Taking the Cable Car to Work
by Jesse Fox, Tel Aviv, Israel on 01.14.08
Cable car in Portugal.
What's the best way to equip a city built on a mountain with decent public transport when the roads start getting clogged up? Try cable cars. Though normally used to provide access to high-altitude tourist attractions and ski spots, the city of Haifa has decided to link itself up vertically with Israel's first public cable car service.
Blessed with challenging topography and years of questionable urban planning, Haifa is a city badly in need of creative transportation solutions. Although a BRT system is currently being built to link the city center with its suburbs, the new system will not reach parts of the city built on the Carmel mountain, including numerous neighborhoods and the city's two major universities. And that's where the cable car comes in.
The University of Haifa overlooks the city from its disconnected perch.
Meant to scale 450 meters of altitude, the cable car should make the trip from Haifa's seaport up to its highest mountain peak in about 15 minutes. While cable cars lack the capacity of subways and buses - their actual capacity is roughly equal to a couple of taxis - the city somehow plans to shuttle up to 5 million travelers a year by running the system "like an assembly line," with cars running every 11 seconds.
Will the cable car become the next light rail? The system is scheduled to begin operating in 2010.
Via:: Ha'aretz
Images:: http://www.apl385.com/madeira/index.htm, http://math.haifa.ac.il/yair/
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One step closer to PRT - Personal Rapid Transit uses a similar sized vehicle on a totally different type of track.
my thoughts exactly... not exactly the podcars from minority report or the incredibles, but it seems progressive...
What a great idea! It's this kind of creative, problem-solving, unique-to-the-situation thinking that gets real, working solutions.
It's always great to see innovative ideas like these, but how efficient is this as mass transit? When you remove the "mass" part of the equation, is a cable car with one or two people any more efficient than driving? Of course, when considered as part of an overall transit system it would look much better, but I'd be curious to see more data.
These kinds of projects can have significantly positive social effects as well -- witness the outcome of the MetroCable extension in Medellín, Colombia. Through the use of aerial trams, they expanded the reach of Medellín's mass transit to very poor communities up in the mountains, spurring a revival of social engagement and participation in once impenetrably dangerous parts of town:
http://blabbeando.blogspot.com/2006/01/medellins-metrocable.html
i wonder if the Baha'i house of worship will be included in the this? My mom, who spent a year in Haifa doing a year of service, told me the city rearranged it's main highway coming from the harbor so that it leads straight toward the beauty of the Baha'i grounds.
If you are interested in PRT, there is a group on Facebook, some discussion starting to trickle in...
"but how efficient is this as mass transit? When you remove the "mass" part of the equation, is a cable car with one or two people any more efficient than driving?"
most likely they'll use demountable gondolas so when demand drops off gondolas can be demounted from the wire and put into storage bays.
the beauty of a cable car system is that when a car is winched up the hill they gain potential energy, then when the car is going down they actually release that energy back into the system. so the motors aren't working as hard as you would first think.
I live in Haifa and attend one of the universities mentioned. This is a great idea, but it's been talked about for decades with no visible progress made. So I'm not optimistic about getting to use it before I graduate and leave town.
The cable car plan is more efficient than driving because for each car that goes up a car goes down, so little energy is needed overall. It's faster too because the distances are short but by car you have to wind back and forth on roads going up/downhill. For these reasons it looks much more viable than PRT.
The "questionable urban planning" referred to is just a single building. Other than that it seems the city is planned pretty well, except of course for the giant issue of topography. Haifa's "downtown" is poor and unsuccessful mostly because it is built on a hillside and hard to get to from anywhere else. The funicular-subway was an attempt to solve that problem, but it does not go far enough to be useful nowadays. There are large, dense office parks on the outskirts of the city, but they don't really have any sense of urban fabric.
Because the cable car is such an original idea, I wonder if there are non-obvious reasons why it would not work or be cost-effective. I'm happy to read about the Medellin system which seems to be doing well in similar geographic circumstances.
I don't think this cable car would have any significant social impact, as the only places it would go to are the 2 universities and 1 central bus/train station.
The Bahai shrine would not be included, it's in the northwest part of the city and the proposed route is in the southeast part. The subway already serves the Bahai shrine, to a certain extent.