Quote:
Originally Posted by DoubleK
Maybe the SE LRT could actually be a gondola/tram.
If the numbers in that article are right, we are clearly doing it wrong. |
Gee, a newspaper story sourced almost entirely from Steven Dale, the internet's biggest singleminded gondola advocate bathes them in a golden light. Color me shocked. He has never met a gondola he didn't like, or an urban area where a gondola wouldn't be exactly the best solution for whatever transportation problem may exist, from potholes on up.
Here's what he says about the numbers: "Light rails systems run about $36 million per mile. But the aerial ropeways required to run gondolas cost just $3 million to $12 million to install per mile." The article mentions the Portland Aerial Tram being over budget, and they even link to an article that gives the actual figures and length -- $57 million, and just over half a mile. The London gondola was a similar price; 60 million pounds and 1 km long. (And ridership is dropping below 2000 riders a day -- not that you would learn that from The Gondola Project, which wrote 19 articles on the London gondola before the really disappointing ridership numbers came out, and 0 since.) Maybe they dropped the 0, and meant to say $120 million? Or maybe the construction cost estimates for gondolas use the early successful projects, built in slums in developing countries -- for some reason, that always comes out cheaper.
The other thing that they don't talk about is operating cost, which is high. (One big reason to build a train is that the operating cost per rider is lower if the train is full.) Depending on the technology, each station is typically manned. The lines are short; half the systems on Wikipedia describe their length in feet or metres rather than miles or kilometres. The Caracas system is under 2 km, and most are shorter than that. Building an aerial tram on the SELRT line would be so far beyond the state of the art it may as well be a different technology. It would be longer than all the urban transit cable cars in the world, put together.
One big advantage cable cars have is right of way is easier to obtain (assuming you can calm residents who are now being overflown by public transit -- one notable resident in Portland decided to repaint his roof with the words "🞵🞵🞵🞵 THE TRAM"). The SELRT route already has a secured right of way, so this is no help. One big disadvantage of gondolas is that they are slow; The Gondola Project site cites a blistering 16 km/h. That would rush people from Seton to downtown in a mere 90 minutes. For comparison, the SETWAY project looked at a variety of options -- their projections for 2039 were 70,000 riders a day with a 35 minute LRT ride, 33,000 with a 46 minute partial LRT, and 16,000 with a 60 minute bus ride.
Where a gondola makes sense is for shorter connections, with limited ROW and/or physical obstacles, for a point-to-point service. That almost sounds like the North Central corridor, except it really only describes the (most difficult) last couple of km. It's impractical to run a gondola all the way to Country Hills, due to speed, technology issues, etc. The first 2-3 km from the downtown is difficult ROW, has the hill and river crossing, etc. The next 3 km has limited ROW but is otherwise reasonably flat and lower density. The remaining 6 km have ROW available. But it doesn't make sense to have a long-term transit solution where a LRT runs half or 3/4 the way downtown, then everybody gets off and transfers to a gondola.
The place that I think a gondola could work is in Foothills Hospital connections. There are a limited set of stops that would be needed, and ROW is tight. A connection to Lion's Park is one part, but I think that maybe the killer app for a gondola would to connect not only to the NW LRT but then to cross the river to Westbrook. It's under 3 km from the Foothills to Westbrook, and a gondola could do that in under 10 minutes, about as fast as driving -- with none of the hassles of the Crowchild interchange -- and twice as fast as transit. The low impact of a gondola is the only way a new river crossing could politically be built. Ultimately, I could see a three leg system; Foothills-Lion's Park, Foothills-Westbrook (with possible stop in Parkdale at the #1/305), and Foothills-Children's-Brentwood, ideally with a stop on the central part of the U of C campus, perhaps north of Mac Hall.
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