Does Your City Need a Gondola?
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- Опубликовано: 20 окт 2024
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Gondolas are probably a favourite transport mode of transit enthusiasts and regular folk alike, and apart from ski resorts and hilly mountainsides, we're starting to see more of them in our cities. But does your city really need a gondola?
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Ever wondered why your city's transit just doesn't seem quite up to snuff? RMTransit is here to answer that, and help you open your eyes to all of the different public transportation systems around the world!
Reece (the RM in RMTransit) is an urbanist and public transport critic residing in Toronto, Canada, with the goal of helping the world become more connected through metros, trams, buses, high-speed trains, and all other transport modes.
Being from Colombia, Medellín's MetroCable was a gamechanger when it was introduced, the time reduction was considerable and it improved the lives of many people in hard to reach parts of the city. Great video!
Thanks for watching! Awesome to hear about the impact!
@@RMTransit The hilly (very hilly) city of Medellin certainly justifies a gondola system. But I wouldn't suggest it unless there's a lot of climbing needed.
@@RMTransit great video pal, I'm Colombian too and just a little bit sad about not seeing any footage of the gondola solution implemented in our capital Bogotá, El TrasmiCable
We study this in the uk for geography. I know so much stuff about your transport system it’s wild.
@@RMTransit Hi Reece. Loyal viewer here from the NorCal Delta. Thanks for your timely video. I just recently got interested in studying what I would name the "Grand Gondola" proposal in Utah. Your discussion provides excellent pro and cons and has helped me immensely to understand, from a novice standpoint, more about this topic. Great job!
There is a gondola in my city (Saint-Denis, Réunion island, France) with 5 station and even if it is as fast as a bus (at least from where i live to the terminus) you can't beat that frequency, 37 second of waiting time it's so relaxing!
When did that open? I don't remember it last time I was in Réunion but that was some years ago now (the Route de Tamarins was still fairly newly opened)
@@dasy2k1 wow that takes me back, for the gondola it open last year
@@dasy2k1 It opened last year. I have tried it and it is neat. A basic advantage of gondolas that is not noted in the video, I believe, is that it provides nice views!
@@qwxcvgy that would be why... I need to save up and go visit again soon. I have family in Piton St Leu
There are plans for a gondola system in Pittsburgh and I think they actually make sense given the hilly terrain and river crossings. We already have 2 furniculars (and used to have 17 before most were removed). The planned gondola will travel over/through a historically underserved neighborhood that is on top of a steep hill and connect it with jobs and other transit modes to both the north and south, crossing a river in the process
Yeah, Pittsburgh was the first place that came to mind to me. A (very) hilly city with clusters of population separated by cliffs, ravines, and other difficult terrain. Seems like the perfect place for this sort of transit.
Didn't know that Pittsburgh had funiculars! 17 at a time! Definitely gonna check out the city for a weekend or something like that. Seems really cool.
@@rileyowens9033 they are part of the transit system so it’s like 3 dollars, same as a bus or trolley. Can take bikes on if there’s no one in the accessible seating
@@rileyowens9033 I've been a few times to Pittsburgh, and the funiculars are worth checking out. You can take one funicular up hill, then walk to the other one while enjoying the view over the city. And don't forget to check out the engine rooms, which are visible to the public. (And marvel at the wooden cogs in the cogweels).
How tf is Pittsburgh so OP when it comes to transit? It has just about every system of transit except for maybe heavy rail. For a rust belt city past its heyday, it still amazes me
Funny… I was just in Medellín las week. The gondola system there is amazing…. one really cool thing over there is that they did not only use it to connect the poor urban settlements on the hills to the city and the main metro lines… but also to connect those areas to a huge natural reserve…. which is another gerat application for gondolas… bring people from urban areas to recreational areas (which may be sensitive natural environments) to which you otherwise would not be able to provide mass transit
Parque Arví, I was there! it is pretty cool to have access to that from downtown. It'd be like a line from central Vancouver making a few stops in North Vancouver and then plunging deep into the mountains, all on a one-seat ride.
Quito - Ecuador also desperately needs this!
My city (Chorzów, Poland) used to have 3 gandola lines in a triangle shape, and it was quite useful (only way of transit through a huge Park - few times larger than Central Park). Unfortunately it has been reduced to only one, which is pretty much redundant with a tram line, so it's only a tourist attraction now.
Why did it get downgraded? To 1 line?
So I live in La Paz. I had to live 2 years through the nightmare of commuting a 1 hour distance before the miteleferico lines that actually help me go from my home to my work were finished. So I have first-hand knowledge of how much of a life changer it was.
My commute changed from having to use cars or "mini buses" to get to work, with awful traffic congestion and actually finding a car/mini bus with a seat was a complex nightmare to commuting between three different lines of miteleferico.
Definitely the best aspect about my office trips is the completely fixed travel time.
Switching between the lines is not as annoying as it sounds, you just need to walk for a bit.
Stations are at walking distance from my home and work, so I'm one of the luckier users. But the other lines have mostly allowed me to avoid using cars for the vast majority of the time.
The gondolas are actually pretty slower. But since they don't have to go through traffic and move in a straight line, they are usually the best choice regardless. Going to El Alto used to be a nightmare trip, but now it's just 40 minutes away. I can browse the web or watch youtube videos while on it.
I think La Paz just happens to be a very specific situation where this is a great form of transportation. The whole city is difficult terrain. Building a subway is not very viable due to ground quality. And we don't have a lot of money, so cost effectiveness is good. Buses were attempted but they get stuck in traffic as well. If up to me, I would get rid of some roads and build rail, but the social aspects are pretty difficult.
We are the highest capital in the world and El Alto is even higher, so winds are very strong, but there are seldom problems with it. There are cases when service has to stop due to the weather, it tends to be a 10 minutes halt.
Regarding maintenance, it's usually done for a week every year, choosing different weeks for each line. It does mean that the capacity is lost during that week. But a specific thing about La Paz is that the school year greatly worsens traffic. So the trick is to have the maintenance breaks when the kids are in vacation, that way the city can survive the loss of capacity. It's still very annoying, though.
Ever since they were built, we have gone through very awful social conflicts that sometimes involved public transport going on strike, sometimes streets getting blocked and in our worst days, entry of fuel to the city getting blocked. These were situations in which cars became nerfed or even completely unavailable. But of course people still needed to work. In those situations Miteleferico's capacity became completely overflown. I had to get used to waiting 30 minutes in line waiting to get to the gondola. But you do what you do.
It"s nice to hear, that the teleferico system in La Paz has contributed to such an improvement in living quality. I hope I can ride in one day. I have lived in Quito - Ecuador for one year and even though it's geography is less extreme compared to La Paz, lying at 2850m on average and with a population of 2,8 million, the city is wedged in a narrow andean valley that stretches 30km from south to north, while only being 5km wide from the southern end to the center. But additionally to that, the lower Valleys to the East, Valle de los Chillos and Valle de Tumbaco (where the Airport is located) have urbanized a lot in the last decades, they are urban/suburban satellite areas of Quito from where many people commute to every day ("ciudades dormitorio"). However, in order to ascend to Quito from the Valleys (at 2500m), you first have to cross over the densely populated eastearn hilltop area of Quito (3150m) and then descend to the Quito-Valley at 2800m. On the western Pichincha Volcano flank, the city has also climbed up the mountain. So this is where a gondola system would really help to decongest these urban highways that are filled in smog from hundreds of buses, additionally the private vehicles have increised a lot as well. At least, Line 1 of the underground Metro de Quito is due to open this december. But It is not enough, as it only runs from south to the financial district .. while particularly the northern part has even worse traffic than the valleys.. Unfortunately, when a teleferico system was proposed by the municipality back in 2016, it got resistance from several neighborhoods and the political opposition. Some so-called experts called the project aparrently "useless" and it was cancelled. :( However, the city of Guayaquil, on the pacific coast of Ecuador with 2,8 million inhabitans as well, has built the aerocable, a gondola that crosses the wide Guayas river and connects to the neighboring city of Durán. But that project as been criticised a lot by the media and part of the public, there seems to be a lack in passengers and no connecting buses.
I travelled around colombia a month ago and got a chance to appreciate the transportation system in Medellin. Is is so amazing what they managed to do there. For me as a european, the gondolas are associated with some luxurious ski resorts in Switzerland, Austria, France. It was so unexpected to see the gondolas as a means of transport, primarily designed for the "poor" neighborhoods. The other thing that surprized me - the metro in Medellin is much cleaner than in most European cities. It seems that locals in Medellin appreciate their transport more and they treat it with care and respect.
A lot of your footage is from the Cablebus system in Mexico City which you barely mention! While it's one of the newest, it's now the longest, I believe (at least if you also count the Mexicable in the northern section of the metro area).
When you do that separate vid, I hope you cover Line 3, which is being built rn along the edge of the 4 sections of Chapultepec Park (also undergoing significant renovation). That one will be super popular IMO.
The metrocable in Medellin was and still is a game changer for the city, making it more united and connected, whilst being pretty affordable to construct. Also, Tourists love them!, pretty good video as always!
I’m looking forward to the gondola LA is building, but not because I think gondola’s a particularly cool or anything. I’m just looking forward to not being stuck in traffic next time I go to a Dodger game!
In reality, I feel like a bus lane system would perform better, but I’m just happy that we’re committing to doing something!
Of course, something is better than nothing . . . Usually
I agree. Opposition against it keep trying to make a point that drunk Dodgers fans will fight regularly and end up throwing each other out the gondola. Ridiculous
@@HarZoiD I have not heard this argument yet. God the most ridiculous arguments always come out when people start trying to do stuff good for the environment/community
Will that be able to cope with 56,000? people leaving the stadium at the end of a match?
From what I read, it will have a capacity of 5000 people per hour, so it would take 11+ hours to clear everyone. Obviously people aren't going to wait that long, they will find an alternative mode of transport.
@@katrinabryce It would add an additional means of getting to the stadium. Most people we probably still drive but it gives people more options. It most likely is not intended to carry the stadium’s full capacity.
One thing I want to mention about the dangleway is the price - £5 for a one-way trip. North Greenwich to Canning Town on the Jubilee line, a trip which is effectively duplicated by the gondola, is £1.80 at peak time, and just £1.60 off peak.
It also goes between two places that are predominantly destinations rather than origins, so ridership is really quite low
Ye this seems like something the middle class would use to avoid having to take public transit (bus/railway) with the peasantry. But I could see this at least lowering the amount of cars on the road.
@@neetfreek9921the silvertown road tunnel is now being built right underneath it, so it's failed at even that 😂
There is talk of using gondolas to travel between Downtown Kansas City, Missouri and Downtown Kansas City, Kansas - both of which are on high hills overlooking the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, with the low-lying West Bottoms district in between.
Not the worst idea, but generally improved transit probably would be wise
Thank you Reece for an extremely interesting video. I would agree with almost everything you say. I personally think that aerial cableways are a practical way of serving high lying suburbs. And remember that cableways (unlike buses) are always electrically driven.
Swiss experience is instructive. They have no URBAN aerial cable cars, but many Swiss towns have urban funiculars. Funiculars are less visually intrusive and are not vulnerable to high winds.
Cable cars, usually of the aerial tramway type, do serve some Swiss high lying VILLAGES.
The well-known Swiss resort of Murren is nowadays ONLY accessible by cable car. The resort of Verbier still has road access, but the main way of getting there is now a Télécabine (French word for gondelbahn).
Verbier is in Valais canton, which has for a long time had a number of villages accessible only by cable car. Valais also still has a number of villages where the public transport is by diesel bus up narrow twisting roads. The canton is now considering replacing these bus routes with (electrically driven) cable cars. This is despite the vulnerability of cable cars to high winds, and the very strict maintenance rules imposed by the Swiss ministry of transport. (Note also that the Swiss MoT insists that cable cars are completely rebuilt every 40 years.)
Cable cars across rivers, such as those in London and Cologne, are purely tourist. The drawback of these cross-river lines for ‘ordinary’ passengers going to work, school, shops etc. is that you have to change twice - on both sides of the river. Gothenburg had plans for a cross-river line integrated into its excellent tram and bus system and using the same ticketing system, but those plans have been abandoned.
Thanks for the detailed comment
The Gothenburg gondola was a bit too ambitious and failed because of it. Moscow and Bresq has a river crossing gondola which is for transit
Brest and Toulouse have both river crossing transit gondolas so do Moscow and Koblenz and there are more in Germany coming. Cologne is for tourism but that doesn't mean all river crossings are tourist lines.
A funicular with one or two cars is unlikely to serve suburbs at least in the US/Canada and most of Europe. My understanding is the Swiss use them to serve small communities/ villages that are a lot more dense than one would consider a suburb. Plus the ultra high ultra high GDP per capita plus their communities are fairly stable population and location wise which makes funiculars much more practical than almost anywhere else.
@@mattmichael2441 You are only partly correct regarding Switzerland. Just as a few high-lying villages are reached by cable car, a few high-lying villages are served by funiculars, notably Braunwald and Stoos. The modern Stoos line is shown in many youtube videos! But you also find funiculars in the HEART of cities. Probably the best known to tourists is the station-city centre line in Lugano. But the museum=piece Polybahn in Zurich is only about five hundred metres from the Hauptbahnhof. In Berne there is the Marzilibahn. Guess where it is! Right next to the Swiss Parliament. (Takes people DOWN to the river Aare below., where there is housing.)
Very excited for the CDMX video! Going for the first time this year I think and have heard great things about the transit.
Avoid the subway (Metro) if you can; there's a many issues that ain't be normal...
@@josemojicaperez4436 Nah, You are being to paranoic. There has been a couple mechanical incidents, nothing to worry about.
Your channel produces some of my favourite content man. As a geography student, I often watch your videos as a means to find discover more about how certain places operate. I thought I’d just say a massive thank you! This is truly S tier content. 👍😎
12:08 Apparently the Dangleway had just four (yes, four!) regular commuters pre Covid 😂
My city of Santo Domingo has been investing in gondolas transport (teleférico) with a 2nd line about to open next month. My opinion is mixed actually, specially for this new upcoming line. I think an express busway would've been cheaper, faster and adds more capacity. The first line is a bit more justifiable since it crosses 2 rivers (the same river technically) over thousands of improvised homes (aka, slums), which makes construction of bridges difficult in that area.
I agree with you, this mode of transport is good for specific cases, but in my opinion not for *mass* transit. Though given that is way cheaper to construct compared to trams, I think it's an 'okay' temporary solution were the terrain/land use requires it, specially in low-income countries like mine.
Medellín's case makes total sense imo though.
What are your thoughts on the Santiago´s one? Do you think is as useless as the one in the Alcarrizos (Second line)?
@@TheGanimex12 i really don't know much about Santiago's line, only that it's on the way. Though I can say that given Santiago's rough terrain on the outskirts it might make more sense.
India has launched a new project called "Parvatmala" meaning "Necklace on mountain" which is a big project to make 250 new ropeway systems in the country including a few urban Gondola systems.
The city of Shimla in Northern India is first in the list with first phase having 15 stations over 15 km of network costing about 200 million USD approved.
Other cities like Aizawl and Gangtok are next in the list.
Varanasi which is not on hills but really crowded and congested is also looking to build such a system.
The former capital of Germany, Bonn, is planning a gondola as part of their public transit network. It is supposed to link the Venusberg, the former government area and Ramersdorf on the other side of the Rhine making connections with the Stadtbahn and S-Bahn. There is a formal evaluation procedure to determine if a public transit project is justified and the planned route passed that test, so more detailed planning is being done now.
In the Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo has a gondola system connected to its metro line 2. A second gondola line is under construction and set to open later this year.
There was a load of potential in London for a gondola but the one we have misses the mark on so many things.
It runs parallel to other routes, is made redundant by non-parallel routes like the DLR and Elizabeth Line from Woolwich which both cross the river and take me to the ExCeL centre it connects to, its northern stop is not directly outside the ExCeL so some people may think it’s not that convenient, it isn’t part of the standard travel fare pricing, plus it is forced to close when there’s high wind.
Better places for it might have been:
- further downstream where the River Thames gets wider and there are fewer crossings.
- Waterloo and City Line alternative/replacement, perfect because of its constant throughput, minimal footprint, plus can probably run on Sundays with little staffing and even close for maintenance on Sunday without major disruption. Better view too. The downsides being it’s susceptible to wind and the capacity might not be enough.
- Hammersmith where the historic listed bridge was forced to close to traffic indefinitely and at one point closed to pedestrians for about a year.
That one seems like a pure tourist attraction except that it was constructed in a place tourists don't want to go anyway.
@@MattMcIrvin Pure Boris Johnson vanity project. At least he didn't get to build the silly bridge from Scotland to Northern Ireland (over a bit of sea full of unexploded WWII bombs) he wanted when he was Prime Minister.
May I suggest a future discussion of the Jungfrau area in Switzerland, which combines small gondolas, big gondolas, cable cars, conventional railways with rack sections, and the largest rack-railway system in the world in order to carry tourists around?
Doppelmayr (the market lead in ropeways)
just recently announced a new kind of ropeway, the TRI-Line (essentially 3S but compact like normal gondolas) attacks a bit the thtoughput limit and especially the Wind problems.
I absolutely love the Disney Skyliner. So much more relaxing than the walk or the boat between parks and enables an entirely new route of resort hopping at the property.
There is a fully underground funicular climbing up the hillside in the city of Haifa (Israel) complete with intermediate stations too. On a different track, cable cars do have specific safety requirements which if not observed could result with fatalities, as witnessed in Northern Italy in the past few years. With funiculars there is a gravity option, as used in the Lynton & Lynmouth Cliff Railway which uses water to make the upper car heavier and as it descends it pulls up the lower car!
I’m so glad that Medellín finally made the channel! I’m moving there next year, it is such a game changer in specific hilly and dense Latin American contexts.
The one I've actually ridden is the Singapore Cable Car (despite its name, actually a gondola system). It's a pleasant way to get to and around the resort island of Sentosa, but in practice it's more a pricey tourist attraction than a general-purpose transit system. You can make the same trips by monorail and bus for much less (yes, this is a system exceeded in practicality by a monorail). The gondola does go to a mountaintop on the main island where it makes more sense.
...When I rode it, there was much discussion of the Disney Skyliner system, which I believe uses the identical hardware, and its lack of air conditioning. The Singapore Cable Car did convince me that the lack of A/C was fine, in an environment easily as steamy as Orlando--between the forced-air ventilation and tinted windows, while it wasn't cool inside, it wasn't oppressive either.
I think my hometown, Hamilton, Ontario, could probably use one, as another way of getting up and down the Niagara Escarpment (known locally as "The Mountain"). We used to have a similar system -- the Hamilton Incline Railway -- but it was shut down in the 1940s. My husband and I sometimes go on hikes on the Escarpment and you can still see the big concrete blocks that used to anchor the Incline Railway.
I'm actually surprised you didn't talk about the Disney Skyliner at Walt Disney World in FL. It might not be a "urban gondola" system, it still serves several resorts and parks.
I had the opportunity to experience it last May. It was so fun!
Good example in microcosm of what makes gondolas good, fast, cheap, high capacity, doesn't need dedicated right of way. Makes the hotels connected to the lines way more desirable as you can go to Epcot and Hollywood Studios without needing to interact with a bus or parking, and makes park hopping between two previously disconnected parks much more fun.
@@kevattack exactly!! Resort transit is not a bad thing at all. (It can be, but not all the time)
And, Disney Transport is all free which is nice!
I thought about it!
Open gondola skyrides (along with smaller, chair-lift-style skyrides) used to be a really common theme-park attraction, many have gone away and I feel like they're set for a revival. Disney took out the ones they used to have at the Magic Kingdom and Disneyland. The new Skyliner is actually being used as a transportation system more than a ride, though-- it was a clever solution to the fact that building out the WDW monorail system to cover that area of the resort would have cost much more than they were willing to spend.
@@RMTransit I know people have requested a more general video on the Disney World transit system--most of the discussion I've seen has been from Disney and theme-park fans, just a couple from transit people, and my impression is that despite being very impressive for a theme-park resort, considered as municipal transit (which it functionally is) it has some shortcomings. There are stark class distinctions--some of the most expensive resorts have monorail connections, others have to make do with the bus which can have not-very-good headways and long waits for connections. The Skyliner actually connects to some of the budget resorts now, though I think they jacked up room prices in recognition of that.
The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) is determining whether to install a gondola or expand bus lanes up Little Cottonwood Canyon in Salt Lake County, Utah. The primary users of the system would be winter recreationalists, though it is anticipated tourist will also come simply to ride the gondola. There is a lot of opposition to the project, many citing environmental concerns and little impact on traffic (it can understandably get really bad during the ski season). I personally am in favor of the proposed system, for many of the reasons discussed in RMTransit's video.
Adam Something recently did a video on a gadgetbahn urban gondola system call Swyft Cities. It is a gondola system that has multi route individualized 'pods" that let people choose their get on and off point no matter where on the system they are at. And here's the kicker, the cables are stationary and doesn't move. The gondola/pods themselves has motors on the wheels to propel them on the cables, so the cables are basically just tracks.
12:30 Bilbao (or rather it’s suburbs) actually have outdoor moving walkways in places such as Portugalete (which is one of the neighbourhoods served by the Bizkaia bridge)
Missed opportunity to show the Portland Tram to the University. I know it's not a "gondola"... but it has a gorgeous design and is quite popular along with having the same issues with "privacy" over people's houses and the contention in that.
HI Reece, I think Montreal should have a gondola for Mount-Royal and its park. There was once a funicular that existed in the early 20th century that brought people from the eastern side of Mount-Royal to the top of the mountain. This would make the park more accesible,
I agree. It would be like the one in Barcelona seving Montjuic
Love that although Istanbul has gondolas, it is represented in this video by a funicular line 🙂
I know they are cable transportation in different forms, but this still made me chuckle.
I think I included an image as well
@@RMTransit Yup, 4:46.
It's been ages since I last went there and it appears that I've forgotten how the Eyüp Gondola looks like. Oh well, my bad. I better get back to what I do best - cheer for Istanbul representation 😀
So here in cologne there's also one gondola, spanning across the river Rhine. It was built as a tourist attraction, and operates as one (closes in winter, except for advent). Even though I've lived here for 14 years now, I have never ridden on it once. Also it's not well connected to any other part of transit
In 2017 I worked in the studio that made the projects of the Light Blue line building stations from Mi Teleférico, Bolivia. I was amazed by the "spiderweb" that was becoming the system at the time. I can add a few things:
- Entire Bolivia had (not sure if it still has) similar GDP to Bogotá. So, there was not so much money at the table.
- La Paz + El Alto is a highly topographic region with clay soils, so solutions such as LRT, Metro, and others were not only more expensive but, served only the downtown, and that wasn't the goal.
- The other goal, like in Medellín, was also to build squares, libraries, schools, theatres, markets, etc. in the slums, not only to move people.
Now Mi Teleférico has 32km and 38 stations, and the year before the pandemic (2019) 97 million trips were made in it, around 14% of the total trips.
As a kinda "cable-based systems nerd", you're absolutely spot on ! Great video :)
“White eleph- ‘legacy projects” that got me cracked up 😂
Nice humour reece!
Gondolas make sense for their cost effectiveness, their ability to adapt to very difficult terrain, and because they are relatively fast to build with minimal disruptions compared to a tram.
However, I sometimes have the impression that the gondolas are some kind of excuse for towns to avoid building more expensive but way more useful transit solutions. They sell them as cheap and cool whilst the only question should be: "Is it worth it ?".
You are right, they're a copout when any bigger alternative is available. There are quite a few cities worldwide where gondolas are the only viable means of mass transit. Hills make basically all trains unusable and serpentining roads make buses slow
Thanks for the good points you made in this video. As someone who uses often ski lifts for skiing purposes, I sometimes wondered why they weren't seen in many more numbers, and I think you've answered that question.
I just wanted to touch on some points: first, I think one of the main attractions of gondolas is just how nice of a transit it is. Except for wind, and heat/cold if the cabin isn't climate controlled, it's just perfect: no noise, there's always a gondola waiting for you, and, most importantly, and I think which answers the popularity thing: the dang views you get from them. Yes, a metro in London is faster, but it's got nothing on the view of the Thames. And it's not even in a pretty neighbourhood, so imagine if you had one carving its way through Central Park, or between the hills of SF. It just makes your commute such a pleasure.
I was wondering though whether one big obstacle for gondolas was air rights. AFAIK, this was one of the reasons for the ballooning costs of the London gondola. Obviously, this isn't an issue in ski resorts, but in crowded cities, it's easy to guess the price of the land and air use for a gondola will not be something to overlook. But I think it will depend on the law of each city.
Overall, I think it's very pleasing to see them become more of a common sight. But I think the applications in which gondolas work best are either tourist transport, hill climbing, or access to places in a back and forth way. I don't see them connecting well two transportation poles, but rather being the last step in a transportation journey. Or, if you will, a metro or train line would be the backbone, and gondolas would be the ribs that connect people from those nodes towards their neighbourhood and final destination, be it their home, local water centre, university, or else.
The biggest problem I see with gondolas is, that some people have a fear of heights, and that in the end, a traditional metro/LRT would just be better. A lot of these systems get built in places where removing space from streets could make a proper tram/LRT possible, which is even cheaper than a cable car (and easily upgradeable).
Also, as shown in this video, cable cars usually don't form long lines, where I can sit down on one end and just stay there until I reach the other, instead I have to change every few stops to get to the next line
Although gondolas or cable cars have existed for decades throughout the world as a means of tourist transport, the city of Medellin was the first to implement them as a means of mass public transport within a city. Currently, in Medellin there are 6 gondola lines linked to the metro and the tram and a few months ago the current mayor announced the creation of 5 more gondola lines for medellin, this type of initiative has made medellin a global benchmark for urban planning, winner of the title as the most innovative city in the world in 2013 and the world city Prize (Lee Kwan Yeu Award) which is considered the Nobel Prize for Global Urbanism in 2016, being the only Latin American city to win this recognition, also since 2019 Medellin is the only Latin American headquarters for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
New Orleans had a gondola going across the river for awhile in the 80's it was a left over from the 1984 Worlds Fair . They ran it for a few years after the fair then tore it down.
Mountain areas in my city would really benefit from this, because not only driving on the main road is scary but also prone to landslides and lots of road work.
For those interested by some details about the specific use case of the first gondola line in Paris :
It is being built at the Southeastern terminus of metro line M8 in Créteil.
It will continue almost straight South then turn West for its last leg.
It will have 5 stations and a length of 4.5km, serving a 20K+ inhabitants area spread over 3 contiguous towns.
The first station will obviously be Créteil Pointe du Lac, M8 terminus.
Then the line heading South will go over a railyard and some heavy traffic roads and will start to follow the beginning of the LGV Sud-Est high-speed line to Lyon.
Then 3 different stations along the partially underground high-speed line and new developments.
Then turn West toward the last station in Villeneuve Saint-Georges that will be in a vacant lot next to a school and bordering an avenue.
The new gondola is already named Câble C1, following Paris nomenclature (like tram T9, metro M14...) and will of course be fully included into the transit fare system.
It will be a lifeline to some very isolated, almost enclaved neighborhoods, separated from the M8 terminus' neighborhood by a long and wide railyard and high voltage lines.
The Southbound main portion of the line will fit in the middle of the towns & neighborhoods stuck between RER A's Southeastern branch terminus to the East and RER D Villeneuve Saint-Georges station to the West.
This new cable line will offer direct access to the metro, hugely facilitating access to Créteil Soleil shopping mall, the lake, a big university campus, 2 large hospital complexes and the administrative center of the district, drastically reducing travel times and massively increasing frequency.
As some of the neighborhoods served by Câble C1 currently only see a bus every 20 to 30 minutes with super long travel time to reach the metro due to frequent traffic jams.
The entire line travel time will be 18 minutes but the most traveled section will be between 6 and 12 minutes.
The gondola, or télécabine in French (a much more descriptive term) will have fully accessible 10 seat cabins and less than 30 seconds headway, each way.
Cabins will all be equipped with CCTV, an information screen and an intercom.
Cyclists will be able to take their bike onboard and plenty of parking spots at each station.
For more information and visuals, there's the Île de France Mobilités website ("cable1" as subdomain), only in French unfortunately.
The project will really use the high and long crossing capabilities of a Gondola to go over and bridge the massive breach / wound that the railyard created in the urban fabric.
Other similar projects are being studied in the Greater Paris area to reconnect smaller isolated communities separated by industrial, railyard, highway or natural no man's lands to mass transit and economic, administrative, shopping or service centers.
At some point, up to 15 similar projects were researched, now it's reduced to a handful but we can expect to see a C2, a C3 and maybe more in the future.
The C1 will be a kind of test to see if the concept is good enough to be duplicated in similar environments.
There's also Toulouse's Téléo, a 3S with large cabins that links a cancer research institute and some BRT lines to a subway line by crossing a river and going over a large hill and park.
It opened in 2022 and seems to be a success.
It has 3 stations and greatly reduces travel times of ground transportation by crossing obstacles.
I think they’d be better than bus routes. Their nimble nature over high density areas, their nearly infinite frequency, their low operating costs, and their small footprint makes up for their lack of speed and capacity.
As someone who grew up skiing in Colorado, I’d love to see more of those here. Boulder could use some! Maybe Union Station in Denver could too, especially over I25.
Closing down streets for pedestrians/bikes and giving them lots of gondolas as sort-of walk extenders would probably be more cost effective and better for businesses (more foot traffic) than more bus routes… although I wish we had some sort of ALM.
Interesting video, I always thought of Gondolas & cable cars were are sort of “TouristBahn” but after watching this they seem like they would be good feeder systems. In Switzerland I feel like they function like that sometimes
Yes. My city is hilly, much of it far too steep for trams, we'd need a funicular railway... We have a ski lift, and I've been saying for years they should do more with the idea.
You definitely should! It’s green!
Depending on needed capacity, a rack railway metro may also be an option.
I could see this as being used as a cheap solution for hilly areas, it has its own application and that's great.
That's one of the more common areas gondolas are used, yes.
Huh, interesting video! I came in thinking "Ha, of course not!", then changed my mind to "huh, these things are useful", to finally arrive at "huh, these things can be useful in certain spots".
In your old neck of the woods. In the lower mainland of British Columbia, we are planning a gondola system up Burnaby Mountain. I for one am really looking forward to it.
My guy!!! You actually a video to my comment from last month about medellin. Love this discussion.
I spent almost a month in Colombia in the cities of Cartagena and Medellín. I will die on the hill that Medellin has the MOST beautiful, scenic, transit system in the entire world. From its Metro to its Cable Cars in the mountainous neighborhoods. It is truly a marvel. It's like a piece of utilitarian art.
I also "did get on the dangleway" in London! 😄 I reckon best gondola I've been on though is Ngong Ping in Hong Kong. Very long and also features a mid section corner tower.
Like many things, there are a few questions:
1. Cost and Uptime (or MTBF) vs. other options
2. Number of people per hour that the system can move (typically about 3000-4000 per hour)
3. The demand curve for movement (problematic if it's a football game or concert ending, perhaps)
Still, gondolas are compelling for their small land footprint, low disruption to existing infrastructure and structures, relatively low cost, and standardization. A gondola can replace 80 buses per hour at a transit point while not requiring 80 employed drivers and thousands of gallons of diesel. And the continuous nature means a constant low dwell time, zero headways, and no need to think about what the schedule is.
Thank you for offering a colder take on gondolas than other urbanist channels. This tendency to just hawk the new hot thing that they think is cool, rather than objectively do an analysis of alternatives to determine what works best, is why planners, civil engineers, and even just regular people don’t take urbanists seriously, even though they have some valuable ideas and suggestions. Especially so in the US.
To paraphrase Finding Nemo, if we want to change the public stigma surrounding railfans, transit advocates, urbanists, etc., we need to first change ourselves as communities. In particular, such communities need to be seen as hubs of credible, informed discussion, to show professionals we are worthy of being taken seriously and we do have good ideas.
I went on one in London and it was so fun. There were some amazing views of the skyline and River Thames
Aha, as a fellow SFU alum, it's good to know that the SFU gondola is going to be a bigger design than the typical ski size gondola
I think as said in this video gondolas are at least in developed countries mostly useful for niche-applications like connecting two, not too far away points in a city (like across a river or Inbetween a major destination and a transit stop) or in difficult terrain.
But especially in poorer countries I can really see Gondolas shine because they are really cheap, quick to plan and build and not really difficult to build (since most parts are prefabricated by the gondola-manufacturer). Furthermore they are cheap to operate and provide a faster form of transit in often highly congested but still very locally operating cities, which if building a gondola system correctly gives for poorer people the benefits of higher forms transit but really cheap to implement and easy to operate.
I would say the worst example is not London but Rio de Janeiro. I do have a video about on my channel, in portuguese (maybe the Auto Caption does the translations OK).
But to sum it up. We build a Gondola system for a slum (Complexo do Alemão), inspired by Medellin. However, We build the system with all the station ON TOP of the slum Hills (everybody needs to walk up the SLum to use the Gondola, hence a majority of inhabitants did not use the system). Construction cost was 3x higher then Medellin for each KM. Each passanger needed a subsidy of 3,5 Bus Fares (equivalent) and the system needed to be shut down in 2016 for maintainance (which has not been completed yet).
I see Gondolas as transit only as a VERY specific solution for a VERY specific problem.
Hong Kong has one special Gondola route which takes you across the sea and mountain to the Budda--Ngong Ping 360 Cable Car. The whole ride is 49 min as I recall and each gondola could sit 12 people. Very scenic route!
I agree about the Dangleway in London. The main trip generator at Greenwich Peninsula is the O2 Area, which is the second busiest and second largest concert hall in the UK (Glasgow Hydro is the busiest, Manchester Arena is the largest). Pretty much everyone who goes there takes the Jubilee Line. Some people take buses from the bus station next door. There's no way that the Dagleway could cope with 20,000 people leaving the Arena at the end of an event.
If you did want to get to that specific DLR stop on the other side of the river, one stop on the Jubilee to Canning Town + one stop on the DLR will take about the same time.
If you want to go anywhere else on the DLR network, one stop on the Jubilee to either Canning Town or Canary Wharf, then continue your journey from there, is a better option. Note that Heron Quays is closer to the Canary Wharf Jubilee station than Canary Wharf is.
If you are looking for somewhere in London to put a tourist ride, there are much more scenic places to put it. People don't generally visit London to look at the industrial estates.
The Elizabeth line at Custom House is also convenient for DLR connections, including Royal Victoria on the north side of the river. The new City Hall is close by.
THANK YOU for this video, I've been waiting for an urbanist channel to talk about gondolas in depth, ever since I dreamed of a gondola network in my city of Lausanne.
Would the citizens of Lausanne accept the huge VISUAL INTRUSION of an urban Gondola system. And remember Lausanne must be the smallest city in the world to have a heavy metro system. (Line M2 uses the same technology as line 14 of the Paris Metro).
Telluride, Colorado has a gondola that is used for skiing during the winter but through the year serves as a public transit route between two parts of the town sitting on separate sides of a mountain.
Watching this immediately gives me some inspiration for a midground system, use overhead conveyors instead of cables, which gives you a bit more cost but ease of maintenance of a chain that can be maintained in pieces and simple guide rail that bolts together. Overhead power/free conveyors give you the ability to add stops where it disconnects from power anywhere you want before automatically reconnecting in various ways, allows easy track switching, can resist wind or travel angle influence, and can follow more of a route than direct point to point like a gondola system. Still not as good as light rail, but easier to tuck in, over, and around existing structures and handle greater changes in elevation. Somewhere between a gondola and a much less limited suspended monorail
We must differentiate GadgetBahns and NicheBahns apart from each other!
Nichebahn, oh my I love that…..
I just started the video so you might talk about it later, but the fact that you are wearing an SFU sweater is hilarious
the small trickle of passengers makes a lot of sense for many mountainous areas, where a smaller village/town is located on a mountain top with residents who work in the city at the bottom of the mountain, cant really imagine a more efficient transport system for that specific situation since buses and cars would need to slowly wind down a narrow mountain side to reach any commercial area. (and the cheapness of the infrastructure compared to other transit systems as well makes it great for lower populated mountain communities)
As a Londoner I've never heard the cable car be referred to as the 'dangleway', but you're right that it's almost entirely just a tourist thing.
Gondolas do have a place in urban transit, but they fit into a niche, certainly not appropriate everywhere. A larger 3S type gondola would be a competitive alternative to trams in locations where building tram tracks is difficult, eg where streets are very narrow/twisty, going up steep terrain etc.
I also agree with the verdict on gondolas not being gadgetbahns, a key feature of gadgetbahns is that they usually use proprietary technology, which gondolas are not. In theory a gondola made by Doppelmayr could be upgraded by Poma, since while the two have distinct designs, they use the same underlying technology.
And in South America they have been an undeniable success, hugely improving QoL for residents, and I saw a study that had seen a huge drop in crime rates in areas connected to the Metrocable in Medellin, areas which would be basically impossible to connect via any other means of transit due to the steep terrain and narrow streets
Connecting Queensbborough to New Westminster would be a cool application of a Gondola. I doubt therei s a business case given the densities in Queensburough but for residents who want easy access to the sky train without dealing with the congestion on highway 91 and 91A it might be a decent option. There have been private ferries connecting the two neighborhoods in the past.
Extreamly useful in hillside slums and favelas. Probably the most useful tool to integrate informal settlements in steep areas into the city.
Nice dive into gondolas! I've ridden quite a few as you might imagine including in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and the longest cable car in the world in Zhangjiajie China. I agree with you that most are quite useful and effective transportation. There was even one proposed for downtown Chicago a few years ago. Are there other gadgetbahn gondolas other than the. Emirates Air Line in London? (Oh, and the elevators in Hong Kong are nice because there are shops and restaurants at every stop between escalators. If it were some sort of train, it would bypass all these business which have grown up around the popular escalators.)
One thing you forget: Gondolas are FUN.
This may sound irrelevant but travel/commute can be soul crushing. A transport system that gives you a lovely view of the area you travel through *is* a bonus.
I have that with the ferry system in Amsterdam, also just fun and relaxing in a way a tram or metro will never be. ymmv of course :)
The 3S Gondola in the Swiss Ski resort of Saas Fee is certainly not fun during the peak ski season! The 25-passenger standing only cabins are crammed full like metro trains in the rush hour. Also on one occasion I had to queue for 45 minutes before I could get on. These points are relevant to Urban gondolas. If an a gondola is built instead of a conventional heavy metro, travelling at peak times may become extremely uncomfortable.
One point that you sort of touched on is that these things are super easy to operate. There aren't many transit systems that can carry thousands of people per hour with 1 or 2 employees (per station) that only require a day or 2 of training. Compare that to the weeks to months required for bus and train operators.
The popularity is not only due to novelty - it's also because it's a way to create transit without having to take any space away from cars.
That being said, I think it can be a great puzzle piece for many cities while most areas will have to be served by other solutions.
I do feel the feasibility of an aerial cableway public transit system depends on local conditions. Places that have some major geographic barrier that the system is cost effective at overcoming (such as steep hillsides) make more sense for such a system, though flatter locations could work as well, but I do think the benefits would be less significant compared to other lower-cost alternatives. I feel some cities in the United States with fragmented and hilly topographies like Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco would benefit more from this type of transportation system than other cities would. I’ve seen such a system in Barcelona that connects a major park and sports facilities near the city center with the surrounding neighborhoods.
Minute 7:52. I never thought my "homestate" of Vorarlberg, Austria, could be ever seen in a video of yours, but there it is. The beautiful and crowded with to many Germans Ski Resort of Lech-Zürs.
we in bonn inn germany are probably getting a long gondola line (5 stations i think) crossing a hill, dense housing and the rhine river. itl provide valuable connections and redundancy in river crossing, and relieve a stressed bus route
May I add electrically driven so environmentally friendly and assuming renewable energy is used also zero operational emissions.
In the meantime agreed… it’s a valid mode of transport to address specific situations.
There are situations where they were implemented in an inappropriate situation (london)
I lived in a smaller city in Germany where we had busses with nice, soft seats- and people who would frequently get up for elderly people. Also, the network was not super frequent but very reliable with stops far apart so it was fast to get around with. I’d trade that for anything with unreliable service, any day. Cheers thanks Reese!
I've settled on the idea that gondolas are something most suited to the role of 'short branch line' off of more robust, higher capacity transit modes running on the more level terrain adjacent to a topographically difficult to access area.
There is also the Funitel system with cables on either side above the cabins -- the cabins have arms that form an "H" such that the cables clear the sides of the cabins in steep climbs, and have better handling of winds.
I just enjoyed my first ride on the new aerial tramway in Haifa, Israel which serves the campuses of The Technion and Haifa University on top of a steep mountain. The system is integrated with the train and bus, works seamlessly and assists students and staff get to the campuses and reduce traffic. The view is amazing and well worth a visit.
This was excellent Reece, thank you. You covered many pro/con points objectively. Great work!
In Mexico City, gondolas have made a lot of sense in its "cablebus" network, which currently has 2 lines and another in planning, as it crosses marginalized areas with narrow, convoluted streets and several hills, where buses are slow (and with poor service). It also has another network basically the same but with another name: the Mexicable; which has 2 lines and serves areas with the same characteristics.
Both have several limitations in terms of their extension both by available resources and by neighborhood opposition, since many people refuse to receive the gondolas because it means "an invasion of their privacy." In Mexico City a wide network is planned to serve the peripheries, many sound like a good plan but some are planning them more as a tourist attraction than as a true mobility solution, as will happen with the next line 3 of the Cablebus.
In Gothenburg, Sweden there were serious plans to establish a gondola over the river to tackle the barrier between the island Hisingen where almost one third of the population lives and mainland Gothenburg where the city centre is located. The slow speed of the gondola in combination with the fact the gondola would only solve the transportation over the river was the disadvantage of the system. In order to enable shipping transports to continue using the river the poles had to be quite tall and solid enough to prevent a ship from occasionally knocking it down. In the end it turned out the gondola system would cost as much as a bridge over the river so the project was cancelled.
I quite liked the Telefèric de Montjuïc in Barcelona. It seemed like a good way to connect the summit of a hill/mountain park to a transit system without butchering the landscape. It made me realize that it would be a good idea to build one in Montreal to connect Parc du Mont-Royal to a metro station downtown.
Politicians in my hometown (Linz, Austria, 200,000 inhabitants) have been talking about installing a gondola route for many years now and I do not get why they keep pushing this idea. Thea area to cover is flat, but has many (especially industrial) buildings on it. Also, they plan to stop it right before the river which would kinda make the system make sense. Half of the route is already served by trains. They just do not realize they should extend and improve the existing system(s).
The case for adding a gondola line from Production Way-University Station to SFU has thankfully paid off, and hopefully soon this dream will become reality for folks commuting to SFU daily. Not only will this bring higher traffic to the campus, but will also improve reliability, especially during the winter when it's more difficult for buses to reach campus.
The only ones I can recall going on are the one in London during the Olympics to scout out the food options around the O2 before working as a basketball official during the games (we had a free travel card, but you had to pay on it, but at a discounted rate), and one in Tenerife (a long time ago). It's fun, the quickest route from my hotel to the O2 arena but it cost a significant amount of money, so wasn't a viable option as a daily commute.
I grew up taking an aerial tramway quite regularly. It was built in a tiny Norwegian village called Rjukan, known for the production of heavy water during ww2 and very little else, but the town lies at the bottom of a steep valley so it gets no sunlight during parts of the year, so they built an aerial tramway to get the factory workers up to the top of the valley, where they could enjoy the sun, go for a walk and maybe even ski.
Good to hear that you talk about SFU Gondola. Considering Peak 2 Peak, it still quite stable. That being said, accessibility as you stated will be a concern. Furthermore, don't forget the Squamish Gondola was placed out of service due to someone disgruntled using normal tools. I am not sure if you want to voice your actual opinion regarding that line. I myself see it may have a use, IF they decide to develop Burnaby Mountain/UniverCity more. Maybe.
Also, one interesting version is Skyrail Midorizaka Line, which is a combination of monorail and gondola (or a Suspended Monorail pulled by cables). Due to the use of a rail as guide rail, it doesn't sway. Unfortunately due to budget (it was used in a planned suburb - I think it falls to the same purpose as the "dangleway" as a promotion), it was shut down and replaced with electrical bus just last year.
We still have gondola system here in Bogota south districts and a new one is planned for serving our very hilly neighborhoods in Eastern downtown. Greetings from Bogotá, Colombia
Gondola's are great, especially as they are resilient to wind, snow, and other bad weather as design.
A private developer was trying to push an urban gondola line in Edmonton, a city which is flat and low density, along a route duplicating the service of the existing LRT.
And council wisely shot it down. I wonder how many other urban gondola systems have to deal with temperatures that can swing nearly 70 degrees over the course of a year (67.9 in 2022). Cables might wear out quickly when used in -34 weather.
A SSS system could possibly also work really well in Hobart in Tasmania which is a very hilly city so it could possibly replace a number of bus routes and be a major link between local bus routes and the CBD! Also Hobart is separated in half by a major river so the system could also go over the river at a high enough altitude for massive ships to pass under! :)
I remember when Exhibition Place had the Alpine Way gondolas. It was taken down due to construction of the now Enercare Cantre. It was to be rebuilt but never happened. Eventually it was scrapped.
Another cable-alternative: Zip-Lines!
Each tower has an efficient and cheap *stationary* power system and elevator at the bottom, for lifting the cabs, which are then traveling *passively* without on-board engines, at much higher velocity! If each zip-tower is also an office-tower, you win!
In Wuppertal we have a Suspension railway its have also monument protection its like gondola.