Some of the headlines are saying that a strike of Train Authority employees was averted at the last minute last night and therefore disruptions for this morning's trains have also been averted.

Other headlines are reporting that there are disruptions in the train lines and hundreds of people are waiting in different cities for bus lines to get to work,. While Egged and Transportation Authority officials have promised that there would be an increase in buses on the lines to deal with the heavier crowds, "on the ground" no increase has been noticed.

This is really nothing new. They stop the train fairly regularly in Bet Shemesh for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is work on the tracks, sometimes it is work on other lines tracks, and now it is due to the fire in the train up north 2 weeks ago requiring all lines using the older trains to be taken offline indefinitely and the trains sent for a safety inspection. And Bet Shemesh is not the only city, as many cities are affected by this.

When this happens, the local newspapers all report that the bus companies are beefing up the lines to handle the heavier crowds, yet in practice no new buses or routes are added. There is no reasonable way to get to Tel Aviv from Bet Shemesh by public transportation. There is a direct bus once a day that is reasonable, and besides for that the rest of the buses are unreasonably long routes traveling through the moshavim between Bet Shemesh and Tel Aviv.

Something new I tried the other day was catching a bus to Modiin and taking the train from there. That was reasonable as well, but the problem is the BS-Modiin Ilit line (that stops at the train station in Modiin) only runs four times a day in each direction. If you schedule doesnt match up with that exactly, you are going to be spending a lot of time waiting for a bus to or from Modiin.

The trains authority has been running a shuttle from Bet Shemesh to Lod (and from select other cities as well). The problem is that you never know when this will stop and how reliable it is. I personally asked for information about the shuttles from representatives, and each person gives a different answer, along with everybody saying that the shuttles are on a day to day basis and the schedule can change, along with the decision to run them at all - the shuttles can be stopped at any given moment. You might rely on the shuttles to get to work, and then show up the next morning and find out that they decided no more shuttles.

The uncertainty is very difficult. People are scrambling around wasting time and energy on a daily basis looking for alternative ways to get to work in a timely fashion, whether it is finding rides, constantly updating and looking for updates regarding the status of the shuttles, looking for new and creative ways to get to TA by bus - a lot of time and energy is wasted on this.

And none of this makes any headlines. We, and other cities, regularly suffer from sheebushim in the train system, and nobody cares. The new bus lines promised by the city that were going to be opened right away 4 months ago are still not running, and it is almost like Bet Shemesh is under siege in relation to Tel Aviv (the bus lines to Jerusalem are pretty good).