THE RETURN OF SANTO DOMINGO Santo Domingo is an isolated barrio in the Colombian city of Medellin. Today it is a place of peace, calm and social progress. Twenty years ago, it was a type of living hell that the developed world can only imagine. Crime was rampant, poverty high. Homes and businesses along Andalucia...
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...
Tune in Wednesday for the start of The Gondola Project’s first photo essay: Medellin/Caracas. I’ve just returned from Medellin, Colombia and Caracas, Venezuela where I toured five of the most important systems in all of cable transit. Two of them just opened mere weeks ago. There’s so much to say, this series could go on...
The Mandalay Bay cable car in Vegas operates under a simple and controversial principal: Technicians, not operators. This fundamental principal means this: The system is never in the hands of amateurs. If you don’t know how the system works in its entirety, you don’t operate the system. It’s the difference between having teenagers run a...
For most of your career you didn’t need to know anything about cable. Not anything. Nothing. What transit planner, engineer, policy-maker or advocate bothers with ski-lifts? That’s not transit, that’s a toy for tourists. You could ignore it. You didn’t need to learn about it and your boss never asked about it. No politician mentioned...
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 –...
What do The Grateful Dead, Alvin & The Chipmunks, Rodney Dangerfield & Andrea Bocelli share in common? (as relates to cable?) Fifty bucks (Canadian) to the first person who can answer the above question. The winner will be announced either tomorrow or sometime in the near future, depending on whether this question is easier than I thought...