The gondola renaissance began, more or less, with Medellín. In 2004, the Colombian city built a gondola to connect one of its sprawling hillside neighborhoods to the trunk line of the Metro, which runs along the fold of the valley. The success of that project inspired the construction of two more lines, which in turn helped make the city an international destination for mayors and urban thinkers, and the winner of the Urban Land Institute’s Innovation City of the Year last month.
Medellín had imitators. In 2007, Portland, Oregon, built a tramway to connect a university campus to downtown. New York City renovated its Roosevelt Island Tram in 2010. In 2009, Manizales, Colombia, installed a gondola system in imitation of Medellin. The next year, Caracas built one; the year after, Rio de Janeiro did too.
Last year, London built an aerial cable crossing the Thames, and in the fall, La Paz announced it will build the world's largest gondola transit network, with eleven stations and over seven miles of cable. The French cities of Brest and Toulouse will complete cable transport in 2015 and 2017, respectively. [...]
And beyond that, according to Assman Ekkehard, a marketing director for Doppelmayr, there was an image problem. "Most people — politicians, the public itself, architects, the people who are doing the plans for cities, traffic specialists — they also had, and still sometimes have this association: ropeways are good for tourists, they're good for bringing people up the mountain, but they're not a good means of transport."
That's beginning to change, Ekkehard believes. "People see cities with ropeways and they see it works," he says. "It’s a very reasonable means of transit – you don’t need a lot of infrastructure. They need very little space. They're very environmentally friendly."
But perhaps more importantly in an era of diminished public funds, they can be built quickly and cheaply.
No comments:
Post a Comment