Over at The City Fix, Megan McConville has a great piece on cable transit called Up, Up and Away in a Cable Car. It’s an excellent analysis of the technology that talks extensively about the management difficulties and poor decision-making behind the Maokong Gondola in Taipei. Well worth the read and very informative for cities...
Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone. Rudyard Kipling (1890)
All images courtesy of the Doppelmayr Garaventa Group. Design by Johannes Geisler.
My hunch is that many people stumble onto the topic of Cable Propelled Transit (and this website) by googling the words urban and gondola or urban gondola. If not, go ahead and try it and see what you come up with. I’ll wait . . . So what did you find? Likely you came upon several...
In her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban theorist Jane Jacobs declared that a safe street or neighborhood was one that had plenty of “eyes” on it. That is, the more people use a street, the safer it becomes. Criminals, after all, don’t like the prying eyes of strangers and...
I love skeptics. Skeptics are a necessary check and balance in our entire system. They’re also some of the most positive and exciting individuals you’ll come across. There is a difference, however, between healthy skepticism and cynicism, even though the two terms are often used interchangeably. Skeptics challenge the status quo and vet new ideas....
Right now, the major source of information about cable tech comes from skiing-related sources. Here’s five useful ones. They’re not all in English. And they’re not all up to date, but they represent some of the few resources cable’s got: Bergbahnen.org Lift-world.info Skilifts.org Funi Forum Ropeways.net Part of what holds cable back is a lack...
Transit planning is a political act, no two ways about it. And as such, transit is subject to all the bumps and grinds characteristic of political and economic cycles. But unlike smaller scale legacy projects (because, let’s be honest, transit is as much about legacy building as much as it is about transportation), transit is...
When I was a child, my mother had a very simple rule when we were taking public transit: If I misbehaved, we walked . . . no matter how far from home we were. I knew perfectly well that my mother didn’t want to walk home any more than I did so one day I...
Please take the time to visit Maria Mysliborska’s wonderful Master’s Thesis Page. It’s a beautiful page that suggests how academic theses will likely be developed and submitted in the future. Maria’s plan is an elegant redevelopment of Edinburgh’s derelict waterfront. Among the highlights of the plan are a local public transit circulator using (you guessed it)...