About the project

The Hatahana project was created as a non-profit effort dedicated to improvement of Tel Aviv Central Bus Station. This is an unofficial project, made without any involvement from the station’s administration or the city municipality. But that does not mean we don’t welcome cooperation or donations—contact us via the contact form.

View from the station

Author and support

The project is led by Mikhail Korotkov, a photographer and visual-research artist. His work explores social, political, and religious themes.

Informational and moral support provided by Yung Yidish, a non-profit organization, cultural center, and Yiddish library located in the Central Bus Station.

Goal

Our goal is to raise awareness of the station and address its many issues: wayfinding for travelers and visitors, understanding the general layout, business visibility, and more—anything that can be improved through research, art, design, coding, and small publications. The station itself has no official website or social media presence and makes no visible effort to address these issues or communicate with the public at all.

Our plans, in no particular order:

• The new Central Bus Station map
  Drawn from scratch using numerous real plans as references. Simplified, updated, and improved. The station was intentionally designed to be confusing, and the basis for solving this confusion is knowing where you are.
• Travel guide brochure
  There is no reliable way to know which platform you need to go to for your bus. Navigation apps aren’t that detailed, and the station confusingly has different platforms with the same numbers. This travel guide brochure will help solve the problem by clearly showing where each bus departs from. Luckily, there aren’t as many bus lines left in the station compared to the past.
• Shopping guide brochure
  A map that highlights all businesses still operating in the station.
• Website (you are using it right now)
  Information for travelers and visitors, mirroring what we’ve already created in the brochures, adding interactivity. This will be an ongoing task, with step-by-step updates.
• Tahana as brand
  All the plans mentioned here should be unified under one name, logo, color scheme, and design, with future potential social media integration in mind. We cannot—and don’t want to—impersonate anyone by using the real station’s logo and name.
• (Guerrilla?) wayfinding
  Finding the exit or toilets by following the official pointers can be impossible—some sections of the station have been closed off, removed, or barricaded, but all the signs pointing to them are still there. While we cannot remove these signs ourselves, we can leave additional clarifications in the most problematic corners of the station.