The Mandalay Bay cable car in Vegas operates under a simple and controversial principal: Technicians, not operators. This fundamental principal means this: The system is never in the hands of amateurs. If you don’t know how the system works in its entirety, you don’t operate the system. It’s the difference between having teenagers run a...
For most of your career you didn’t need to know anything about cable. Not anything. Nothing. What transit planner, engineer, policy-maker or advocate bothers with ski-lifts? That’s not transit, that’s a toy for tourists. You could ignore it. You didn’t need to learn about it and your boss never asked about it. No politician mentioned...
I recently travelled to Las Vegas, Nevada to explore that city’s two public cable systems. This is Part 2 of a 3 Part report on the Mandalay Bay Cable Car. The Mandalay Bay Cable Car is the kind of cable installation I love. It’s a modest, unassuming workhorse that demonstrates why cable is just so...
I recently travelled to Las Vegas, Nevada to explore that city’s two public cable systems. This is Part 1 of a 3 Part report on the Mandalay Bay Cable Car. In the late 1990’s, the MGM group wanted to build a new casino in Las Vegas. The new casino – dubbed The Mandalay Bay –...
No great city, company, person or government is anything without crisis. Crisis -when overcome – proves determination and resolve. It hardens the mettle, stiffens the spine. It makes us work, innovate, improvise and toughen up. New York had the 1970’s Bankruptcy. San Francisco the 1906 Earthquake. The London Fire. Montreal’s October Crisis. Barcelona under Franco....
Gimme’ what the other guy’s got. That’s all City Hall tends to want. Buzzwords. Hype. Tourists. That’s why every city’s racing to be Green, World Class and Creative. City Hall thinks that’s good marketing and it is . . . if you actually are Green, World Class and Creative. But what if you’re not? You...
In his book, The Design of Future Things, Donald A. Norman writes: “We must design our technologies for the way people actually behave, not the way we would like them to behave.” Now replace technologies with cities. Or transit. Or government. Or customer service. Or the justice system. Or public policy. Or hospitals. Or lawyers. Or the postal...
Adam Butler is an Australian blogger and advocate of Zero Fare Public Transport. Recently, Adam posted a column on his website called The Public Transport Bandwagon. It’s an excellent piece of writing with an interesting hook. As Adam explains, the Victoria government in Australia has recently spent over $1 billion dollars on an automated ticketing system....
(This is Part 2 of a 2-Part piece on the Bondada-Neumann Study from the late 1980’s. In Part 1, I focused on the issue of Familiarity. In Part 2, I discuss the differences in perceptions between planners with cable experience and those without.) Bondada and Neumann’s discovery that transit planners and engineers had little familiarity...
Last night I went for a ride in San Francisco. I was on the west coast learning about various cable systems and I was at the end of a long week of traveling and research. I needed room to clear my head, get out of the hotel. I found myself jumping on a cable car at...