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.
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.
A couple of years back, Volkswagen came up with a brilliant viral marketing campaign known as The Fun Theory. The basic idea being that “fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better” (their words, not mine).
The shorthand for the theory was the very public transformation of a subway stairwell into a piano as a means to coax people from using the escalator to using the stairs (or piano?). The resulting video became a viral sensation, and has been viewed over 16 million times on youtube.
If you haven’t already seen it, take a look:
The video claims that the piano staircase resulted in 66% more people using the stairs than using the escalator. No doubt and great. Of course, that number has to be taken with a grain of salt. We don’t know how that number was calculated, over what period of time it was measured and if people slowly gravitated back to the escalator after the novelty of the piano wore off.
Nevertheless, there’s something here.
Let’s be frank: Public transit planning and policy are pretty much the antitheses of fun. They’re science without the coffee. And while most of us would agree that increased public transit usage is an incredibly worthwhile and noble goal, there’s been few successes throughout the last 50 years to create a long-lasting trend towards increased ridership within western, developed nations (Europe, possibly, notwithstanding).
Now I’m not suggesting that ridership is dependent solely on a “fun factor,” but I am suggesting that fun is certainly one way to stimulate ridership.
The last 10 years have been a bonanza of learning about the human condition. Fields such as cognitive psychology, behavioral economics and change management have taught us – if nothing else – that humans respond to their environment in irrational, emotional ways.
Change is not a state that occurs out of hard examination of facts and details, it is a state that is achieved when people are emotionally driven to do something that makes them feel better than they did before. That may frustrate numbers-oriented professions and people but it is also an enormous opportunity.
It’s all fine and well for planners and policy-makers to obsess about facts and details – that’s important, don’t get me wrong. But when it comes to implementing the desired change the facts and details point to, the traditional tools used by the planning and policy-making establishment are utterly ineffective.
(Note: For a longer discussion of the fun versus detail argument, please see our single most viewed post Form vs. Function.)
When it comes time to implement, the facts and details need to be thrown out the window because the target audience doesn’t care about them. Consider the typical “pro-transit” arguments:
It saves you money. People don’t care that taking transit saves money. If they cared about saving money, they wouldn’t spend $4.00 for pre-cut carrots and celery at their local grocery store. People will pay for convenience.
It’s safer than driving. People don’t care that taking transit is safer than driving a car. If they cared about safety, no one would ever ski, sky-dive or smoke. Furthermore, you wouldn’t have people irrationally devoted to their car yet completely unwilling to fly (the safest form of mass transit there is).
It reduces traffic. People don’t care that taking transit reduces traffic. Why? Because the benefit of using traffic goes to someone else. If I take transit, I inconvenience myself so that other people may benefit from clearer roads. That’s implicit in the argument and the reason it fails.
That’s where fun comes in. We can change people’s behavior not by advertising to them, educating them or forcing them. We change people’s behavior by stimulating an emotional state that makes them susceptible to change their behavior of their own choice and accord.
Fun is one such tactic for the simple reason that people like fun. You like fun, don’t you?
Problem is there’s no room for fun in our planning and policy-making. These are not realms where fun is allowed to intercede as fun is viewed as unprofessional, naive and strange. Our planning and policy-making fundamentally misunderstands the fact that people are not mere numbers in a model but are wonderfully emotional, fun-loving and irrational. To assume otherwise is to create a model completely out-of-touch with reality.
If there is one thing I wish we could change about our (transit) planning methods it’s that. I want us to start from the simple and uncontroversial assumption that people are irrational, emotional and motivated by things other than time and money. We go from there.
So how does this relate to Urban Gondolas? Simple.
Gondolas are fun.
(Big thanks to Jason for calling my attention to The Fun Theory. Like everyone else, I’d seen the video a couple years back, but I’d never taken the time to apply it.)
You’re now the owner of the world’s largest cable gondola transit manufacturer on the planet. This could be a fictional company or a real company; it doesn’t matter.
You’re told by your CEO that three (and only three) innovations must be developed to ensure the technology’s viability into the future. One innovation needs to be relatively simple; the second innovation needs to be difficult but manageable in the near future and; the third innovation needs to be a pipe dream – something that’s likely never to happen within the next decade, but that would nevertheless improve the product drastically.
Your CEO asks you what those three innovations should be.
Here’s mine:
Reduce dwell times to under 30 seconds – should be relatively simple.
Develop gondolas that can operate at the maximum speed of aerial trams – with time it shouldn’t be a problem.
Allow for off-line stations such as those found in faux-prt systems – unlikely to occur anytime soon.
Above: A bumblebee not flying. Image by flickr user cuellar.
There exists an almost century-old anecdote about a German aerodynamicist and a bumblebee.
Over dinner, the aerodynamicist remarked to a biologist that – according to his calculations and the accepted theory of the day – a bumblebee was incapable of flight.
This, of course, wasn’t true. Bumblebees could fly (still do, I believe) and it didn’t matter that the aerodynamicist and his calculations said otherwise. Delighted by the absurdity of the situation, the biologist spread the story far and wide.
Is the story true? Who cares. It’s a good story and that’s all that matters.
Whether the story is true or not is irrelevant because as a fable and piece of folklore it resonates with us as human beings (check out The Straight Dope for their take on the tale).
For better or for worse, it’s a story that feeds people’s willful distrust of experts, specialists and trained professionals.
Most of the time, I think, we should listen to the experts, specialists and trained professionals. The reason they’re experts is because they know more about something than the general population does.
But the same mechanism that makes an expert an expert can also blind him to anecdotal reality. Nine times out of ten the aerodynamicist will be right with his calculations. But because he knows nothing about bumblebees and their biology, his calculations were worthless in the above situation because no matter what his equations foretold, we’ve actually seen bumblebees fly.
It’s in those moments where it’s incumbent upon the non-expert to point out the error – and incumbent upon the expert to admit his shortcomings.
According to the accepted theory of the day you probably can’t use gondolas as public transit. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t doing it.
A good rule to live by for non-experts: Defer to the experts until they’ve demonstrated themselves no longer worthy of the name.
A good rule to live by for experts: You’re ability to remain an expert is dependent upon your willingness to admit what you don’t know and defer to those that do.
Perhaps the most common question we’re asked about Urban Gondolas and Cable Propelled Transit is the safety question. Namely, are they safe?
And while anecdotally we’ve always known them to be a remarkably safe technology, gathering clear statistical proof has been very difficult. Most countries don’t have readily available access to numbers on this and those that do make the mistake of combining ski hill chairlifts and gondolas within the same statistical category despite the two having fundamental differences in their safety statistics.
Nevertheless, the Switzerland’s Office fédéral de la statistique OFS recently put out some new statistics that help shed some light on the safety issue. While by no means definitive, we’ve compiled some of the important numbers in the tables below and our preliminary investigations suggest Cable Propelled Transit technologies such as Funiculars, Gondolas and Aerial Trams are amongst the safest public transit technologies around.
Take a look:
Compiled by CUP; Based Upon Numbers Gathered By Office fédéral de la statistique OFS.
You’ll note that during 2008 and 2009 Funiculars and Gondolas/Aerial Tram technologies consistently experienced the fewest number of accidents, injuries and deaths per 1,000 passengers. Rail-based technologies consistently experienced the most.
These numbers are important for a couple of reasons:
Switzerland has the largest number of cable transit systems in the world with a well-used and highly-developed multi-modal transit network across the country. If cable is to be compared to other travel modes, this is the place to make the comparisons.
These numbers necessarily did not include small, private gondola systems nor ski hill chairlift systems. This lack of inclusion makes the comparisons far more apt.
Notwithstanding the above, these numbers do come with a few caveats:
It would have been preferred to see numbers across a wider time period. Unfortunately the data series used did not include accidents, injuries and deaths for Tram, Trolleybus and Autobus technologies prior to 2008.
Owing to Switzerland’s almost complete lack of Subway/Metro technology, no statistics were available for those technologies.
While complete accident, injury and death statistics were available for 2010, passenger volumes were not available.
An additional comparison between modes by Passenger Kilometers Travelled would’ve been preferred as the distance travelled by cable is likely to be shorter than the distance travelled by the other modes. Such figures, however, were not present in the datasets for Gondola systems. Instead, gondola values were given in Hours of Operation.
All information was given in French. And while as Canadians we have a base understanding of the language, there is clear potential for error. Anyone with a greater grasp of the French language is invited to double-check our work.
Having said that, this is still a step in the right direction and more than a little bit eye-opening.
As always, additional information, corrections or amendments can be posted in the comments and we’ll be sure to correct any errors or omissions.
I think it fair to say most transit geeks/advocates/aficionados/whatever start from the following rational, central assumption:
The role of transit is to move as many people as quickly, cost-effectively and comfortably as possible.
Obviously some might favor one aspect of that assumption more so than others. Jarrett Walker, for example, would favor speed over all others while Patrick Condon is likely to skew towards the issue of comfort (for a great debate about this issue, check out Is Speed Obsolete? over at Human Transit). But generally speaking I think the above assumption is the unstated jumping off point for most transit geeks and their analyses.
It’s also probably the worst assumption any transit geek can make.
Let me explain:
When transit geeks argue about things like speed, capacity, station spacing, route alignments and technology, they are starting from a place that begins with the Transit Geek’s Assumption; that transit is about moving many people quickly, cheaply and easily. However transit isn’t about moving many people quickly, cheaply and easily. At least not entirely.
Transit is also about . . .
economic stimulus;
vote-buying through infrastructure;
real estate development;
dividing communities into pro-transit and anti-transit camps;
providing jobs to those who would build and operate said transit;
ego-centric legacy projects;
consulting contracts;
political gamesmanship and brinksmanship;
city marketing;
attention-seeking;
lobbying, lobbying, lobbying;
media coverage;
environmental improvement;
a whole host of other things.
Transit advocacy comes in many forms. Image by Elly Blue.
When you start from the Transit Geek’s Assumption, you trap yourself into believing that your worldview about transit is shared by everyone else. But it’s not. Transit is a deeply political act that engages – quite literally – millions of stakeholders, each with their own agenda.
Conflict is assured and arguments guaranteed.
Argue for (or against) a transit plan from the position of the Transit Geek’s Assumption against someone who doesn’t share that worldview and you’ve already lost the argument.
After all, a proposed transit line being too expensive isn’t an argument to a politician who explicitly wants over-priced Transit Bling solely to boost his media profile and garner him a front-page quote.
Architects and urban designers may be no fans of elevated transport infrastructure and fair enough. Rarely is the overhead viaduct, rail bridge or elevated freeway a contributor to the urban form.
Typically, they sap the very life out of the surrounding area.
Notwithstanding that argument, however, is the fact that tunnelling is remarkably more expensive than building overhead transport infrastructure while providing the exact same quality and level of service.
Plus there’s the question of the view – but that’s something for a whole other post.
Now if the architects and urban designers of the world were willing to open their own wallets to make up for the difference in price between elevated and tunnelled transport infrastructure, then tunnels it is. But until that unlikely day ever arrives, elevated transport infrastructure is likely to be the preferred means of providing fully-dedicated rights-of-way for public transit in the near future . . . at least in places where virtual slave labour can’t be used to build said tunnels.
The entire problem with the elevated versus buried argument is the logical fallacy both sides present. The buried proponents argue that elevated infrastructure is inherently ugly and detrimental to the urban form and it’s a hard argument to refute when you see things like Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway or the Chicago El. But the argument breaks down because the fact that most elevated infrastructure is ugly doesn’t mean all elevated infrastructure must be ugly.
The elevated proponents, meanwhile, don’t do themselves any favours by consistently producing and constructing some of the most ugly and intrusive infrastructure ever unleashed on the urban form. You can’t claim that a piece of infrastructure will help a community when a great many historical examples have destroyed, decimated and cut-up pre-existing communities.
Let’s be frank here: Most elevated transport infrastructure is ugly and it’s therefore no surprise that architects and urban designers get all up in arms whenever a new one is proposed for any city. Just look at the debate over Honolulu’s new LRT line over at The Transport Politic here and here.
Which brings me to the Netherlands new light rail systems the Randstadrail. Opened in phases over the second half of the last decade, it connects The Hague with Rotterdam. While most of the Rotterdam system is underground, much of the track infrastructure in the Hague is elevated. And unlike most standard elevated tracks, these are elevated not just physically, but aesthetically as well. Take a look:
A Randstadrail station as integrated into a pedestrianized plaza. Image by deVos.
Note how the overhead rails don’t overwhelm the sidewalk below. There’s an elegant, almost beautiful interplay between street, rail and service. Image by flickr user Daniel Sparing.
An entrance up to the Randstadrail. Image by flickr user Daniel Sparing.
A train departs a Randstadrail station. Image by flickr user Ferdi’s-World.
From underneath the Randstadrail. The lattice work creates a sculptural effect that is almost organic. Notice too the space for pedestrians and the lack of support columns. Image by flickr user Gerard Stolk.
It’s an interesting example of using the elevated track as a visual cue, guide and corridor. It seems designed to play with the pedestrian at street level as much as it is designed to move people above street level.
Will elevated infrastructure work everywhere? Of course not. Some urban form dictates that elevated infrastructure is completely inappropriate and impossible. But at the same time, if one considers geologic and economic factors, some environments are completely inappropriate for tunneled infrastructure too.
At the end of the day architects and urban designers have a responsibility to understand the financial constraints cities face and cannot disregard all elevated structures simply because they’re “ugly.” After all, an architect’s or an urban designer’s job is to make the urban form beautiful within the structural, political, environmental and economic factors of the day. For an architect or urban designer to willfully ignore something as viable as elevated transport infrastructure simply on the grounds of aesthetics is to admit that they possess a severe lack of creativity and are quite likely just not very good at their jobs.
To draw an analogy: If you were bad at chemistry, would you run around claiming chemistry to be stupid, useless, harmful or ugly? Or would you instead rely upon people who actually did understand chemistry and knew how to use it responsibly?
Hopefully this current debate subsides in the near future. It’s harmful and it’s wasteful. Hopefully as the internet allows us to easily peer into the backyards and intersections of the world, systems like the Randstadrail in The Hague and projects like Zürich’s Im Viadukt will gain notice and can go a long way to showing the world that elevated infrastructure can be more, shall we say, elevated.
