That’s what the famous American urban planner Daniel Burnham is often-quoted as having said. Make no small plans. We teach our planning students this edict like its religion. But how many big plans, grand plans, enormous plans are ever actually realized? Few, and rarely as per the original design. Big plans are cumbersome beasts. They...
Beyond the obvious, here’s a few things I think transit should be: Free. Or close to it. Most businesses would pay millions of dollars for a captive market of individuals who predictably use the same two stations twice a day, five days a week. Transit operators should make their money not off of transit, but...
Medellin’s third and most recent Cable Propelled Transit line is Linea L – Cable Arvi. It is only a few weeks old and transports the people of Medellin up through the mountains and all the way to Parque Arvi (pronouned “Ar-bee”), a new nature preserve a few kilometres from the city. The park and transit...
LINEA J Unlike Linea K of the Medellin Metrocable, Linea J is much more actively involved in Transit Oriented Development (TOD). Linea K served an existing and extremely dense neighborhood lacking in transit. Linea J serves the barrio of Vallejuelos and the La Aurora development that is in the process of building and expanding. This...
Even in Medellin the Not Over My Backyard rule applies. Andrés Uribe and Theo Kruk, two executives with Metro Medellin witnessed that very problem. Though Metro Medellin was ultimately successful at building their Metrocable line (with significant portions of it traveling over people’s homes) there was initial concern from locals in the barrio of Santo...
Tune in Wednesday for the start of The Gondola Project’s first photo essay: Medellin/Caracas. I’ve just returned from Medellin, Colombia and Caracas, Venezuela where I toured five of the most important systems in all of cable transit. Two of them just opened mere weeks ago. There’s so much to say, this series could go on...
So you’ve been thinking about cable and your city for a while now. You think it’s a good idea and you’re thinking of telling your boss, electorate, whomever. Here’s a few helpful hints before you do: Develop a sense of humor about yourself. If you don’t, everyone else will. Grow a thick skin. Deeply related...
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 3 of a 3 Part report on the Mandalay Bay Cable Car. The importance of station design in cable cannot be overstated. Even more than other transit technologies, cable stations have to be designed to accommodate...