Last week we discussed why the Staten Island Economic Development Corporation’s idea for an Aerial Tram connecting the island borough to the southern tip of Manhattan was, like, a really, really terrible idea.
Five days ago, meanwhile, major manufacturers Leitner-Poma and Doppelmayr admitted that such technology doesn’t even exist yet to make the system viable. “The technology for a tram to do this distance isn’t yet there,” stated Tom Sanford, vice president of sales for Doppelmayr.
I’m sure this is going to confuse people.
Given long-distance gondolas over water in Vietnam and 3S cable cars crossing for miles over British Columbia mountain valleys why is it not possible to cross 5.7 miles of inner New York harbour?
The answer is straightforward for industry insiders, but totally confusing to the general layman. Note what Sanford said — “the technology for a tram to do this distance isn’t there yet.” The operative word is tram. As in Aerial Tram.
For outsiders, the cable car sector is completely baffling. In our experience, most people assume that all cable cars are the same. In their world, buses are all basically identical just as are all streetcars and subways.
The thing about cable cars is that they are not a single, unified technology. They’re not all the same. Cable cars are a family of technologies with significant nuances between them. Those nuances affect the viability and cost-benefit of any given project and should be understood—at least superficially—by project proponents before going public with any idea.
So now we have a classic case of a major government agency spending a significant amount of public time and resources to conceive a project that is completely without merit. Somehow they even managed to come up with a cost estimate of $175 million USD to build something that the builders have publicly stated cannot be built. And that happened because the proponents didn’t so much as understand the basic performance characteristics of an Aerial Tram. Had they understood those characteristics, they’d have known this project was dead from the beginning.
Lesson — know your technologies and match the right technology to the right project. That doesn’t apply just to cable cars, it applies to all transit planning endeavours.
Want to learn more about the difference between Aerial Trams and Gondolas? Read our post Aerial Trams vs. Gondolas.
Want more? Purchase Cable Car Confidential: The Essential Guide to Cable Cars, Urban Gondolas & Cable Propelled Transit and start learning about the world's fastest growing transportation technologies.
