It’s a new year, folks! Congratulations, we survived another one! My column yesterday attracted the site’s first Rabble and I don’t expect it to be the last. Among “thickslab’s” (please don’t post anonymously on this site, folks, and try to be respectful) concerns was the issue of passenger safety. I don’t mean in the sense...
The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) is not enamoured by my proposal for cable transit in Toronto, likely because their plan is a multi-billion dollar network of light rail lines throughout Toronto called Transit City. Fair enough. But let’s actually break down the TTC’s argument and see why they’re not into the idea. Brad Ross, TTC...
The exception to Detachable Grips are what I like to think of as Attachable Grips. This concept is best exemplified by the familiar San Francisco Cable Cars. I will not go into a long description about the technology. Instead, I’d like to point you to Joe Thompson’s Cable Car Guy website which does an excellent job...
Since no one on Boxing Day really wants to spend their time learning about anything, and no one has any real need to go anywhere by transit (hopefully), I’ll lay off today. Instead, I’d just like to draw your attention to the new Flickr badge on The Gondola Project sidebar. Clicking it will take you...
It’s important to recognize that the term used to describe a Detachable Grip is detachable not attachable. Detachable grips are attached to a cable with heavy, industrial springs providing the pressure necessary to create the grip’s vice-like hold. Until a constant, targeted, external and specially-designed force is applied to pry open the grip, the grip’s hold is (for all...
Sometimes we’re not great at extrapolating and translating from one realm into another. We’re hard-wired to imagine one technology, idea or product as being appropriate in only one environment. It’s like when you learn a second language. Oftentimes, you’ll be baffled by words with multiple meanings. Because you first learned the word in one environment, you...
. . . are often touted as the answer to our transit woes. The idea is simple enough: When a transit vehicle approaches an intersection, the light changes to give it priority. Trouble is, there’s very little research to suggest it works and transit advocates such as Steve Munro continue to laud this technology without discussing its...
I’m constantly asked how urban gondolas, cable cars and cable-propelled transit perform in bad weather. It’s an odd question because the answer is so obvious. The technology was popularized, after all, in alpine ski resorts. I don’t, however, begrudge the question. When I began my work on CPT I wondered the same thing. The question bemuses...
As I mentioned yesterday, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency announced on Thursday that the Oakland Airport Connector would be a Cable Propelled Transit system. This was a major breakthrough by a cable technology as it competed head-to-head with two other self-propelled transit technologies and won. One of the reasons cited by BART for...
Albert Einstein was once quoted as saying if at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. Absurd indeed. When I first started my work on Cable-Propelled Transit (CPT), I hid it from everyone. I knew it was an absurd idea and the last thing I wanted to get tagged...