“Five more minutes then I’m hailing a taxi.” Image by flickr user Pim Horvers.
One way to build a successful business is to provide a product, feature or service the market didn’t even know it couldn’t live without. Once the market is exposed to that which it can’t live without, everything that came before it seems lacking and the market is irrevocably disrupted for the better.
The urban gondola feature that has the most potential to cause this kind of disruption (yet receives so little attention) is less-than-one-minute (LT1M) wait times.
It’s odd. Nowadays, wait times are accepted as a given within public transit to such an extent we barely even pay attention to them anymore.
Yes, I’m going to have to wait for my bus or streetcar.
Yes, my streetcar is probably not going to arrive at its scheduled time.
Yes, I’ll be waiting for ten minutes only to have four buses arrive all at one time.
(Note: That last one is such a common occurrence, there’s even a name for it – bunching.)
We barely discuss these things anymore because they are simply a part of the performance-cost package of public transportation. These things are such a given, we don’t even recognize that another way is possible.
Urban gondolas do away with that problem to such a massive degree, one has to ask themselves the following: Once people are exposed to LT1M wait times, how long will they be willing to accept the old model of unreliable schedules and extended wait times offered by standard technologies?
One could even find themselves wondering how to reliably implement LT1M wait times in our standard transit technologies (hint: you currently can’t).
To the cable industry and urban gondola enthusiast this must sound like an excellent opportunity, and it is. But it’s also a situation that’s fraught with peril:
If people begin to demand LT1M across their transit network, we may find transit agencies and planners attempting to implement cable technology in wholly inappropriate ways and locales. That doesn’t help anyone.
Recognizing the possibility that the Cable Propelled Transit’s LT1M wait times could make existing transportation services look inferior (from a wait time perspective), transit agencies may balk at urban gondolas entirely.
The convenience of LT1M could cause riders of other parts of a transit network to shift their usage to an adjacent or nearby urban gondola line. This shift in ridership could potentially overwhelm the urban gondola line, push it over capacity and thereby eliminate all of the convenience LT1M initially provided. It should be noted that this very situation occurred with Medellin’s Linea K.
LT1M wait times represent a massive advantage cable has over every other standard transportation mode and is one that’s unlikely to be matched any time soon.
But unless transit providers, planners and manufacturers recognize the potential problems LT1M could cause – and effectively manage and mitigate those problems – cable transit could find itself a victim of its own success.
5 Comments
I agree with you (written at June 4, 2011 at https://www.gondolaproject.com/2011/06/02/urban-gondola-transit-as-minivan-revisited/ )
But I do not agree in full with you, that
“The convenience of LT1M could cause riders of other parts of a transit network to shift their usage to an adjacent or nearby urban gondola line. This shift in ridership could potentially overwhelm the urban gondola line, push it over capacity and thereby eliminate all of the convenience LT1M initially provided. It should be noted that this very situation occurred with Medellin’s Linea K.”
This is a problem of all transportation systems. Now we can experience it at the car traffic system (too much drivers at the same time led to congested roads).
CPT can transport a maximum of persons per hour.
Roads can transport a maximum of persons/cars per hour, too.
Therefore you must know the maximum of persons you have to transport before you build any transportation system.
An advantage of CPT is, at rush hours you could drive with bigger gondolas or with less intervals (if the whole system is constructed for this load), but you don’t need more personal or personnel costs !
You can build a GPT-transportation with lower investment costs, so the tickets can be cheaper. If you have to build an expensive subway system, the tickets are more expensive. Accept the customers higher prices or longer waiting times?
A friend of mine is managing a restaurant. He says, the optimal effectiveness of utlilization is about 90%. If it is higher, the prices are too less (with higher prices he could earn more money). If it is less than 90%, the prices are too high (or the price-quality ratio is to poor) and so he earns not enough money too.
If a CPT-system is BETTER than other transit systems (including car traffic) the optimal effectiveness of utilization is about 90% too. At rush hours (demand is high – law of the market ) the ticket have to be more expensive (and these passengers have priority) and people who want to save money are travelling earlier or later or have to wait (it’s a capitalist system).
90% not 99%, because at the restaurant he needs some free tables for surprise guests, he wants to assign them a table and not to send them away with annoying customers.
You need a little bit free place at a gondola too.
It is also naturally a problem of investment costs too. Do we build a system with carrying ropes for normal traffic or a system with load reserves, if we change only the gondolas later to bigger ones.
@ “Recognizing the possibility that the Cable Propelled Transit’s LT1M wait times could make existing transportation services look inferior (from a wait time perspective), transit agencies may balk at urban gondolas entirely.”
Easily solved. First thing: the guys that buy transit always buy the most expensive. So triple the price. Stick a snurly driver/attendant (unionized, of course) in every car. Increase wait-time to 8 – 12 minutes (and make sure you bunch cars up). Tear up the road under it (so what if it doesn’t need it: people expect to be inconvenienced during construction periods). Lower the cabins so they’re at streetcar height and armor plate them ’em enough to ensure that in a fight, the car looses (and give out bonuses every time they kill someone. After all, one of the goals of transit is to reduce the car population). Finally, install a clang-clang. People love that bell.
Then, after a year or so and users wake up and recognize that the things can operate without drivers, fire them (OK,make ’em managers of something). When they learn that cabins can be elevated and skim over the traffic in a dedicated corridor, raise ’em. Then, without traffic worries, headway can be increased, so do that, too. Which means that you can also lose the armor plating. But keep the clang-clang and ring it on every block: to remind people of ‘what used to be’.
You’re welcome.
[Guenther] has it right. If a new gondola system competes with a bus and is faster, people will shift to the gondola until it’s reached capacity and lines are long enough that the bus is competitive again. This is a feature, not a bug. We’re now carrying just as many people with a handful of operators as we did with dozens of buses. We can then either:
1. Do nothing. Capacity has increased and the average trip time has gone down. Yay!
2. Charge more for the higher service, balancing service back to buses. Use the added revenue to add more cars and eventually build yet another gondola. Capacity increases further and the average trip time is even shorter. Yay!
3. Cut bus service to reflect the lower demand. Take money saved and add more cars and eventually build yet another gondola. Capacity starts out at original levels, but increases and the average trip time is shorter. Yay!
My point is that there is no downside to better service.