Over the weekend, in an incident the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are treating as a criminal matter, an apparent saboteur somehow managed to sever the haul rope of the Sea to Sky Gondola in Squamish, British Columbia. Thankfully, the vandal acted in the dead of night thereby avoiding any human casualties. This person’s actions, however,...
Aerial ropeways are amongst the safest, if not the safest forms of transport in the world. For those who work with cable transport, they will personally understand and acknowledge that there is a deeply embedded culture of safety where passenger security is prioritized first and foremost. While aerial lifts rarely suffer any mechanical or electronic failures...
— In the past weeks, a few lift incidents made headlines across North America. Dozens were evacuated after a chair fell down at Heavenly Mountain Sky Resort (Nevada), while a stranded passenger captured some incredible footage of his own rescue at Kicking Horse Mountain Resort (British Columbia). Naturally since safety on Cable Propelled Transit is always a top...
Earlier this year, Doppelmayr Urban Solutions produced an attractively art directed brochure-cum-magazine called Ropeways in the urban environment. It compiles the many benefits of cable cars (or ropeways as they’re called in the industry) as urban transportation. The following is a summary of the magazine’s main points. The content is very useful for anyone looking...
Perhaps the most common question we’re asked about Urban Gondolas and Cable Propelled Transit is the safety question. Namely, are they safe? And while anecdotally we’ve always known them to be a remarkably safe technology, gathering clear statistical proof has been very difficult. Most countries don’t have readily available access to numbers on this and...
Note: this is a repost from an original article in 2012. Last week, guest blogger Ryan O’Connor, wrote a brief analysis on the state of HSR (high speed rail) and the potential implications and lessons cable can learn from China’s recent love affair with rail. If you haven’t been keeping up-to-date with transportation news in...
Here at the Gondola Project, we generally discuss cable transport issues but many of our long-time readers also know we’re really just transit nerds at heart. (And über-nerds will note we’ve used the word nerd two days in a row.) Sticking to one single solution isn’t our thing and we’re always looking for new and...
Anglophone reader Paul Travis forwards us this old-school video about ropeway safety in German. Given our still nascent grasp of the language and the importance of cable car safety, we invite our German-speaking friends to help translate. (Google is getting better but we still wouldn’t trust it beyond ‘Please direct me to the local gondola...
We’ve seen our fair share of primitive, simple ropeways around the world, especially in China (link 1, link 2) where cable is often used to connect remote, mountainous villages. And today, we can add another one to this exclusive list — the Yushan Village “Sky Road” Ropeway in Hubei Province. In the past, the 200...
In our never-ending quest to document how the world of Hollywood fiction views cable cars and all mass transit as a mortal threat to your safety, we give you this: