A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled What Do You Hate About Your City’s Transit System? The post was meant to get people thinking about their own local transit system and to contemplate why they just accept what their transit is rather than what it could be. I encouraged people to email...
What a wonderful phrase: “Gadget value.” I just stumbled upon it in an old history text book and instantly fell in love with the term . . . Gadget Value is the intrinsic interest a mechanism generates totally separate from it’s use. It’s why we love cars, trains and any other mechanism. Cable has massive...
I recently wrote an article for the Architectural League of New York‘s urbanism-themed website Urban Omnibus. The article, titled Off the Road and Into the Skies (click to read it), should provide you with a decent history of New York City’s Roosevelt Island Tram and some analysis of Santiago Calatrava’s botched cable transit proposal for...
January 28th, 1882 is one of (if not the) most important dates in Cable Transit history. On that blustery winter day, C.B. Holmes opened the first cable car in Chicago. It was the first time cable was shown to be economical in such a snowy, icy, windy environment. It was also the first known instance...
Your children and/or grandchildren will think it’s cool. You will save lives because you’re implementing the safest form of mass public transit there is. You will save your city money which will make everyone at City Hall happier. Your peers will respect you for doing something different. You will have fun. You like fun, don’t...
I’d just like to thank everyone for the kind words and support the above article generated. I actually found out this article had landed after the fact. Myself and my partner, Gabriela, were driving home from visiting the Hungerburgbahn in Austria. I received a phone call on my cell from the Toronto radio station CFRB....
The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) is not enamoured by my proposal for cable transit in Toronto, likely because their plan is a multi-billion dollar network of light rail lines throughout Toronto called Transit City. Fair enough. But let’s actually break down the TTC’s argument and see why they’re not into the idea. Brad Ross, TTC...
We’ve experienced a “few” extra hits here on The Gondola Project since this article came out in the Toronto Star. I know many of those new visitors may be hostile to the idea of Cable Propelled Transit, and that’s okay. All I ask is three things: a) Remember, this site is a work-in-progress. If you...
On April 26th, 2008 unionized staff of the Toronto Transit Commission walked off the job at 12:01 am. The action occurred on a Friday night, thereby stranding late night workers, revelers and bar patrons. People were not happy. At the time, I was without a contract and was scrambling to find a way to continue...