I just returned from touring the Mandalay Bay and City Centre cable transit systems in Las Vegas. There’s much to say about both, but I’ll leave a more complex analysis for another day. When it came to american public transit back in the late 1800’s, cable cars ruled the roost. One of the major hassles...
For most of the 20th century, the cable industry had been a hodge-podge of European, Japanese and American companies each jockeying for their piece of the blossoming ski industry. Some companies specialized in manufacturing, others in operations and maintenance. Privately owned and maintained systems were common. There were dozens of players but few titans. Like...
Pitting drivers against transit users is cheap and easy politics and it doesn’t help anyone (except maybe the politician). Drivers aren’t inherently against transit any more than transit users are inherently against cars. That just becomes the end result when you make both groups fight over the little slivers of road space we currently have. (For...
Last month I toured Whistler’s Peak 2 Peak cable gondola system. This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on the system. Click on the following link to view Part 1. The very first thing one notices about the Peak 2 Peak is the sheer scale of it. Everything is bigger, flashier and a little...
Last month I toured Whistler’s Peak 2 Peak cable gondola system. This is a 3-part series on the system. Part 1 is necessarily technical in nature and will refer back to several pages of The Gondola Project for those unfamiliar with cable technology. With small, incremental baby-steps, cable transit continues to push its capabilities beyond...
New York’s famous Roosevelt Island Tram will be closing this spring for a complete overhaul. The system, built in the late 70’s is one of the few public CPT systems in North America and recently became fully-integrated into that city’s transit system. So if any of you are in NY in the next month, take...
Sometimes transit should just be fun. At the height of the economic crisis, the folks at O*GE InteractiveGallery in Haifa, Israel, decided to brighten people’s daily life with their Citymonsters art project. The transformation of the Haifa Cable Car was part of that project. The Haifa Cable Car is not a complex system. It dates...
Note: This post was updated on May 30, 2011. These revisions reflect the most current and available knowledge we have but do not guarantee the validity of the claims made. As always, it’s best to use the information contained herein as a guide. Bicable Detachable Gondolas (BDG) are a less common form of gondola than...
Take a look at that picture again . . . Now take a look at this one: Looks like the same system, right? Well, you’re sort of right and sort of wrong. It is, indeed, the same system, but they’re in two different cities! For those who don’t know (and I certainly didn’t), the biannual...