A few highlights from around the world of Urban Gondolas and Cable Propelled Transit: The Winstead Br0thers, those of the ill-fated and ill-conceived Baltimore Urban Gondola Proposal last week planned to present a similar proposal to Ocean City, Maryland Council. Like the Baltimore concept, this was not a transit system and merely a tourist-based installation. Mere...
I want to build upon the concept I described yesterday of ‘Vapour Literature.’ You could also call it Vapour Research or Vapour Evidence but they’re all the same thing: Empirical evidence of a fact that was never meant to exist as evidence in the first place. The example I used was the photo-sharing site Flickr....
There are three commonly known types of research (and we’re conditioned to only listen to and accept one): White Literature – Clean, pure and peer-reviewed. Academic. The Gold standard. Black Literature – Advertising, marketing, corporate literature, propaganda. Grey Literature – The stuff in-between. Company white papers, government reports and think tank advocacy pieces. I’d like...
This summer Fusion Halifax is hosting a series of panel discussions entitled It’s More Than Buses – a conversation about the future of public transportation in Halifax. The first session is on June 28th and I’ll be sitting on the panel. Halifax is one of those curious cities. The largest city in Canada’s Maritime provinces, it’s...
Last Friday night a 17 year old teen was stopped by the police in the Swiss town of Jonschwil when they noticed the local Töffli-Bub (Swiss German slang for “scooter boy”) driving around town in a homemade “scooter-car.” It seems the inventive young man had created his Töffli-Auto by welding the rear end of an old...
Cable Propelled Transit systems could prove a boon to public transportation scholars and researchers because the technology’s curious history could open up the ‘black box’ of public transportation funding in the developed world and throw into question our entire model of how we build things that move other things. Because cable has a long history...
Note: Nick Chu is presently on vacation in China but still managed to smuggle the follow observations out from behind The Great Firewall. A quick look at some of the things that make urbanism in China work (or not) – all stats from The Concrete Dragon by Thomas J. Campanella: Percentage of Chinese population living...
A few highlights from around the world of Urban Gondolas and Cable Propelled Transit: Gordon Harris, CEO of the Simon Fraser University Trust, finally speaks out in support of of the Burnaby Mountain Gondola. Mr. Harris had recently come under fire for refusing to comment on the project despite being the brainchild of the entire...
We talk a lot about station profile and architecture here at The Gondola Project. So I thought it might be fun to track down some little know systems that most of us have probably never even heard of (let alone seen). As these are all systems with little publicly available information or research, we’re basically...
Over at Makeprojects Jeff describes how he designed, built and installed an 100-foot long wood and steel pipe funicular for the purposes of “people/firewood/beer moving” at his family cottage. And despite Jeff’s wood and steel pipe funicular looking about as safe as one can expect a homemade wood and steel pipe funicular to look, it’s...