Post by Steven Dale
Last week in British Columbia, a 25 year old woman spent 12 hours overnight stuck in an Excalibur Gondola cabin at the Whistler-Blackcomb ski resort.
The woman was unharmed and the incident was chalked up to “human error.”
Problem is, incidents like this will always put a damper on things. Anytime a city wants to explore a gondola transit project, there’s always going to be some guy in some room who stands up and points out the story of the woman who was trapped in a gondola for three days before anyone noticed.
Note how 12 hours is inflated to 3 days when dealing with some guy in some room retelling a story he’s using to reinforce some point he’s trying to make to someone.
It doesn’t matter that the protocols one implements in an urban setting (such as cctv, intercoms and daily vehicle cleanings) would preclude a problem like this from ever happening. The fact that it did happen is too good a story for people to pass up.
As cable grows in the urban market, you can be sure that people are going to pay more and more attention to the moments when it doesn’t work as planned. The fact that cable does what’s it’s supposed to do 99.98% of the time just isn’t that good a story. Reliability is a good selling point, but unreliability is a better story.
Politics and advocacy is as much about stories as it is about stats, polls and votes. The cable industry has to learn how to manage those stories and understand that as they become the new kid on the block, there’s going to be more and more people waiting to use stories like these for their own political, financial and personal gain.
And you thought your hotel room was small. Image by flickr user Andrew Smith.
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Want more? Purchase Cable Car Confidential: The Essential Guide to Cable Cars, Urban Gondolas & Cable Propelled Transit and start learning about the world's fastest growing transportation technologies.
