#Aerial Rapid Transit

Jan 28, 2011
Uncategorized

Gondola Transit in St. Louis?

(Voluntary Disclosure: Managers and Consultants associated with St. Louis’ CityArchRiver2015 interviewed me last month to assist them in understanding cable propelled and urban gondola transit. I received no compensation for this interview and the opinions expressed below are my own.) The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (also known as the St. Louis Gateway Arch) is easily...

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Jan 27, 2011
Thoughts

Cheap is Relative

Last year, when I had the opportunity to interview Metro Medellin about their Metrocable systems I stuck my foot in my mouth in a way only a North American could. We spent a couple hours going over the history, the successes and the failures of the system. When discussing the advantages of the gondola transit...

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Jan 26, 2011
Cable Transit Industry

Chinese Knock-Offs?

Ski hills are great and all, but the market’s limited. We’re not building any more mountains (except in Dubai) and the mountains we do have are being adversely effected by global warming – at least when it comes to ski conditions. That’s not much of a growth market. The urban market, however, is virtually limitless....

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Jan 25, 2011
Thoughts

Gondolas ≠ Tourists

You want to build an urban gondola transit system in the hopes of attracting millions of tourists from around the world? Good luck with that. If you build one, and if you have tourists, you may very well get tourists riding your gondola, but that doesn’t mean tourists arrived because of your gondola. There’s a...

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Jan 24, 2011
Oddities

Bringing Up The Topic Of Gondola Transit…

… is bound to be fraught with perils. Lacking the sufficient pitch, people are bound to imagine whatever they feel like. And there’s a very good chance that the image they conjure in their heads will be the exact opposite of what you desire. Tell someone you can use gondolas as transit and they might...

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Jan 23, 2011
Sunday Statshot

Sunday Morning Statshot

A quick look at some of the things that make your cities work (or not) Urban Sanitation Edition: World population: 7 billion Number of people worldwide defecating in public : 1.1 billion World population lacking access to basic sanitation: 2.6 billion Average toilet usage per day per person: 6 times Time spent on the toilet...

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Jan 22, 2011
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup

A few highlights from around the world of Urban Gondola transit systems and Cable Propelled Transit: The Venezuelan Embassy in America celebrates the one year anniversary of the San Augustin Metrocable, praising the system for trimming travel times from up to 2 hours down to 9 minutes. In preparation for the Olymics, Russian resort town...

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Jan 21, 2011
Teleférico do Complexo do Alemao

New Images of Rio’s Teleferico do Alemao

Flickr isn’t immediate. After something new is built in the world, it takes a good few months to a year for the flickr community to build up a sizeable collection of images of whatever that new construction may be. Takes even longer for a good body of Creative Commons images to build up. Nevertheless, with...

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Jan 20, 2011
Uncategorized

An Urban Gondola Transit Line for Budapest?

Sometimes things just arrive in your inbox and you have no idea what it means. Take this for example: I would sincerely love to know more about this project. There are clearly some production values behind it and the involvement of the Arena Plaza shopping mall suggests this might be something more than someone’s hobby....

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Jan 19, 2011
Sugarloaf Double Double

Why The Sugarloaf ‘Double-Double’ Matters

Yesterday I asked readers to check out this link that led to a picture of a double-double chair lift at Sugarloaf resort in Maine. I asked readers to discuss why such a system is important to the world of Cable Propelled Transit and Urban Gondolas. As the system in question had recently been involved in...

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