We can use ski lifts as transit!?! That’s a Eureka Moment and one that’s been happening to the urban transit community for the last 10 years. It’s big, it’s profound and it’s exciting. It’s also unwieldily and awkward because too much has been left uncovered and left unsaid. There are too many questions, too many...
One of the little-considered, but no less useful value-added features of Cable Propelled Transit is the ease with which headways, speed and capacity may be adjusted. Throughout any given day, capacity and headway (and to a lesser extent, speed) needs on a specific transit line will fluctuate. That’s why we have terms such as “Crush...
Medellin’s third and most recent Cable Propelled Transit line is Linea L – Cable Arvi. It is only a few weeks old and transports the people of Medellin up through the mountains and all the way to Parque Arvi (pronouned “Ar-bee”), a new nature preserve a few kilometres from the city. The park and transit...
THE RETURN OF SANTO DOMINGO Santo Domingo is an isolated barrio in the Colombian city of Medellin. Today it is a place of peace, calm and social progress. Twenty years ago, it was a type of living hell that the developed world can only imagine. Crime was rampant, poverty high. Homes and businesses along Andalucia...
David asks: PRT is getting some buzz lately what with Heathrow’s system going live soon and Masdar in the works. Do you know of any systems or engineering solutions that allow overhead gondolas to work the same way? IE: Swap to a different cable at a junction? Is CPT PRT-able? Swapping to a different cable...
Even in Medellin the Not Over My Backyard rule applies. Andrés Uribe and Theo Kruk, two executives with Metro Medellin witnessed that very problem. Though Metro Medellin was ultimately successful at building their Metrocable line (with significant portions of it traveling over people’s homes) there was initial concern from locals in the barrio of Santo...
So you’ve been thinking about cable and your city for a while now. You think it’s a good idea and you’re thinking of telling your boss, electorate, whomever. Here’s a few helpful hints before you do: Develop a sense of humor about yourself. If you don’t, everyone else will. Grow a thick skin. Deeply related...
The Mandalay Bay cable car in Vegas operates under a simple and controversial principal: Technicians, not operators. This fundamental principal means this: The system is never in the hands of amateurs. If you don’t know how the system works in its entirety, you don’t operate the system. It’s the difference between having teenagers run a...
For most of your career you didn’t need to know anything about cable. Not anything. Nothing. What transit planner, engineer, policy-maker or advocate bothers with ski-lifts? That’s not transit, that’s a toy for tourists. You could ignore it. You didn’t need to learn about it and your boss never asked about it. No politician mentioned...
I recently travelled to Las Vegas, Nevada to explore that city’s two public cable systems. This is Part 3 of a 3 Part report on the Mandalay Bay Cable Car. The importance of station design in cable cannot be overstated. Even more than other transit technologies, cable stations have to be designed to accommodate...