Wheels come off for Egged in late-bus case

By MIRIAM BULWAR DAVID-HAY (TRANSLATED)
The Egged bus company has been ordered to pay a Haifa woman NIS 750 in compensation after she waited for one-and-a-half hours for a bus that never came, reports www.mynet.co.il. A judge in Haifa's small claims court ruled that the bus company should compensate the woman for not providing a scheduled service, saying that many members of the public needed and were entitled to receive Egged's services. According to the report, the woman sued the bus company after she waited in vain at the city's train station one evening for a No. 18 bus to take her home to the Neveh Sha'anan neighborhood. She told the court she had been frightened and inconvenienced by the long wait at night. In response, Egged argued that no real harm had been caused to the woman, saying she could have taken a No. 19 bus instead. An Egged driver told the court the No. 18 bus had not run that evening because there were too few drivers to meet the workload. The judge ruled in the woman's favor, saying that many members of the public required Egged's services, but in this case had not received them. He said the woman had been forced to wait at night in vain because the company had not scheduled enough drivers for its lines, and rejected the argument that she could have taken a different bus. The judge ordered the company to pay her NIS 750 in compensation, plus NIS 250 in legal costs.