Unlike Seattle, Israel has much better public transportation. There are many bus lines and usually you only need to take one or two buses to where you want to go. Since there are so many buses, a few streets have bus lanes (this does not include all private buses). The street one block away from our apartment is a VERY busy road and it also has a bus lane.
Many intersections in Jerusalem or anywhere in Israel have at least 6 places to cross. So there is not just one place to cross to get to the other side. There are even streets where you need to cross four parts of the road just to get to the other side! This can be very annoying!!!
Also, the traffic lights slow you down. For example, most of the lights to cross a street are not in sync with each other. This means that you may have a green light to walk halfway across the street, and then be stuck in the middle of the street for about a minute (it seems longer than it is) waiting to cross to the other side.
On most streets, there is about 30 seconds where all of the lights (for walking) are green, but that is not usually enough time to get all the way across. Since I hate waiting in the middle of the street, I like to walk very fast or run across the street in order to make it to the other side in time.
In Jerusalem, there are buses that go around the city, a light rail that goes through part of the city (and it is insanely efficient because it is on a street closed off to cars), buses that go to other cities from Jerusalem, and a super fast train that goes to the airport (where you can switch to other trains that go at a normal speed to get to other places).
The fast train only takes like 23 minutes to get to Ben-Gurion Airport (it would take around an hour to drive). To get to the fast train, you have to go very deep underground. It takes six different escalators that are all CRAZY steep to get to the train platform.
If you are ever in Israel, you will be shocked at the effort it takes to cross a street and how annoying it is that you need to cross multiple crosswalks to get to the other side of the street.
This year I have become super grateful for the intersections in Seattle because you only have to cross at one place to get to the other side of the street.
– Naomi
The red and green dots of light are the walking signals