Haifa Cable Car

The wire crosses the steep, largely undeveloped western flank of the Carmel between the seafront and the ridge. There is nothing much underneath it: rock, scrub and the paths that run down towards Elijah's Cave. The stated line length is 355 metres and the rise between the stations 130 metres, and those are the numbers repeated by Israel National News in 2002, by ynet in 2008 and by the English Wikipedia entry. Hebrew Wikipedia's infobox gives 375 metres while its own text gives 355, so the discrepancy is inside a single source rather than between two.

The cabins are the point. Six spheres run on the line, three in each direction, and they travel as one group rather than independently, leaving each station every quarter of an hour. They are glazed most of the way round, which is what ynet meant in describing a 360 degree outlook over Haifa Bay and north along the coast as far as Rosh Hanikra. Capacity is small: when the college scheme described below began, ynet put the number who could go up at any one time at 18 to 20 people across the three cabins on that side.

How long the crossing takes depends on who is asked, and the gap is large enough to be worth stating. The operator's own site sells it as a five minute ride between sky and earth. The public relations officer for Gordon Academic College, describing the same machine in December 2016, gave a cycle of three to five minutes. Ynet's 2008 survey printed fifteen minutes for the 355 metres, which does not fit either of the other two and looks like the quarter-hour departure interval recorded elsewhere.

• 355 m of line, 130 m of height between the stations
• Six spherical cabins, three running each way as a single group
• Departures every 15 minutes from each station
• About five minutes in the cabin, on the operator's own figure
• 18 to 20 passengers at a time in the three cabins on one side, as reported in 2016

The cable car was put up for tourism during the mayoralty of Arie Gurel, to a design by the architect Amnon Galpman, and was built by the Economic Company for Haifa. Gurel was born in Poland in 1918, reached the country at seventeen, served in the Haganah and trained as an electronic engineer before going into public life. He won three consecutive elections and was mayor from 1978 until 1993, and he died in Haifa on 28 October 2007. Ynet's obituary lists the cable car alongside the Bat Galim promenade and the Bahai terraces among the works of those fifteen years, and records what the city called it: because the cabins are round, they became the mayor's eggs, or Gurel's eggs.

Ownership has been private throughout. Hebrew Wikipedia names the owner as Y. BaIr Holdings 1995 Ltd, trading as Yotvata, the company behind the Yotvata BaIr restaurant chain, and cites the receipts passengers are handed. Ynet's 2008 round-up located the lower station inside the Yotvata BaIr restaurant complex on the promenade, which is the same arrangement described from the other direction. The practical consequence is that this line has never been part of Haifa's public transport network, and no municipal travel card is valid on it.

Hebrew Wikipedia opens its account of the line not with engineering but with fiction, quoting the passage in Theodor Herzl's 1902 novel Altneuland, in Nahum Sokolow's translation, in which a great iron carriage is seen flying above palm trees, suspended from a vast iron bridge. The article's claim is that Haifa's cable car realised the image, down to the palms planted at the Bat Galim station. That is an editorial reading rather than a documented intention, and it is the article's own, but the palms are there.

The reception at the time was not uncritical. Carmel Magazine's history of the line records that residents were sceptical of the idea of getting about the city this way, and that it settled instead into a straightforward tourist attraction. The nickname is the part that lasted.

The machine is substantially the one built in 1986: the same alignment, the same two stations, the same six spheres. What has gone is the way it was meant to be used. In its original configuration the cabins were to move almost without pause, with a commentary on the landscape playing inside them as passengers crossed. By the 2000s, Hebrew Wikipedia records, the cabins left each station once every fifteen minutes, travelled as a single group, and the sound system had stopped working. Nobody has replaced it.

There have been two long stoppages. The first came with the Second Lebanon War in 2006, when the line was shut. Hebrew Wikipedia says it returned to service around eighteen months later. Ynet's national survey of cable cars, published on 30 January 2008, still described it as closed following war damage and not operating at the time of writing, which sets the lower bound on that outage independently of the encyclopaedia. The second was shorter and stranger: on 1 January 2016 the cable car's communications cable was torn by high winds and the line shut for about two months. The operator's site still carries a warning that opening hours may change according to the weather.

The maker is worth a caveat. Hebrew Wikipedia attributes the cable car to the Austrian and Swiss firm Doppelmayr/Garaventa, and English Wikipedia files the page in the same group's category. That group has existed in that form only since 2002, when Doppelmayr of Wolfurt merged with Garaventa AG of Switzerland, so the attribution names the company as it is now rather than telling you which of the two supplied a machine erected in 1986. Neither encyclopaedia goes further, and the operator publishes nothing at all about who built it.

• Kept: the 1986 alignment, both stations, and the six spherical cabins
• Gone: the near-continuous running, and the recorded commentary inside the cabins
• Shut from 2006 for roughly eighteen months, after the Second Lebanon War
• Shut for about two months from 1 January 2016, when wind tore the communications cable

In December 2016 the line acquired a second job. Gordon Academic College sits on the French Carmel, a few minutes' walk from the upper station, and had spent years in a parking crisis serious enough to produce disputes with neighbours and student protests. The college's answer was to send its people the long way round: park free among the hundreds of spaces near the Bat Galim promenade, ride up, and walk in. The college paid the fares during the pilot, 2,500 students and staff were issued cards identifying them, and the cable car's management extended the operating day to 07:30 to 19:30 to fit the timetable.

Ynet, reporting from the first morning on 6 December 2016, found students who had got up half an hour later than usual and still arrived on time, and named the obvious weakness of the scheme in the same breath: only 18 to 20 people can go up at once in the three cabins available on that side. The college's spokeswoman said the cycle ran between three and five minutes, so the queue moved.

The arrangement never extended beyond the college. Hebrew Wikipedia is explicit that the free travel applies only to Gordon's students and staff and is not included in the arrangements covering the city's other transport. For everyone else this remains a ticketed attraction bought at the door, which is the single most common misunderstanding about it.

The lower station stands on the Bat Galim promenade, and what waits there is the sea. The operator's own description of the neighbourhood is unusually honest about the seasons: a beach that fills with holidaymakers in summer, and surfers who come mainly in winter for the high waves that break in this corner of the bay. The promenade itself was one of the projects of the same mayoralty that built the cable car.

The upper station opens onto Stella Maris, at the seaward end of the Carmel. Across the road is the Carmelite monastery and church, the mother house of the order worldwide, and beside it the lookout over Haifa Bay that most people came up for. Two things catch visitors out. The church closes from 12:00 to 15:00 every day, so a lunchtime ride arrives at a locked door. And the lighthouse next to it is a working military installation rather than part of the visit.

Between the two stations, on the slope the cable car crosses, is Elijah's Cave, a rock-cut chamber holy to Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze, where visitors leave written petitions in the walls. The operator describes it as reachable by an easy stepped path and notes the seasonal flowering along the tracks that run down to it from Stella Maris. That makes the useful ticket a single rather than a return: ride up for ₪25, walk down past the cave, and finish on the promenade.