ANY CHARACTER HERE One thing I love about cable is the questions and discussions it creates. Generally speaking, people are curious creatures and when confronted with the strange, bizarre and not-so-everyday, they want to know more. They ask questions, ponder and – for better or for worse – they come to their own conclusions. Those...
Considering how nascent the idea of urban gondola transit in Calgary is, it’s incredible to see how the media has pounced on it – and in some situations gotten the story completely wrong. More than likely, the media attention has been little more than a light-hearted distraction from the more serious business of Canada’s Federal...
Over the past week, we’ve been working on the site to make it more user-friendly and accessible to people. Regular readers will notice significant changes in the header bar, the drop down menus and the ability to access old posts. We’ve also opened the Gondola Project Forums, so for everyone whose been asking for them...
Over the weekend I was interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s CBC Radio One for a piece on urban gondolas in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The story and interview was broadcast today on CBC Radio One and you can listen to the full story and interview(s) here.
A quick look at some of the things that make solar energy work (or not): Percentage of electricity in US supplied by solar: <1% Number of times more solar panels installed in Germany than US: 3x Number of times more solar energy produced by Italy than the US: 3x Record high cost for a barrel...
A few highlights from around the world of Urban Gondola Transit and Cable Propelled Transit: Inspired by the new London Thames Cable Car, Whales Online argues that such technologies could be an attractive option in various cities around the Welsh countryside. The Philippines’ Department of Agriculture plans to build 54 ropeway systems throughout the country...
Are all three the same thing? Yes and no. Yes in the sense that they all generally describe the same item. No in the sense that different countries throughout the so-called Anglosphere have a clear preference for one term above all the others. Consider this graph: This is from Google Insight and shows the relative...
Likely one of the most awe-inspiring examples of Cable Propelled Transit and/or gondola transit are the deeply vernacular Meteora Cable Cars. A Unesco World Heritage site, The Meteora are a series of Eastern Orthodox monasteries in Northern Greece dating from the 14th and 15th centuries. All are located hundreds of meters in the sky atop...
One thing we’ve noticed over the last year or so is that city-specific content rules. It’s all fine and well for us to talk generally about urban gondolas and cable-propelled transit, but it’s not until ideas specific to a given city are put forward that people really start paying attention. That doesn’t apply simply to...
Over the Easter weekend, a new urban gondola system opened in the Netherlands. This system, in the small city of Venlo, is the longest ever in the Netherlands at an admittedly modest 1.1 kilometers. As is becoming a common theme and narrative, there’s virtually no publicly available information on the system. What we do know...