000 residents.  However, there are 16 public bus companies in Israel, operating a total of 5,939 buses and employing 8,470 drivers.  About 654 million bus trips were taken during 2009.  (Israel's population is about 7.6 million.)  One might expect that maps of the public bus system would be widespread since so many Israelis use public transportation each day, yet hard copy maps are practically impossible to come by.  Egged, which is the largest bus operator in Israel, operates most intercity serivce, as well as all intracity service in Jerusalem (Israel's largest city) and Haifa (Israel's third largest city).  Hardly any of the bus routes that Egged operates are mapped out in any form.

However, that is starting to change, at least in Jerusalem.  Shortly after I arrived here in June 2009, friends and family suggested I try mapping out the buses, and I was interested in the project myself as a way to learn the bus routes and the city in general.  At the end of that August, I posted what I believe is still the only entirely complete bus map of all Jerusalem daytime intracity bus routes in a format that can be viewed in Google Earth or Google Maps, available for viewing at jlembusmap.com and jerusalembusmap.net.  Since launch, nearly 7,000 people have accessed the bus map through those pages, and I believe many more have accessed its location on Google Maps through links from other sites.  I started a Facebook Fan Page in September 2009 to spread the word about the map and to post news about updates to the maps at the suggestion of a friend, and that page now has over 2,100 fans.  The map also got me written up in a Jerusalem Post article in November 2009, and has been mentioned on countless blogs and been given out by administrators of several yeshivot and other long term programs located in Jerusalem to their participants.  In April 2010, I added the 7 night lines that operate after 12:30 AM 6 nights a week during the summer and twice a week the rest of the year, as well as suburban routes covered by the "Expanded Jerusalem Area" monthly pass.  In other words, I believe that my bus map is the only geographically accurate map that includes every intercity and suburban bus route in the Jerusalem area, including the many variations that some routes have (for example, in addition to Route 32, there are three separate Route 32?s and a Route 032, all of which are variations of the primary Route 32). 

Shortly before I made my map, another map was put out, called Jerubus.  This map is available for viewing as a PDF file, and also as an Iphone App.  This map is not geographically accurate, only includes about 30 routes (plus a separate layout for the aforementioned night lines), and looks more like a subway map diagram than a bus map in my opinion.  It also contains some significant errors (I believe my map is almost 100% accurate, though I do discover errors every so often, though nothing major has hardly ever come up in the past 13 months).  This map also has a Facebook fan page, with a total of 64 fans, and has also gotten some media attention.

There was a website called busmap.co.il that is not currently online that had a schematic map, though slightly more geographically accurate than Jerubus, but also not brought up to date following major service changes that took place in August 2009.  It isn't available online right now.

Finally, the last rider endeavor at a bus map for Jerusalem is found at www.jerusalembusmap.com, where a wiki bus map is currently being built.  It only has a handful of lines, those it has are largely incomplete, and contain errors.  This map seems to be very unknown, despite having a desirable domain name (which is why I have jlembusmap.com and jerusalembusmap.net, and not jerusalembusmap.com).  I know of no one who has tried using it or who has found it on their own.

The last time Egged and the Jerusalem Municipality issued a Jerusalem Bus Map is believed to have been in the mid-1990s, I have two hard copy maps from 1995 at home in Maryland and while some routes are essentially the same, others are not anything close to what they are today, and some neighborhoods and major roads were not constructed 16 years ago.  In response to public pressure, in the past year, large stickers with maps and some schedule information have been posted at the stops for about 20 routes, essentially these are guide-a-ride equivalents but since they are stickers, many of them don't last long in a usable condition.  Today, Egged posted these new maps to its website and Facebook page.  They can be seen as JPGs in this Facebook album, or as (extremely large and slow to download) PDFs available from this page on the Egged website</a> (in Hebrew only, but the PDFs are available from the first four bulletpoints, the one marked 7 and 7? is the fastest downloading file of the four).  There are plans to make these diagrams for additional routes.

I'd be interested in what people's preferred map format is, and if anyone has suggestions, comments, or constructive criticism for my map in particular (or anything else I've written about here), feel free to offer it. 

Does anyone else know of any large cities (or countries) besides the NJT service area where bus maps are not available?  What about other situations in which frustrated riders have taken a situation with the public transportation into their own hands to improve it? 

Thanks for reading/looking!

[WMAveteran]

Congratulations, an impressive task.  My limited experience with NJT indicates that the schedule for each individual route has a map on it.  Does Egged display a route map on the schedule for each route? 

[WMATAGMOAGH]

Thank you.

Bus schedules, as we think of them in the US, don't seem to exist anywhere else I've been in the world.  I can't remember if Rome bus stop signs had the span of service or frequency included on them, though they did contain a long list of all the stops served by each bus at that location.  My recollection is that London and Paris have maps posted at many stops (London does for sure), but that these signs don't give much other info beyond span of service or frequency.  The trams in Krakow, Poland had posted schedules at each stop, as did the terminal stops for the buses in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina (the small, sleepy frontier town used as a base by tourists wishing to visit Iguazu Falls, where many roads are not even paved), but those only indicate when the bus will come, not when it will get to anywhere else on the line.  And of course, there is the extreme example of the Egyptian bus stop, which is not signed in any way and you just try to find where the locals are waiting for the bus and hop on, the buses often don't even come to a complete stop to pick up or drop off passengers there.  Like I said, the concept of a schedule in the form of the "take one" that we have in the US does not seem to exist anywhere else I've been.  So there are no printed Egged time tables in the way that NJT or other US transit systems have.

The new guide a ride type stickers that they are posting at some Jerusalem bus stops have the span of service and average frequency of the buses for service on Sundays through Thursdays (the Israeli weekend is Friday-Saturday), but a note in small print says that service end times on Fridays and start times on Saturdays are dependent upon the Sabbath and has no further information.  On the pilot maps of this kind, that information was in both Hebrew and English, now it is in Hebrew only, though one of the few widely known facts about the buses in Jerusalem is that service usually ends about 90 minutes before candlelighting on Fridays and resumes about 60 minutes after the end of Shabbat on Saturdays.  (The pilots had a bit of Arabic on them too, but generally the information was only in Hebrew and English, now there is no English anywhere on the stickers.)  Some routes come frequently enough a schedule is rarely needed.  I believe all buses leave the first stop on time almost all the time, but what happens after that is a total crapshoot.  Drivers don't seem to slow down if they are running early.  Timetables are available on the Egged website, but whether the bus comes when the website says it will (in the case of intracity buses) can be pretty random.

At many of the intercity terminals, electronic signs over each platform will indicate the next departures from that location, but those aren't updated in any sort of real time.  For example, at 6:56 or so, the 7 PM departure will begin to flash to indicate an imminent departure even if the bus hasn't come yet.  At about 7:02, the bus will disappear from the display, regardless of whether it has come, is still boarding, or hasn't left yet for some reason.  Jerusalem has a total of ONE real time information sign, and it only shows info for 4 of the routes that stop at that location.  I was waiting for a bus earlier today there, of course it wasn't one of the ones that the sign covers, but it does seem to be accurate in its countdowns.  At least it works, it just said "THIS SIGN IS BEING TESTED" for months on end or sometimes nothing at all and even got taken down for awhile over the past 18 months or so.

See why the riding public got frustrated to the point unofficial maps have started popping up, mine included?  For better or worse, it is part of the Israeli mindset to take matters in to your own hands in situations like these, apparently it is a result of the way in which the IDF is structured (the officer ranks, especially at the very top, are very thin, so lower level soldiers often have to come up with solutions to problems on their own with little or no guidance from their senior commanders).

[NewFlyer9736BCT]

That was a pretty generous thing you did there, considering the fact that those bus lines are complex and high in number. Simply an amazing job.

[WMATAGMOAGH]

Thanks very much George. 

I don't know if you took a look at the individual route paths for some of those routes, but if you (or any else) want(s) a challenge, try figuring out the 9 (start on Yafo going west at the Central Bus Station), 10 (regular routing, not the alternate, start on Hazon Ish in Ramat Shlomo), 16A (start on HaMem Gimmel in Romema), 48 (start on Shomrei HaHar going west, this one is a loop so you should end back where you started eventually), 101 (start at the south end of the route going out to the east), and 104 (start at the east end of the route and go west). 

Also, there are plenty of straight forward and simple routes (like the 4/4A, 71, 72, 31, 20, 12, 22, 27, 28), but there are certainly plenty of anomalies or strange routes, or historical reasons for their anomalies.  The 6 and 6A are pretty inconsistent in their routings through Pisgat Ze'ev at the northeast end of the route.  The 18 ends less than a mile (as the bird flies) from where it starts yet it isn't a loop service (many advocate for making it into a loop, which probably isn't a bad idea at all).  The 24 and 24A used to be loop routes, where one route offered the clockwise service and the other route offered the clockwise service.  And then there are the really extreme cases.  If any can explain the connection between the 5 and 5A, I'd love to hear it...