Uber Taxi Service in Israel

According to Globes:

The Tel Aviv District Court has ordered Uber Israel to halt its UberDAY and UberNIGHT taxi services within 48 hours following an appeal by the Israel Taxi Drivers Association and the Gett taxi hailing app company.

At the beginning of November, Uber Israel began operating its UberDAY ridesharing service in Tel Aviv and the neighboring cities of Ramat Gan and Givatayim with journeys undertaken to Herzliya in the north and Bat Yam in the south. Since October 2016, Uber Israel had been operating its UberNIGHT service in Greater Tel Aviv. The service had severe restrictions on the amount of rides each driver was able to provide so that earnings would be capped to cover car maintenance costs as defined by the Israel Tax Authority.

However, Judge Eitan Orenstein found that Uber Israel did not meet the criterion for ridesharing by which drivers simply cover their costs for a journey. This also raised the issue of appropriate insurance and the court was not convinced by Uber Israel's assurances that policies were being negotiated.

The Ministry of Transport had also sued Uber Israel for providing a service, which in its opinion is illegal. Judge Eitan Orenstein was critical of the Attorney General for not having expressed a position on the matter.

Tell Tale Signs

Back in the Seventies, the post-67 wave of immigrants to Israel from the West were trying to adjust to the realities of life in the country. At that time Dry Bones was the star feature of the Jerusalem Post; the paper they all read. And the most popular Dry Bones cartoons were full pagers with Mr. Shuldig that were entitled "You Know You've Been Here Too Long When..."

Those cartoons wryly tracked the little things that we did which were signs of our having gone native ...like calling a grocery store a makolet when speaking English, or smelling the cottage cheese (don't ask!).

We were strangers in a strange, new, exciting, and bewildering land.

Here in the 21st century many of us feel the same way. Like immigrants to a strange new land called the future. I thought about that when I did today's cartoon. Maybe I should start a series called "You Know You're Living In The Future When..."

Sunday Mail: March 30, 2008

Posting a cartoon every weekday leaves no room for me to simply share news, ideas, and other stuff with you, so here's a Dry Bones feature called: 'Sunday Mail: Letters from Dry Bones'.

Item One: "Learning Hebrew".
A number of readers have asked my advice about "learning Hebrew". The trouble is that they almost never say if they want to learn Conversational Hebrew, or Modern Hebrew, or Biblical Hebrew, or if they are looking for a workshop where they can improve their Hebrew.

It's obvious that to learn Hebrew you've got to have a Hebrew-speaking teacher. Not just someone who speaks it better than you do. My advice, if you are serious, is to check out a remote-learning (or "virtual classroom") Hebrew program. No matter where you are in the world, these programs will provide you with real, live, Israeli Hebrew teachers who are in Israel! They have a specific program for your specific needs. Here are the links for
Conversational Hebrew,
Modern Hebrew
Biblical Hebrew
or, to improve your Hebrew check out their
Hebrew workshops for advanced students

Item Two:Israeli Taxis
I don't own a car and often take taxicabs. Where I come from, you can tell when a taxi is empty because its roof light is turned on. When the cab is not available, the light is off. Here in the cities of the Jewish State, the roof light of a taxi is put on to signal that it is nighttime and nothing else. This results in my signalling wildly at the driver of an approaching roof-lit cab and only discovering, at the last minute, that there's a passenger inside. I am then forced to save face by continuing to wave as the cab goes by, pretending that I had not been signalling him, but rather some other driver, in some other cab, somewhere behind his.

Most Israeli cabs have neat GPS map devices on their dashboards. I was in a cab in Tel Aviv the other day, chatting with the driver. He was not happy with his GPS map.

"I know of a neat place online to get some great GPS maps." I said.

"Where?" he asked.

"I don't know" I answered, "I wrote about it on my blog a while ago and I don't remember the URL."

He probably thought "Why does the idiot bring it up when he can't give me the address?!!"

What I thought was "Why does the idiot keep his roof light on when he can't give someone a lift?!!"

By the way, now that I'm back at the computer I checked, found the link to the neat GPS place and discovered that they're having a 50% off sale!! Click here.