As an Israeli living abroad (Vienna in my case, have been here for 7 years), the lacking mass transport in Tel Aviv (you can kinda get by without a car, but it's not easy and as you say even if you live in a central location you still need a car sometimes) is my most major reason to not even consider Tel Aviv a real option right now (neither me nor my girlfriend have driving licenses or the will to ever have a car).

Even just dropping the silly no-transit-on-saturday rule would be a huge improvement (then you could actually get pretty much anywhere you need to, just not very quickly and you'd have to live in a farily central location inside Tel Aviv proper).

This really puzzles me - if significantly poorer cities such as Budapest and Prague can pull off decent mass-transit, how come Tel Aviv can't?

    I rent a car for trips across the country if needed

How do you visit people outside Tel Aviv on the weekend? Probably my most common ailment in your situation would be that I couldn't easily visit family members and friends even if they live in greater Tel Aviv on weekends, since the buses/trains don't work on Saturdays and shared taxis don't go everywhere.

So - I have a license and love to drive. But here it is ~different~. The whole traffic 'culture' constantly makes me think that I'd cause accidents here: My Autobahn mindset doesn't translate to the driving behavior here, so I fear that _I_ will crash into someone, someday, because of 'No, he certainly won't do ... BOOM'.

Agreed, the Saturday issue is annoying sometimes. You can go by train as far as I am informed (but where to? The options are limited) and the sherut + cab solution works. Bus, (sherut,) cab are ~cheap~ here.

In TLV I need no car, never. For shopping it might be annoying sometimes, but that's really just my own lazyness, I think.

Renting cars: I don't need one without planning ahead. If I do that, I can easily rent it in advance (ignoring the Saturday issue again). In the greater area I still try to use the bike. A car is for visits to the dead sea, to Haifa, Jerusalem (train works just as well though) etc. I don't have family here and friends are ~local~, i.e. TLV, Ramat Gan, Ramat Aviv etc. => Bike

This really puzzles me - if significantly poorer cities such as Budapest and Prague can pull off decent mass-transit, how come Tel Aviv can't?

Can you provide some source? Since, at least according to EUROSTAT the Prague NUTS-2 Region is in EU's top 10[1] and Tel Aviv is not even in the Middle East's top 10. Also, a lot of the machinery for the Czech mass transit systems (trams, trolleybuses, metro trains, Esko (commuter) trains, buses, fare collection systems) is produced locally, thus directly contributing to the economy. Israel just doesn't have those centuries of excellent tradition in machine-engineering and construction.

1. http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/1-18022010...

We were in Krakow recently and just about cried seeing the number of trams running through the place - in Edinburgh we're spending about a billion pounds for one tram line that goes from not-quite-the-airport to the city center.

    Can you provide some source?

I don't have a source, the impression was based on my subjective knowledge that my Czech friends earn significantly less than my Israeli friends.

I know a lot of people in both countries - 1000 euro/month is a nice middle-class salary in Prague, in Tel Aviv that's just barely making ends-meet, if at all (it's quite possibly that your rent alone will be close to that much, and not in a particularly nice apartment either).

Also, why it is only decent? The Prague mass transit system has comfortable clean and warm vehicles, extremely good coverage (14 commuter train lines, ~24 light rail, 3 metro and hundreds of bus routes), short intervals and all of that is also in the suburbs. I have been to a lot of places, but haven't seen a system that functions much better.

Oh, and it costs <20EUR per month...

This was very much not the point of my post :)

I was talking about Tel Aviv and used Budapest and Prague as off hand examples - if you wish you can replace them with Cracow and Bratislava.

Thank you, it's nice to hear this as a resident. Alas, I'd also go for "decent" because although the transit system is good, it's being sabotaged by the city council - it prefers to fund building highways through the city center, and to sell off the profitable parts of the public transit company. Dark times are ahead, what with much of the rolling stock nearing the end of life and much-needed extensions being deferred indefinitely for purely pork-barrel reasons.