name | Egged Israel Transport Cooperative Society Ltdאגד |
---|---|
logo | Egged logo.svg |
logo size | 50px |
parent | Self-owned (worker cooperative) 2,222 members 6,227 employees |
founded | |
headquarters | 142 Menachem Begin RoadTel Aviv 64921Israel |
service area | Israel (nationwide),West BankBulgaria PolandNetherlands (starting December 2011) |
fleet | 2,861 |
ridership | 25,267 |
website | Egged (English) }} |
Egged Israel Transport Cooperative Society Ltd (), a cooperative owned by its members is the largest transit bus company in Israel. It provides about 55 % of public transport services throughout the country, employs 6,227 workers and has 2,861 buses (including 57 bulletproof buses) for more than 928 service routes and 3,103 alternative routes all over Israel and the Israeli occupied territories. Egged buses make 25,267 trips every day, transporting about a million passengers over 720,073 km of roads. Egged's bus routes reach most settlements, kibbutzim, moshavim and cities in Israel, as well as in the West Bank, and the company also runs local bus networks in most Israeli cities and towns.
During the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973, Egged buses and drivers helped to reinforce the logistics system of the IDF and drove soldiers and food to the battlefields.
In late 2002, Egged sued the Palestinian Authority and its Chairman Yassir Arafat for compensation of damages and loss of income due to terrorist attacks and suicide bombings on buses during the second intifada, claiming that the attacks had deterred passengers from taking buses. On February 3, 2003, the Tel Aviv District Court ruled that Palestinian Authority Chairman Arafat has to pay Egged NIS 52 million in damages for the loss of one year's income and NIS 100,000 in court expenses.
Despite deregulation attempts by Benjamin Netanyahu, Egged is still Israel's largest bus company, is subsidized by the government, and still controls most of the inter-city bus lines in Israel. Netanyahu's attempts were cut short by a bus strike that brought the country to a halt, and Egged's workers and directors don't hesitate to declare that any further attempts to undermine the company's monopoly will be met with similar measures. However, in recent years, many bus lines have begun to be operated by smaller bus companies such as Dan, Kavim, Superbus, Connex and others. In 2005, Egged and the Israeli Government reached an agreement under which by the year 2015 subsidization will be reduced to specific sectors, the disabled, soldiers and students, and for certain equipment.
Egged has purchased 51 % of the Bulgarian Trans-Triumph bus company, which runs service to cities such as Varna and Sofia, as well as airport and tour buses for approximately 4 million Euro. Egged, through its affiliated company, is responsible for the operation of half the public transportation in the city of Varna, the second largest city in Bulgaria with about half-a-million residents. Egged also formed a joint venture company with Rousse municipality called EGGED ROUSSE JSC which operates the public transport in the town of Rousse.
Egged operates some 1,400 buses in Poland, where it owns the Polish bus company Mobilis it acquired for 4 million Euro in 2006. The company operates some metropolitan bus routes, including exclusive franchises in Warsaw, Kraków and Bydgoszcz. The BDS movement has launched a Polish campaign against Egged, claiming that the company “undermines working conditions in Poland and is involved in maintaining a system of settlements [in the Israeli occupied territories] that violate international law”.
Egged Bus Services have also got an eight-year contract with an option for an additional two years worth about 500 million Euro for public transport in the region Waterland in the Netherlands starting December 2011. The contract drew opposition from local Dutch activist groups who accuse Egged of supporting Israel’s settlements policy in the West Bank, and consider the company's winning the tender as indirect Dutch support for Israel’s settlements policy, according to reports by Radio Netherlands Worldwide. Egged’s Dutch subsidiary denies being involved in politics.
Until January 2011, Egged also operated gender-segregated lines, commonly called “mehadrin” buses, mainly running in and/or between major Haredi population centers. In these sex segregated buses women are expected to sit in the back of the bus and wear so called “modest dress”. The “mehadrin” lines were criticized after a woman, Miriam Shear, was assaulted for refusing to give up her seat to a male passenger and move to the back of the bus.
In 2011, after a suit filed by a number of women including Shear and novelist Naomi Ragen, the Israeli High Court ruled that the system as it was implemented was discriminatory. The court, accepting the recommendations of a committee set up to investigate the “mehadrin” buses, ordered that signs designating buses as segregated (even voluntarily) were to be removed and new signs to be put up informing passengers that they had the right to sit wherever they wanted, and stressed that neither passengers nor the driver could pressure anyone into complying with a segregated seating arrangement. Egged, suspected of allegedly violating the Supreme Court ruling, stresses that there is no “mehadrin” concept and that the company “operates only in line with Supreme Court instructions and allows every passenger to select his seat without gender discrimination.”
Category:Bus companies of Israel Category:Cooperatives in Israel Category:Worker cooperatives Category:Companies established in 1933 Category:Bus transport in Poland Category:Israeli brands
cs:Egged de:Egged es:Egged fr:Coopérative d'autobus Egged he:אגד nl:Egged ja:エゲッドバス pt:Egged ru:Эгед yi:אגדThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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