This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
1. Bike racks. You probably only need one for every 5th car or so, but it should be easy to add. Would probably get more use up hills than down.
2. Perth Australia is renovating its waterfront, and has just proposed a $30M gondola system to connect it to Kings Park (called a “cable car” in the image here).
3. In considering if such a system is appropriate for our city, it’s useful to look at what it can do. Here’s a great list of aerial trams and gondolas that are the highest, shortest, etc. Some useful numbers: tallest support pillar is 373′ tall, and longest run is 2.8 miles and takes 15 minutes (in New Mexico). The longest unsupported span is at Whistler at 1.9 miles. I’m not sure of the world’s fastest – the Genting Highland claimed to be the fastest at 13.4 miles/hour, but Whistler is 15.7 miles/hour and there may be faster ones out there.
4. Capacity. Medellin has a capacity of 3,000 passengers per hour per direction at 12 second spacing. Assuming 100 passengers per bus, that’s 30 buses an hour capacity. I would guess that beats our bus demand between any two points in the city. We can start with wider spacing to save money, but design in the ability to add cars in the future.
Hmm, how about propulsion options? Are any existing system counterbalanced?
The options are: counterbalanced (called “aerial trams”), propulsion-and-support on the same cable (“MDG” Monocable Detachable Gondolas, and Funitels), and propulsion-and-support on seperate cables (“BDG” Bicable Detachable Gondolas, 3S, Funifors). I’ve spent some time today learning the distinctions (good primer here at the links in the bottom right), and counterbalanced is kind of a terrible idea because they can’t corner, aren’t detachable (so they effectively can’t have stops except at the ends), and you can only have 2 vehicles. Portland’s aerial tram is counterbalanced.
MDG seems to be the way to go for low capacity systems ($5M-$20M/km, 22km/hr, 4,000 pphpd max), and 3S for higher capacity systems and windy areas ($10M-$30M/km, 40km/hr max, 6,000 pphpd max).
(pphpd = passengers per hour per direction)
We need to seed the public image with appealing gondolas like these: http://www.michels-gfk.de/gfk-seilbahn-kabinen.php
I’m newly convinced that a Cap Hill line needs to terminate on north Broadway and connect with the streetcar (presuming it extends northward as the City desires). To connect with Link is fairly redundant, but connecting the ridge and valley streetcars makes a casual connection between SLU and the Hill’s residential and districts that should serve both in blurring the border of I-5.
(Not to mention the tourist appeal of visiting Volunteer Park via a scenic ride, visibility from the Needle, and such. But those are negatives for me; I’d rather the cruisegoers not discover the hill.)
I think “casual” is an important attribute of gondolas. The nearly-zero headways and visible stations create an accessibility such as streetcars enjoy over buses and subways. [Arial gondolas: the iPad of transit.]
Awesome pictures. super look for Seattle. I can totally picture it here. I also noticed: Designarbeiten – Porsche Design GmbH.
So when the anti-transit crowd accuses us of buying a Porsche, it would actually be the truth…