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Dear Toronto:

You might have heard today on CBC’s Metro Morning an interview with myself, Steven Dale, the Founder of The Gondola Project and Founding Principal at Creative Urban Projects.

Typically, such press causes The Gondola Project to experience a rather large surge in traffic from whatever given geographic region is discussing the idea. As such: Welcome to the conversation.

The Gondola Project is an ongoing participatory planning project to help explain and spread the idea of Urban Gondolas and Cable Propelled Transit throughout the world. It is meant to be accessible, user-friendly and informative.

As most of today’s new readers have probably never contemplated the idea of using what is – let’s be honest – ski lift technology as mass public transit, don’t worry – at first it was totally ridiculous to us as well! We get that the idea is foreign, bizarre and strange.

But after exploring The Gondola Project we hope you’ll see that it’s not so strange and bizarre a notion after all. Feel free to comment, ask questions and generally engage us on the topic – that’s what we’re here for. And if you’re interested, take a look at our concept for an Urban Gondola in Toronto.

And please be rest-assured, The Gondola Project doesn’t suggest cable transit, cable cars or urban gondolas are the solution to our collective public transit woes.

Our cities are increasingly complex entities and the more tools we have to tackle coming challenges, the better. We’re not here to say gondolas are the best tool to the exclusion of all others, but we are here to say gondolas are a viable, valuable tool worth exploring.

Enjoy!

– Steven Dale

PS: We’re currently working on site updates, so if there are a couple of things that aren’t working, please give it a day or two.

PPS: A good place to start with The Gondola Project is in our ABOUT section and our LEARN ABOUT CABLE TRANSIT sections (accessible through our the header bar above).

PPPS: To save you the hassle of wading through months of old blog posts, we’ve also hand-selected a group of older posts to get you up-and-running:

• The Basics

• PPHPD

• Medellin / Caracas

• CPT Is Not A Cure-All

• The Koblenz Rheinseilbahn

• Time Is A Non-Renewable Resource

• 9 Cable Systems That Are Important (and Virtually Unknown)

• Translating Gondolas Into Urban Gondolas

• Urban Gondolas, Cable Cars & Snow

• Shooting A Chickadee With A Cannonball

• Is Cable A Niche Technology?

• CPT Is Not A Monorail

• De-Bugging

• LT1M Wait Times

• LRT Is Chicken

• What About PRT?

• The Wealth of Poor Nations

• We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

• The Public Transit Model

• What Changed?

• January 28th, 1882

• Bondada-Neumann Study, Part 1

• History & Future

In order to broaden the scope of the site more, we will often discuss issues peripherally-related to public transit and urban gondolas. To get a feel for those kinds of discussions, we’ve hand-selected a group of older posts that should give you a reasonable understanding of The Gondola Project’s worldview:

• The Public Transit Model – If you had the opportunity to invest your own money in public transit, would you?

• Alternatives Analysis Thought Experiment – If every technology mode in the world had the same performance-cost package, how would you decide which to implement?

• Forcing Functions – Humans make mistakes constantly. Forcing Functions help prevent those mistakes. What forcing functions do we need to see in transit to make it better for everyone?

• Ugly is an Opportunity to be Beautiful – Does infrastructure have to be ugly?

• A Minute Is Not A Minute – Are our transit models undermined by the fact that people perceive time in very different ways?

• The End of Public Transit? – Google’s testing a car that drives itself. Could this be the end of public transit?

• Inflexible Inventory – Everyone wants to travel at the same time in the same direction. Can that problem be solved?

• Chinese Tunnel Bus – Who doesn’t love the Chinese Tunnel Bus™?

• Forecasting as Voodoo – Are transit planners’ ridership forecasts a reliable tool?

• Never Mind The Real World – Do our planning models sufficiently take into consideration that which actually occurs in the world, rather than what we hope will occur?

• A Tale of Two Planning Professors – What can two planning professors teach us about the state of planning education and practice?

• Zombie Streetcars & Transit Bling – Is newer always better?