Gareth Long is an artist in New York and one of my oldest and dearest friends. Sadly, due to the two-headed monster known as Geography and Life, we rarely get to see each other. But given the recent reopening of the Roosevelt Island Tram, it seemed like a logical opportunity to work together and see...
On Tuesday, New York’s Roosevelt Island Tram reopened after a 9 month, $25 million refurbishment. The rebuild, conducted by Poma, transforms the system from an Aerial Tram to a Funifor-type system. That means vehicles will operate independently of one another. When one vehicle is taken out of service, the other can still be operational. This...
Others might disagree with my selection, but if you’re new to the world of Cable Propelled Transit (CPT) and Urban Gondolas, these are the 7 aerial systems you need to know about:
I recently spoke with a cable engineer who thought it completely absurd that people use Aerial Tram statistics to negate the feasibility of Urban Gondolas. When I told him such confusion was the norm rather than the exception, he became flustered. He simply couldn’t accept that people make that mistake. They’re two completely different performance packages!...
The other day I was pretty hard on Aerial Trams for being obsolete, expensive and inefficient members of the cable transit family. Because of their place in history, however, many of the most iconic and important cable transit systems ever built were Aerial Trams, a point I failed to mention. Here are 6 of them:...
New York’s famous Roosevelt Island Tram will be closing this spring for a complete overhaul. The system, built in the late 70’s is one of the few public CPT systems in North America and recently became fully-integrated into that city’s transit system. So if any of you are in NY in the next month, take...
I recently wrote an article for the Architectural League of New York‘s urbanism-themed website Urban Omnibus. The article, titled Off the Road and Into the Skies (click to read it), should provide you with a decent history of New York City’s Roosevelt Island Tram and some analysis of Santiago Calatrava’s botched cable transit proposal for...
but every city wants to be second. The competitive drive to be number one just doesn’t seem to permeate City Hall and that’s understandable. Infrastructure is terribly expensive and no politician or planner wants to embarrass themselves by green-lighting a future white elephant. Cities are therefore remarkably conservative when it comes to infrastructure. Cities tend...