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 it and no media personality called you up about it asking for your opinion. Simple reality is you probably never even considered it as a transit technology in the first place.
Look at Hamilton.
It was a good arrangement. It was easy. Slap down some rails, buy some streetcars, call it Light Rail. Write the cheque. Trouble is, that arrangement has changed. Fundamentally.
Now you do need to know about cable. Trouble. Now people are asking you about it. Also trouble. Now governments are seriously asking “what about cable?” Trouble thrice over. Media calls you up and you either say you know nothing about cable or what you do say is demonstrably wrong. Double trouble.
You wouldn’t be reading this post if that wasn’t true. Cable Propelled Transit’s not the kind of thing you stumble upon; you hunt for it.
The thing is this: Cable’s here and so are you. Which do you think is going to be around longer? And what are you going to do about it? You can fight it, get angry about it, rail against it – which is a guaranteed losing strategy – or you can embrace it, learn about it and – most importantly – help improve it.
It’s always better to ride with the leading edge of change than chase after it.