In a time when every public entity
is trying to spend less and still provide adequate transportation options to
its constituents, I found myself looking to the sky. Intra-urban planes would be a bit overkill,
and mimicking Sao Paulo’s 420 helipads (in the city!) is just too
inequitable. What I’m looking at is the
gondola or aerial tram or Cable Propelled
Transit (CPT). It is fast becoming
one of the most popular, least-used forms of urban mass transit in the world. There
are only four cities in the world, according to The Gondola Project (arguably the global
leader in CPT proselytization), that have truly integrated their CPT into their
whole transit system: Caracas, Venezuela; Constantine, Algeria; Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil; and Medellin, Colombia. Otherwise,
most cities have short, single, experimental or tourist-based lines like
Portland’s aerial tram or the Rostok/ Munich lift that was disassembled in Rostok to follow a garden exhibition traveling to Munich. However, more and more of these experiments
are planting themselves all over the map, like the London Thames Cable Car; the
urban gondola in Ordu, Turkey; or the Teléferico de Gaia in
Portugal. Why is this form of transit
becoming popular?
