 In addition, a funicular underground rail line, the Carmelit, was opened in Haifa in 1959.Following the low point of 2.5 million passengers in 1990, the extensive investments in the national heavy rail infrastructure beginning in the early to mid-1990s made train travel more appealing, especially given the ever-increasing road congestion, and consequently passenger rail use began rising rapidly—by a factor of about fivefold over any given ten-year span during the 1990s and 2000s.Consequently, in the 25-year span between 1990 and 2015, heavy rail passenger traffic grew over 20-times.