Earlier this week, we wrote about map designs of public transit around the world. In our research, we came across the Haifa subway—the shortest in the world. The design seems totally unique. Have you ever encountered a transit system like this before?

The system opened in 1959 and has 6 stations along its 1.8-kilometer track that climbs Mount Carmel in Haifa, a coastal city in northern Israel. According to DesignBoom, “the system transports around 2,000 people along the track each day and is among the most unusual subway stations in the world.”

OTHER MODES

Israel is a small country with a total land area of about 8,000 square miles. It’s a country slightly smaller in land mass than the state of New Jersey, with 7.3 million people and a high percentage of them located on the Mediterranean coast. Along with Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Haifa is one of Israel’s largest cities with about 1 million residents.

The city has a bus rapid transit (BRT) system, called Metronit, in the works. Treehugger wrote about the plan back in 2008. Currently, as we wrote about before, intercity bus travel is one of the most popular ways of getting around Israel. Egged Ltd. is Israel’s largest transit bus company and the second largest in the world after London Buses. It operates 945 lines, serving a million passengers daily. About 47 percent of Israeli bus passengers use the service, according to one source.

Despite Haifa’s short tramway-like subway and efforts to improve the bus system, there are a ton of traffic problems in the city. The Israeli Finance Ministry says the country loses NIS 20 billion a year (that’s about $5.5 billion) due to traffic. And Haifa accounts for 10 percent of these costs. Troubling news for Israel, a recent study found that the “use of public transportation by commuters to and from work declined by 20% between 1995 and 2008, while use of private cars increased by 15%.” Israel faces a number of reasons for the increases in car ownership, including tax incentives for the purchase of vehicles, the lack of a national transportation plan and a decline in the number of commuter buses.

To deal with this issue, Haifa plans to have 100 18-meter buses in place for the next 12 years. Implementation will start in 2011.  Some of the buses will be diesel and others will be hybrid. The hybrid buses will act as prototypes for other cities around the country, should they prove efficient. The Jerusalem Post says, “Metronit will augment the city’s existing Carmelit subway and a series of existing and planned cable cars that connect the different parts of the city resting on the Carmel Mountains and the lower city by the port.” (Read our previous post about cable car systems around the world.)

We shall see whether the new BRT system is designed as uniquely as Haifa’s subway line.