Waiting For Others To Exit Train Before Pushing In Apparently Too Advanced A Notion For Hi-Tech Nation

Waiting for other passengers to get off the train before pushing one’s way into it appears to lie beyond even the advanced capacity of the Israeli mind.

Jerusalem, December 21 – A country that consistently ranks in the top tier of societies producing the most forward-looking, innovative products across multiple industries has yet to master the sophisticated principles of staying out of the way as disembarking commuters make their egress from public transit vehicles, instead barging forward as soon as the doors open, slowing the process for everyone involved, observers note.

Since its humble agriculture-based economic beginnings in the late 1940’s, the State of Israel has advanced to the forefront of technological development, with each year bringing news of another purchase by some foreign software giant of an Israeli startup. New approaches to various industries such as farming, medical treatment, and medical research have yielded world-changing results and products from water-conserving drip-irrigation to promising cancer treatments, not to mention military innovations such as focused-energy weapons and missile-interception systems. But waiting for other passengers to get off the train before pushing one’s way into it appears to lie beyond even the advanced capacity of the Israeli mind.

The phenomenon occurs with the most frequency and intensity at various stations of the capital’s light rail. The one line – scheduled to expand to multiple others, into a citywide network, over the next several years – runs through two of the busiest section of town, from the Central Bus Station to the Mahane Yehuda open-air market, through the downtown “center” at the intersection of King George V and Jaffa Streets, and the City Hall/Safra Square stop. At all hours of the day, crowds of commuters need to exit the train, only to find their path blocked by crowds of commuters attempting to enter the train through the same doors. The resulting pushing, twisting, arguing, and occasional injury take longer than the same process, involving more people moving in both directions, that takes place hundreds of times per day in other major global cities where commuters on the platform know to wait until their counterparts emerging from the vehicle have finished doing so, and only then proceeding inward.

Anthropologists believe the phenomenon represents a holdover from the more primitive era of bus-only transportation. “It’s the Levant. The entire notion of an orderly queue is foreign to Israel,” explained Dr. Ura Feier. “It hearkens back to a time before the country was prosperous, and resources were scarce – and competition therefore fierce. Letting someone else get somewhere first was a sign of weakness. To this day, a mob is more likely to form than a line. The country needs more Protestants.”

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