Announcements

07
Apr

2015

Stuck in Traffic: Meet the Newest Member of the Team

Hello, I’m the second Steven to join the Gondola Project but, for the sake of ease, I go by Steve. A writer by trade, I have several specialties, one of which is automobile journalism. Indeed I am an accredited member of the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada (AJAC) and was even voted the runner-up Journalist of the Year in 2014.

I currently reside in Europe but until recently lived in downtown Toronto, Canada. It’s safe to say that when most people in the world think about Canada, if they do at all, they picture a vast empty land with boundless vistas. Or they envision clean orderly towns, peopled by more polite versions of Americans driving empty roads. The reality for nearly all Canadians though is gridlocked city life, with aggressively rude drivers. This is especially the case for Torontonians. Depending on your source, Toronto’s traffic and commuting woes have been called worse than New York, LA and even Barcelona’s.

It was through my struggles as a city-bound auto journalist that I happened upon the Gondola Project. As an auto writer, part of my duties were to test drive a given car for a week, then write about the experience. Usually that entailed sitting, frustrated, in the car, unable to get where I wanted.

I began to separate my reportage from other auto journalists by discussing the reality of urban driving. It’s a far cry from the idealized photos and road stories we all see in our local paper’s autos section.

City driving is a mess. It chokes our cities’ economies while choking our children and boiling our blood pressure in frustration. What’s the point of having 350hp and massive torque delivery if pedestrians are passing you? The situation is not going to get better. Over half the world now lives in cities. The days of a quick drive from the suburbs on un-crowded public highways are over. What’s a driver to do? This became a regular theme in my stories.

Then, two years ago, I looked up. Overhead all was clear. Then I looked up the Gondola Project. I was an instant convert.

What a revelation for urban life to make cable cars commuter vessels! The infrastructure costs are a fraction of underground or even over–ground rail; the build time too.

Then there are the salubrious benefits. The power costs for operation are infinitesimal. So it’s better for the environment, but it’s also good for individuals. Imagine! Instead of descending into the bowels of the earth for your daily commute or sitting grumpily in your car and having to continually challenge other motorists for every inch, you could be lifted up, up, up and over the heads of everyone, enjoying the views and zero traffic tie-ups. Cable car technology literally and figuratively makes urban transport an uplifting experience. I look forward to writing more about it.



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24
Feb

2014

Welcome, Readers From Seattle!

If you’ve arrived on The Gondola Project via today’s article at The Seattle Times, welcome!

Feel free to take a look around, ask some questions and generally engage with the admittedly bizarre idea of using ski lifts as public transport. You’ll find our small corner of the web to be a generally open group of people, happy to work through all your questions.

A few ideas to help you orient yourselves:

  • Most people find our original photo essay on Medellin and Caracas as a good place to start on the subject of cable propelled transit.
  • You need to understand the difference between an Aerial Tram, an MDG gondola and a 3S gondola. I cannot reinforce that point enough.
  • Understand that we’re not gondola zealots. We don’t see gondolas as the be-all and end-all of public transit. We simply see it as one among many transportation tools. You’ll find us to be highly critical when we need to be.

Mostly, just be curious and have fun. Enjoy!

– Gondola Project Team

 

PS: Another good place to start with The Gondola Project is in our ABOUT section and our LEARN ABOUT CABLE TRANSIT sections (accessible through our the header bar above). To save you the hassle of wading through months of old blog posts, we’ve hand-selected a group of older posts to get you up-and-running:

 



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.

10
May

2012

Another CPT for Colombia – The Bogota Metrocable?

Metrocable Line J in Medellin. Sources suggest that Bogota will see its first CPT system within 1-4 years. Image by CUP Projects.

Not to be outdone by its compatriot, Medellin, news reports coming from Bogota, Colombia indicates that the country’s capital is now seeking to build a Metrocable system of its own.

The cable car is expected to operate in the districts of Ciudad Bolivar and San Cristobal – both of which are located southwest and southeast of the city. From a cursory analysis, it appears that Ciudad Bolivar suffers from poor transport connections and is one of the poorest regions in the city.

Preliminary plans show that the system will run 3.4km in length with a capacity of 2,400-3,200 pphpd.

The Bogota Metrocable is estimated to cost $125 billion pesos ( USD ~$70 million) and will run at speeds of 5 m/s. This is nothing incredibly special nor different from the existing systems such as Medellin but its great to learn that the technology continues to make headways. If anyone has any additional information on this system, we’d love to hear from about it!

 



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.

14
Sep

2011

Announcing: City Builder Book Club

First Edition of The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The 50th anniversary edition of Jane Jacobs’ classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities was officially released today. The book may still stir up controversy in the City Building professions, but it remains essential reading today as much as it was 50 years ago.

In commemoration of this anniversary, Toronto’s Centre for City Ecology (CCE) has partnered with CUP Projects in order to create the City Builder Book Club, an online reading series dedicated to the books that have helped shape our understanding of our cities. The first book we’ll be reading is Death and Life.

The way it works is this:

Each week for 12 weeks we’ll be reading 1-2 chapters of Death and Life with myself (Steven Dale) and Mary Rowe (Founder of CCE) acting as guides to the text,  blogging about the chapters read, leading discussions and moderating comments. If you’re looking for something to compare it to, it’s not unlike the blog-based “TV Clubs” most popularized by The AV Club.

Here’s the twist: In addition to weekly posts by Mary and myself, we’ve also lined up a great crew of “Guest Guides” who’ll each blog about one specific chapter of interest. These Guest Guides hail from a variety of City Building disciplines and from all around the world – and for the transit geeks out there, we’ve arranged for Jarrett Walker (Human Transit) and Yonah Freemark (Transport Politic) to each contribute a post.

Right now we’re finalizing the schedule, but plans are to launch the Book Club shortly in Fall 2011. It should be a great event!

If you’d like to join the book club and want to know when we officially start, subscribe to our mailing list at citybuilderbookclub.org.



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.

15
Oct

2010

A Welcome Message

Yesterday, The Gondola Project was linked to by Planetizen, the world’s oldest and largest urban planning-related site on the internet. As a result, traffic has increased dramatically.

In an effort to help ease these new visitors into the topic, I’ve linked to a group of 20 posts from the first few months of The Gondola Project to help explain the site and its position on Cable Propelled Transit (CPT) and Urban Gondolas. I’d also encourage new readers to check out the most popular posts listed on the right hand side of the page as well as the education modules on the bottom right.

This site is intended as a primer on Urban Gondolas and Cable Propelled Transit, but we discuss a lot of transit-related issues as well. This also isn’t a site for zealots. The Gondola Project believes Urban Gondolas and CPT are useful additions to the public transit family. We don’t, however, believe them to be a cure-all. We believe in multi-modality and the exploration of many different forms; Urban Gondolas being one of them.

In the next couple of months, we’ll be rebuilding some parts of The Gondola Project to increase usability and accessibility of past posts. In the meantime, have a look around, ask questions, comment profusely and have an open mind. Urban Gondolas may seem bizarre at first, but they’re well worth figuring out.

– Steven Dale



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.

12
Oct

2010

Help Wanted

For The Gondola Project to move and grow beyond its original 365 Day Mandate, the site’s going to need help. There’s no two ways about it. Based on the comments from last week’s post it appears that readers want the site to continue with a variety of upgrades, most of which are good ideas.

But to get there, we’re going to need help.

So…

If any regular (or irregular) readers of The Gondola Project feel like pitching in an hour or two a week, it’d be great to have you along. There’s so many things to do, and no where near enough time, money or manpower to do it. Among other things, here are some things that are going to be required in the future:

  • Opening and moderating the forum.
  • Engagement with other transit-related websites.
  • Guest posts.
  • Expanding the Flickr Group and image gallery.
  • Reorganizing tabs and categories to make the user interface more user-friendly.
  • Creating a better method (or any method) to allow users to access important previous posts.
  • Conceptual renderings and images.
  • General social networking.
  • Research
  • Translating
  • Anything else you can think of.

Work like this is bigger than any one person. The more people involved, the better chance we have to make this a reality. In its own small, small way, The Gondola Project is a demonstration of that.

If you’d like to help out, please send us an email at gondola (at) creativeurbanprojects (dot) com.



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.