Mediterranean Escher: A Glimpse Inside Tel Aviv's Central Bus Station TEL AVIV - As Labor Day weekend approaches, hundreds of thousands of bus passengers, eager to savor summer's last gasp, will pass through the Port Authority Bus Terminal. As baffling as some tourists - and even New Yorkers - find the place, imagine that sort of human traffic scurrying through a labyrinth of oddly placed stairways and market stalls. Picture that in your mind's eye, and you'll know what it's like to travel by bus through Tel Aviv. Israel has roughly the same land area and population as New Jersey. But where Jerseyans often drive out of state, Israelis don't have that option, as most border crossings are closed to private vehicles. The relatively small distances Israelis travel within the country's narrow borders, combined with the high tax rates placed on buying a new car, mean that many choose to travel by bus. And many of those buses pass through Tel Aviv's immense, confusing central bus station. If you ask a Tel Aviv local how to get to the central bus station, that person will likely ask you if you mean the old one or the new one, even though the old central bus station hasn't been used in decades, and the new one has been in service for 20 years. That might not, however, be the case for much longer. Tel Aviv's "new" central bus station is one of the largest in the world. According to the Tel Aviv city government, the station encompasses more than 750,000 square feet of floor space on seven levels, taking up a 144,000-square-foot chunk of Tel Aviv's troubled southern district. Planning for the station originally started in the 1960s, but construction was only completed in 1993, according to the city. Venturing inside for the first time can be overwhelming. Shops, merchant carts and, of course, an endless stream of bus passengers, are stuffed into every corner of the extensive structure. Clashing colors play off of oddly angled walls and disconnected stairways, making the building's interior look like something M.C. Escher might have dreamed up if he had lived in the 1990s and frequented Middle Eastern bazaars. The station's seven floors are interconnected by a series of staircases, escalators and elevators that make navigating the station a logistical nightmare. But every day an estimated 80,000 passengers manage to find their way through. The station serves as the hub for Israel's extensive national bus infrastructure, which - according to figures provided by Israel's transportation ministry - handles 660 million passengers every year, out of a population of about eight million people. In Israel, 85 percent of public transportation is provided by buses, which comprise a fleet of 6,800 buses across the country. Egged, according to the bus company's own statistics, operates 3,000 of those. But the central bus station in Tel Aviv serves other purposes beside transportation. The structure also encompasses one of the city's largest shopping malls, with over 1,000 storefronts. Venture down to the first two floors, however, and you'll see nothing but empty storefronts and disused platforms. Signs around the station direct soldiers to the bottom floor for when the Israel Defense Forces use the platforms for occasional troop transports, like the one I took to basic training in the north. The central bus station serves as the center of a growing refugee community, some of whom infiltrate Israel's borders illegally and others who have claimed political asylum. According to statistics from Israel's Population and Immigration Authority, there are 54,000 refugees living in Israel, 56.5 percent of them coming from Eritrea, 26 percent from Sudan and most of the rest from other African countries. Many of the refugees, according to Kav LaOved, an organization that deals with immigrants in Israel, have taken up residence in southern Tel Aviv, the area where the central bus station is. The city is examining various options for rejuvenating the district, and one of the first steps will be to decommission the central bus station altogether. Plans released by the Tel Aviv city government this year call for rerouting buses to one of two alternative stations - one next to the Tel Aviv 2000 Terminal on Arlozerov Street in the north of the city, and another by the Holon highway junction to the south - and either repurposing the existing building as a cultural, academic and commercial campus, or demolishing it entirely. The city has only just begun to evaluate the options, so making a decision - much less carrying it out - could take several years. Once it does, however, the only ones likely to miss what has become a symbol for overbuilt inefficiency in the country will be those shopkeepers who remain.