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...
David asks: PRT is getting some buzz lately what with Heathrow’s system going live soon and Masdar in the works. Do you know of any systems or engineering solutions that allow overhead gondolas to work the same way? IE: Swap to a different cable at a junction? Is CPT PRT-able? Swapping to a different cable...
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...
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...
I recently travelled to Las Vegas, Nevada to explore that city’s two public cable systems. This is Part 2 of a 3 Part report on the Mandalay Bay Cable Car. The Mandalay Bay Cable Car is the kind of cable installation I love. It’s a modest, unassuming workhorse that demonstrates why cable is just so...
I recently travelled to Las Vegas, Nevada to explore that city’s two public cable systems. This is Part 1 of a 3 Part report on the Mandalay Bay Cable Car. In the late 1990’s, the MGM group wanted to build a new casino in Las Vegas. The new casino – dubbed The Mandalay Bay –...
(This is Part 2 of a 2-Part piece on the Bondada-Neumann Study from the late 1980’s. In Part 1, I focused on the issue of Familiarity. In Part 2, I discuss the differences in perceptions between planners with cable experience and those without.) Bondada and Neumann’s discovery that transit planners and engineers had little familiarity...
Pitting drivers against transit users is cheap and easy politics and it doesn’t help anyone (except maybe the politician). Drivers aren’t inherently against transit any more than transit users are inherently against cars. That just becomes the end result when you make both groups fight over the little slivers of road space we currently have. (For...
Back in 1990 Grace Manufacturing had a lot of scrap steel lying around and it was sharp. Instead of throwing the steel out, they decided to turn that waste into revenue. So was born the Microplane, an incredibly sharp wood shaving tool. It sold fine, but nothing special. Then along came Lorraine Lee of Ottawa,...