From Atlantic Cities:
So why is this only happening now? Cable-drawn transport has existed for thousands of years, and was widely used during the 19th century in mines and at mills. Like industrial technologies before it, the machinery slowly crept into city life nearly 150 years ago. …
“People see cities with ropeways 
and they see it works,” (Assman Ekkehard, a marketing director for Doppelmayr) says. “It’s a very reasonable means of transit – you don’t need a lot of infrastructure. They need very little space. They’re very environmentally friendly.” … in an era of diminished public funds, they can be built quickly and cheaply. …
Michael McDaniel, who is trying to convince Austin, Texas, to develop a transit network of gondolas, framed the costs like this in an interview with Marketplace:
“Running subway lines under a city can cost about $400 million per mile. Light rails systems run about $36 million per mile. But the aerial ropeways required to run gondolas cost just $3 million to $12 million to install per mile.”
Forget buildings, SFU needs to find a successful alumni to donate a gondola…
“Running subway lines under a city can cost about $400 million per mile. Light rails systems run about $36 million per mile. But the aerial ropeways required to run gondolas cost just $3 million to $12 million to install per mile.”
I wish people would stop making glib comparisons like this (and people who know better would stop uncritically quoting them). A gondola is potentially much cheaper for point to point transport, but can’t provide the continuous walkshed that a rail or bus line can, unless you build stations every 1/4-1/2 mile, in which case you sure as heck aren’t going to get it for $3 million/mile. Even $12 million/mile is wildly optimistic if you have to buy air rights off anyone.
The ideal case for gondolas is the SFU/OHSU case, where you have a big ridership center perched alone on the top of a huge hill. If a small- to medium-sized city wants to improve mobility in a continuous urban area, improving the speed and frequency of the core bus network is the first place to start. Leave mode-fetish futurism to the architects and dreamers.
Agreed. The reason gondolas haven’t caught on is because they aren’t appropriate in many cases. But they do make a whole lot of sense in certain contexts (like when you place a major university on top of a mountain!).
@Bruce,as always, you can’t make direct comparisons, but there are examples of successful multi-line, multi-station cable cars systems. medelin and caracas immediately come to mind. of note, both systems serve lower income residental areas on the surrounding hills of these metro areas.
I can see cable cars having a strong business case where there are geographic barriers to bus/train service – mountains, hills, bodies of water, etc. I’ve never been to austin, but i am not sure if there are substantial hills, etc that would favor cable cars…
Cable cars w/o topography look bizarre. London’s “Emirate Air Line” comes to mind.
Agreed, SFU needs a gondola. But I think that the 400mill/mile or $250mill/km figures for RRT may be on the high side, even as tunneled bored downtown Skytrain. http://skytrainforsurrey.org/2012/04/22/skytrain-costs-for-surrey-overstated-by-translink/ Just to ensure correct information, not to advocate for skytrain. The cost estimate for Gondola up SFU is ~100-120 million. That’s of course again in my opinion an over estimate (Just look at a 60million Peak2Peak of the same length though land acquisition may cost a few million), but still not too much compared to the benefits. But surrey still should get first dibs.
One of the best transportaton ideas in years. Ideal for SFU. Now I won’t be faceitous and say the prune-faced NIMBYs you seen on the front of local weekly papers more and more, will be the only opposition. But I might.
Hello, I’m one of those prune-faced NIMBYs, although I’ve never been on the front of a local weekly paper.
Stephen Dale is a Toronto-based gondola proponent hired by TransLink in 2011 for a term contract to support the project. In 2009, he commented online on the project (if you want the exact page link Google “Stephen Rees Gondola” and you should find it). This comment contradicts what Mr. Dale was saying with regard to routing the system from Production Station over people’s homes, while in the employ of TransLink two years later:
“Sorry to be getting to this conversation late (by like 8 months). I’m a planner in Toronto who specializes in Cable Propelled Transit. I’ve spoken with the author of the two studies as well as Gordon Harris, the President of UniverCity and based on that knowledge I can say that it’s a great idea with two major issues:
• … (technical analysis comment on types of ropeway systems deleted)
• Everyone is talking about Production Way station. That is a planner’s nightmare waiting to happen. If you look at the Portland Aerial Tram case history, you quickly learn that going over top of people’s homes will result in tremendous backlash.
I talk about this on my cable transit blog at http://gondolaproject.com/2009/11/15/not-over-my-back-yard/.
The Lake City Station provides a route that would not fly over people’s back yards.
All the best,
Steven Dale”
December 5, 2009 at 12:56 am
Most misleading pricing ever.
The SFU gondola project is $120M. Obviously the cables aren’t the most expensive part of the project.
It runs 3,700 trips daily. DAILY. That means that at peak hours, when, say, 500 people go to school, you’ll be waiting for hours for your turn.
Fix the damn bumpy roads, buy chains for the buses, and add more bus routes. It’s the cheapest, most robust, most scalable, most common sense answer.
It just happens not to be the most profitable for TransLink, that’s all.
And when I say 3,700 trips per day, those are the real-world numbers from Portland’s similar project — not the completely unrealistic “3,000 per hour” claimed by TransLink.
Something I had already noticed at the Gondola open-house:
Virtually all people opposed to it are either seriously misinformed, or spreading fantasy tale.
Rei, is just confirming that:
A modern 3S gondola can certainly carry 3700 persons per hour…In fact it is just what happen with the Peak to Peak in Whistler which capacity exceed 4000 passenger per hour…the one in Koblenz, Germany, has a capacity of …7600 passengers per hour…
So Translink numbers in that respect are completely realistic: and people pretending otherwise, are just ignorant of the state of art of the cable car technology …considering Whistler is in our “backyard”, one could find this ignorance rather pathetic when not embarrassing…
PS: In Portland, it is an aerial tramway, not a Gondola,, basically like the Grouse Skyride.