Posts Tagged: Aerial Ropeways

21
Dec

2015

The Grandmother Test

I recently met someone who disapproves of this whole Urban Gondola concept – which is fine, you’re entitled to your own opinion. He said it’s hard enough to get his grandmother to ride the subway (because she finds it terrifying), let alone a gondola.

According to The Grandmother Test (yeah, it should be called that) we should therefore stop everyone from building subways entirely. Probably not going to happen.

Yet when I pointed out the logical problem of The Grandmother Test, he basically just said urban gondolas are stupid. He wasn’t a skeptic; he was a cynic.

Whether it’s urban gondolas or any other great idea, if you spot someone who fails (passes?) The Grandmother Test, just walk away and don’t waste your time. There’s nothing you can do there.



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Thoughts
0
Comments
08
Sep

2015

Reviewing Good Advice: Low Profile Urban Gondolas

This piece was first published on The Gondola Project in 2010 but it is still highly relevant and useful. It’s about keeping your head low to the ground being unobtrusive; useful advice from a Canadian.

There’s a story about Cable Propelled Transit, Aerial Ropeways and Urban Gondolas that only hurts the technology’s future. Unfortunately, the industry does little to stop the spread of this story.

The story is simple: If you build an urban gondola, you’ll have vehicles flying over tall buildings, hundreds of feet in the air!

This story is bad for cable. Here’s why:

Read more



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Urban Planning & Design
7
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02
Aug

2010

9 Cable Systems That Are Important (And Virtually Unknown)

Sometimes important things are hidden away in far off (or difficult to access) places. Other times, they’re nearby but finding information very difficult.

In any case, here are nine cable systems that have great potential for expanding our knowledge about Cable-Propelled Transit but are so isolated, bizarre or obscure, research is painfully scant.

I suspect part of the problem is language. There could be reams of information on many of the systems listed below, but that research isn’t available in English.

  • The Skyrail Rainforest Cableway, Austrialia – A 7.5 km long system with four stations. Very sensitive to its rainforest environment and has won several eco-tourism awards. Built in the early 1990’s, it’s capacity was more than doubled a few years after it originally opened. It’s only 2,500 kilometers north of Sydney.
  • The Urban Gondolas of Algeria – A series of five urban gondolas built in North Africa. The first three have been completed already. The country still struggles with the lingering effects of a brutal civil war.
  • The Norsjö Aerial Ropeway, Sweden – Currently, the longest passenger ropeway in the world. Located a 12 hour drive north of Stockholm, so if anyone’s thinking of a road trip this summer . . .
  • The Ngong Ping 360, Hong Kong – A Chinese system with a rather difficult history. Finding reports on this system are very hard to come by.
  • The Koblenz Rheinseilbahn, Germany – A brand new system with some of the wildest looking cabins around. So new is the system, it’s very difficult to find any publicly-accessible information on it.
  • The Fun’ambule, Switzerland – A Hybrid Funicular like the Hungerburgbahn in Austria. This one is built by Doppelmayr and uses a different technique of adjusting inclination than that used by Poma in the Hungerburgbahn. Apparently, it operates underground.
  • The Fribourg Funicular, Switzerland – A funicular dating from the late 1800’s. It’s run exclusively (get this) using waste water.
  • The Gangtok Ropeway, India – An Aerial Tram with a mid-station. It’s the only fixed link transit system in this mountaintop city of 30,000. Find Gangtok on a map, and you’ll see just how isolated this system is.
  • The Makong Gondola, Taipei – Turbulent decision-making process. Very difficult to find information.

If anyone out there knows anything about any of these systems; has toured any of these systems; or can locate information on any of these systems, please tell us about it in the comments below.



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Research Issues
12
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29
Jun

2010

1934 Chicago World’s Fair

For your amusement (at around 2:25) . . . In Technicolor!

And for the record: When I talk about Cable Propelled Transit, this is not what I mean.



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1934 Chicago World's Fair / History / Just For Fun
7
Comments
28
Jun

2010

Never Mind The Real World

If I gave you the choice between a transit technology that could carry 20,000 people and a technology that could carry 6,000 which would you choose? Clearly, youd choose 20,000.

Or what if I gave you the choice between a transit technology that operated at 100 km/hr or one that operated at 35 km/hr? Obviously youd opt for the faster one. Faster is better because faster means you get where youre going sooner.

And thats the problem.

Humans are irrational – no secret there – and were so hard-wired to grab the most of anything, well almost always opt for that which gives us the most. It doesnt matter that we dont even like three-quarters of whats on the Mandarin’s all-you-can-eat buffet, we just like to know the option is there.

So too with transit planners.

Theoretically, Light Rail carries between 6,000 – 20,000. Just ask Professor Vukan R. Vuchic, one of the only people to ever write a textbook on transit planning. His Urban Transit series of textbooks constantly state that LRT carries between 6,000 and 20,000 people. He also states that they operate at “maximum speeds (of) 70 km/hr or higher.”

Never mind that there’s no LRT system in North America that carries more than 4,000.

Never mind that there’s never been an LRT system built that carries 20,000 people.

Never mind the cost involved in staffing and purchasing vehicles that arrive every 1-3 minutes; the figure necessary to reach 20,000 people.

Never mind that the posted speed limit in most cities is 40-50 km/hr. To Vuchic, what matters is that Light Rail emcan/em go 70 km/hr or higher.

Never mind that Vuchic himself says that the average operating speed of LRT is as low as 15 km/hr.

Never mind that LRT stations are spaced 300 – 1,000 meters apart, completely preventing vehicles from reaching those top speeds.

Never mind stop signs, traffic lights, jaywalkers, slow-moving grandmothers, speeding teenagers and streetcar drivers who stop to grab a coffee while on the job.

In other words: Never mind the real world. Completely ignore what actually happens in cities and instead focus solely on what is theoretically possible. Focus on the text book and the equations in it, not the city block and the people on it.

Numbers like Vuchics are constantly used to justify technologies like LRT and we flock to them because they promise us the fastest, biggest, best technology around. It doesnt matter that the numbers prove otherwise. If you give people a narrative that appeals to them, they’ll believe it. Its cheap and easy politics and it’s not fair, but that’s the way it is. Nobody ever said life was fair.

When you’re talking about billion dollar contracts and thousands of jobs, should you really expect government and industry to play fair?

Cable can carry more people than the industry publishes. It can also travel at speeds faster than what they publish. Ridiculously simple innovations like double decker vehicles would double the capacity over night. But the cable industry seems to want to play fair. They only want to talk about what they’ve done in the past, not what they’re going to do in the future.

That’s admirable, but it hurts the industry’s chances.



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Light Rail & Streetcars / Research Issues / Urban Planning & Design
13
Comments
26
Jun

2010

Aerial Technologies, Lesson 8: Funifor

The Freeride Paradise Funifor. Image by alexleo10.

The last aerial cable technology worth mentioning is the Funifor. Like the 3S, Funifors are very rare beasts. Only around a half dozen exist, and are all located in northern Italy (for whatever strange reason).

In essence, the Funifor is nothing more than a fusion of a Funitel and an Aerial Tram. It’s dual grip mechanism allows for a short grip arm and a more stocky, yet purposeful appearance. It doesn’t appear to dangle like other aerial systems. Like an Aerial Tram, however, it lacks the Funitel’s detachability. This means longer than normal wait times and lower capacity. It also means intermediary stations are very difficult and the technology is best used for point-to-point applications.

Like most Aerial Trams, a Funifor runs on a parallel set of support ropes, though the pair are spaced wider apart than standard Aerial Trams.

What distinguishes a Funifor from an Aerial Tram is that each of the two cabins operate separately. As opposed to an Aerial Tram, a Funifor’s propulsion rope is not returned to the opposite direction for use by the other vehicle. Instead, each cabin uses its own set of bullwheels, engines and propulsion ropes. (That’s why when you see pictures of a Funifor, each direction appears to use 4 separate ropes; two for support, one for propulsion plus the return part of the propulsion loop.) This allows a Funifor three distinct advantages over an Aerial Tram:

  1. As cabins operate independently of each other, higher capacity can be realized through reduced wait times.
  2. Intermediary stations become possible in locations other than the exact mid-point.
  3. In the event that one line shuts down due to emergency and or maintenance, the other line can still operate. Yes, that means that capacity is reduced by half, but at least the system is still in operation.
  4. If evacuation of a vehicle is necessary, the second vehicle can be used. Funifors can be equipped with bridging equipment allowing passengers to move from the disabled vehicle over to the other operational line.

These advantages, however, are offset by a couple of negatives:

  1. Towers are necessarily larger and sturdier in order to carry the extra load.
  2. Doubling of engines and propulsion ropes causes a significant increase in cost.

If one were choosing between an Aerial Tram and a Funifor in an urban environment, it would be best to opt for the Funifor. The added capacity, reduced travel times, maintenance potential and evac procedures makes it an obviously superior choice. Yes, it’s more expensive, but on balance worth it.

Why, after all, do you think New York opted to rebuild the Roosevelt Island Tram as a Funifor? Given that the terminals were already built, the $25 million USD price tag that came with this rebuild made the choice easy.

The Roosevelt Island Tram Redesign. Image from The Roosevelt Islander blog.

(In fairness to the manufacturer Sigma (one division of the Poma-Leitner group), this is not strictly-speaking a Funifor. Funifor – the word – is a trademarked name of the Doppelmayr Garaventa Group. Sigma’s design, however, clearly captures all that a Funifor is.)

Return to Lesson 7: 3S



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Funifor / Technologies
10
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25
Jun

2010

8 Ways To Define An Aerial Ropeway

Cable Propelled Transit is just one segment of a technology that has dozens of names, Aerial Ropeways being the most common. But what if you broke it down a bit more? Aerial Ropeways, after all, is a pretty broad term and one that’s not really applicable to the urban area.

So how about these:

  1. Resort & Theme Park Systems – Purely for tourism and recreational purposes, most typically found at ski hills. They’re located well outside of urban areas, or if they are in urban areas, they exist in theme parks and zoos. These are by far the most common of all cable and ropeway systems. You don’t need examples, because these are the ones most everyone are familiar with.
  2. Toys For Tourists – Systems located in urban areas, but existing almost exclusively for tourists. These are rarely built and almost always die on the table, rarely getting past the proposal stage. See here.
  3. Complementary Infrastructure – Systems that exist to service another more primary business need. They may carry commuters, tourists or business people. They are usually free to ride and exist as a kind of middle child between the resort systems above and the CPT systems below. Systems such as these are becoming more-and-more common, especially in airports and master planned developments such as casinos. The Mandalay Bay Cable Car, for example.
  4. CPT with Zero Integration – Urban systems primarily targeted towards local users. These systems have no physical or fare integration with existing transit systems or technologies. The Mount Avila system in Caracas, Venezuela is an excellent example.
  5. CPT with Physical Integration – Urban systems primarily targeted towards local users. Physical design of stations and the surrounding areas allow for ease of use and transfer between other transit technologies. But the systems suffer for lack of integration within the local fare structure. The Portland Aerial Tram, or the Innsbruck Hungerburgbahn for example. Like Zero Integration systems, they are very closely related to Toys For Tourists.
  6. CPT with Fare Integration – Urban systems primarily targeted towards local users and commuters. Systems suffer from a lack of physical integration, but benefit from being ticketed under the same fare structure/system as the surrounding transit network. New York’s Roosevelt Island Tram used to have Zero Integration, but since a deal was brokered in 2004, the system should be classified as one with Fare Integration.
  7. CPT with Full Integration – The holy grail of CPT. Local users benefit from full physical and fare integration schemes. Obviously the Medellin and Caracas Metrocables fall into this category.
  8. Educational Systems – One of the problems with explaining CPT is the lack of strong examples. Instead, it’s necessary to extrapolate and translate things learned from non-urban ropeways and apply those lessons to CPT in order to improve the technology. Educational Systems are all over the place. I’d suggest that almost all Aerial Ropeways are Educational, but some of the most important are the Grindelwald-First in Switzerland, the Norsjö Aerial Ropeway in Sweden, Vancouver’s Peak 2 Peak, and the Volkswagen Funitel in Slovakia. All have important lessons for anyone interested in creatively applying Aerial Ropeways in urban environments.

Can you think of other potential categories that were missed?



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Research Issues / Uncategorized
4
Comments