January 28th, 1882 is one of (if not the) most important dates in Cable Transit history. On that blustery winter day, C.B. Holmes opened the first cable car in Chicago. It was the first time cable was shown to be economical in such a snowy, icy, windy environment. It was also the first known instance...
Corners are important because all cities have them. If your transit technology cannot turn corners, you cannot exist in cities. It’s just that simple. As I said before, however, no one has taken the time to explicitly and simply explain how cable deals with them. For those who’ve never encountered Cable Propelled Transit before, you...
It’s a new year, folks! Congratulations, we survived another one! My column yesterday attracted the site’s first Rabble and I don’t expect it to be the last. Among “thickslab’s” (please don’t post anonymously on this site, folks, and try to be respectful) concerns was the issue of passenger safety. I don’t mean in the sense...
Since no one on Boxing Day really wants to spend their time learning about anything, and no one has any real need to go anywhere by transit (hopefully), I’ll lay off today. Instead, I’d just like to draw your attention to the new Flickr badge on The Gondola Project sidebar. Clicking it will take you...
If you’ll recall, cable cars, funiculars, aerial trams and urban gondolas are propelled by means of transit vehicles attaching themselves to a moving cable. Hence the term Cable Propelled Transit. But how does that occur? With Grips, that’s how. Grips are just what they sound like. They are like a fist grabbing onto a rope...
Albert Einstein was once quoted as saying if at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. Absurd indeed. When I first started my work on Cable-Propelled Transit (CPT), I hid it from everyone. I knew it was an absurd idea and the last thing I wanted to get tagged...
The other day I wrote about how Toronto’s streetcars were like shooting chickadees with cannonballs. In terms of speed, the streetcars were designed to operate at speeds far in excess of what was possible in an urban environment. So how does CPT stack up on our Cannonball Index (that doesn’t exist, by the way, but...
The Swiss have an expression to describe solving a problem with far more than is necessary. To do so, they say, is to “shoot a chickadee with a cannonball,” and is a perfect description of what light rail is to the transit planning problem. As an example: Toronto’s current fleet of streetcars were designed to...
There are two major sub-groups of Cable-Propelled Transit (CPT) technology: Gondolas and Cable Cars. Gondolas are supported and propelled from above by cables. Most people are familiar with this technology as used in alpine ski-resorts, however it is finding increased usage in non-alpine urban regions. Cable Cars on the other hand, are supported and propelled...
Simply speaking, Cable-Propelled Transit (CPT) is a transit technology that moves people in motor-less, engine-less vehicles that are propelled by a steel cable. Proceed to Basic Lesson 2 to learn about Gondolas & Cable Cars