Nostalgia Sunday – Israel Electric
Filed under: Business, Environment, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Nostalgia Sunday
Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) is amongst our country’s most hated monopolies, and today we got another dose of why that is. According to a World Bank report reported by Globes, “Salaries at Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) (TASE: ELEC.B22) are among the highest among utilities in the world…”
“IEC commissioned the report in an effort to prove that Israel’s electricity tariffs are low. While the utility got the answer it sought, it also received an unsolicited sting about its employees’ high salaries.” (Full story available here).
It’s very nice to find out that we pay lower tariffs… right now. (Despite the recent price cuts, the World Bank believes that is going to have to change). But it doesn’t make up for decades of abuse at the hands of surly overpaid technicians and clerks who for many years — and I’m not sure the World Bank knew about this one — also got their electricity for next to nothing.
The free electricity thing was so out of control that back in the Seventies, when our family would go visit cousin Sasha, a veteran IEC employee, we would count the number of unnecessarily electrified appliances he had, such as wall clocks, stove top cookers (Israelis usually have gas ranges) and the occasional extension cord trailing out of a window — just to help out the neighbors.
At a certain point, sometime after the other hated monopoly, Israel’s phone company, was privatized, IEC got wise and started behaving more like a service provider, less like a price gouging monolith. And you have to give IEC credit where it’s due: in the span of some 80 years, it has created a modern power infrastructure serving the entire country.
It is also one of the only companies in the world capable of providing complete turnkey service, from building power stations to providing billing services.
IEC has also made public a good number of pictures from their archive, on view at the PikiWiki site. Here are a few nice ones, for starters. This is a picture of Israel’s first power station, in Haifa.
Electric company workers laying high-tension wires.
The next time they built a power station in Haifa, it was bigger…
An interior shot…
And some might recognize this location, the mouth of the Yarkon river near the Reading power plant and the Tel Aviv port.
A Hybrid of Environmentalism and Politics in Online Honda Ad
We recently came across this alleged Honda commercial online, which fuses environmental activism with political opinion. It speaks for itself, so take a quick look:
It is unclear and very unlikely that Honda actually sponsored this ad. It’s more probable that somebody cut and pasted a news clip together with the taglines of another Honda commercial. Whomever that person is will probably remain anonymous. It is still an interesting phenomenon, though and we’ll leave it up to you to decide whether the makers of the clip are dangerous carborexic types or legitimate activists of the first degree.
The clip has caused quite some interest in the blogosphere. Here are some excerpts of the online dialogue that the clip has generated:
Darryl Wolk blogged that he is “not sure if this commercial is real, but it is why I take the global warming agenda seriously. America and the West must break our dependency on foreign oil. Green technology, public transportation, tough auto standards and a cap and trade system are the way to go.”
According to another blog, Current, there were originally two of these clips – one focused on the Hezbollah in Lebanon (as shown above) and one focused on Iran. (To read the rest of this entry, written by Karen Chernick, click over to Green Prophet)
UPDATE: the video, if you haven’t noticed yet, has been taken down. Guess some exec from Honda got whiff of it…
A Sneak Peek at the Future of Jerusalem Mass Transit
Filed under: General, Israeliness, Politics
CityPass, the international corporation that is building and operating the Jerusalem light rail system, recently opened the doors to its hi-tech transit depot and we joined the tour. We learned more than we wanted to know about the facility’s electricity system and the minutiae of how the maintenance staff cleans dusty wheels.
The highlight for us, though, was getting a chance to wander through the train cars themselves. Despite seats still wrapped in plastic, the enormous vehicles – five times the size of a normal bus – were immensely impressive and a stark contrast with the desert landscape around them (the depot is located just west of the northern Jerusalem satellite community of Pisgat Ze’ev).
Each car consists of five articulated sections and can seat 64 (with a total capacity of 250). There are LCD screens to announce stops and magnetic card readers throughout. 24 cars out of a total of 46 have already been delivered so far.
The Jerusalem light rail has a few features not found in other locations, like France and Spain, where CityPass is operating. The vehicles have to contend with Jerusalem’s notorious hilly terrain. And all the windows have been reinforced to be resistant to stones and Molotov cocktails. A controversial security decision has meant that the light rail travels through the Arab neighborhood of Shuafat…but makes no stops.
Nevertheless, visiting the depot and seeing the cars all in one place gives one the feeling of being in a sci-fi flick: could these state-of-the-art contraptions ever roll through the historic but out of fashion center that represents Israel’s capital?
But that’s just the point.
Jerusalem used to have a more vibrant downtown. But in recent years, many of its more upscale shops have relocated to the Malcha Mall and tourists now flock to the Emek Refaim area. Much of the town center has been reduced to a sad medley of hole-in-the-wall shops selling cheap shmatas and rowdy teenagers who haunt the night hours.
That’s why I’m so enthusiastic about the light rail. Upon its completion, Jaffa Road will turn into a pedestrian-only walkway with the new fangled trolleys running down its center.
Freed from the narrow sidewalks and never-ending traffic, the street will experience a resurgence. Already you can see a row of new cafes in the space of a few blocks, flanked by my favorite The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf (the only branch in Jerusalem). A European-style walker-friendly promenade is just the ticket for revitalizing Jerusalem’s core.
Getting there may not be so easy.
Jaffa Road is in the process of being dug up. Large swaths are currently blocked off entirely. Buses have been diverted to adjacent Nevi’im Street which is much too congested to handle the flow. Construction has been painfully slow, leading mayor-elect Nir Barkat to call for the entire project to be stopped and be replaced by high-speed buses.
I’ve already lived through this once. When I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, the City’s main artery, Market Street, was dug up for nearly a decade during the building of the BART subway. Businesses folded and Market Street was off-limits for private cars and buses alike.
Eventually, construction was completed and the street now boasts a range of trendy shopping and entertainment facilities. The subway brings in visitors from all over the Bay Area, conveniently and quickly. No one discounts BART’s effectiveness today.
The same will undoubtedly be true for Jerusalem.
A project as grand and complex as Jerusalem’s light rail system has never been attempted before in Israel (the high speed train between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv may eventually top it, if it doesn’t get derailed for the umpteenth time). After a peek at the vehicles that will, hopefully no later than 2010, rattle through town, I remain an enthusiastic supporter.
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