Every now and then somebody comes forward and proposes an urban gondola. The most recent one that I have heard about here in Toronto was this one from 2016 called the "Don Valley Cable Car." But like many gondola proposals, it sort of just disappeared. Probably because it wasn't entirely necessary. (I just checked their website and it is now down.)
However, there are rare instances where a gondola makes a lot of sense. Medellin, for example, has a very successful urban gondola system that my friend Alex Feldman wrote about, here on the blog, after a visit to the city back in 2014. In this case, the gondola was instrumental in connecting hill-side communities that were previously disconnected from the rest of the city.
Another less urbanized example is the one that Utah (Salt Lake County) is planning to build in Little Cottonwood Canyon. I wrote about this project back in March when I was there and, today, the Utah Department of Transportation announced their preferred mobility option. It is called Gondola Alternative B and, as far as I can tell, it is still the longest and most expensive urban gondola ever proposed.
Here are the details in graphic form:
To summarize, though:
The system is being designed to carry 1,050 passengers per hour, with cabins departing every 2 minutes.
The gondola itself is expected to cost $370 million, but when you add in a new parking garage for 2,500 cars, tolling infrastructure on the existing State Route, and other improvements, the total all-in capital cost is projected to be $729 million. The route itself is somewhere around 10 miles, so let's call it $73 million per mile.
At the same time, the projected operating costs are relatively low at $8 million per year, so this option actually has the lowest 30-year lifecycle cost out of all the ones that were studied. The other alternatives included widening the existing roadway, enhancing the bus service, and adding rail. There was also one other gondola option, which was presumably called Gondola Alternative A.
If you're wondering why this is likely a good idea, check out my post from this past winter.
If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that I have a thing for narrow streets. Which is why when I travel I sometimes (okay, oftentimes) bring a laser distance measuring device with me. I like measuring things so that I have dimensions that I can feed back into our own development projects. But perhaps most importantly, it allows me to appear as nerdy as humanly possible while traveling. Walking around with just a camera in hand isn't enough. You need to try harder than that. And so far the narrowest street that I have come across was in Noto, Sicily at just over 1.3m wide.
If you also like to fawn over narrow European streets, you may enjoy this recent video by City Beautiful. In it, Dave Amos compares European cities, like Rome, to US cities, like Salt Lake City and Philadelphia, and then asks: Can the US build European-style street networks? His immediate answer is, "probably not." And this is something that we have talked about before on the blog. Street networks tend to be really sticky. They're hard to change. However, there is another possible solution: create new smaller mid-block streets. And that's the focus of Dave's video:
https://youtu.be/iv9fWEekFUM
But if you think about it, this condition already exists in a number of cities. Here in Toronto, we have somewhere around 300 kilometers of laneways, which tend to range in width from 4 to 6m. These are European-scaled streets and amazingly they're already in place! The only difference is that, today, they mostly serve a back-of-house function. They provide access to garages. However, that is quickly changing with the introduction of laneway suites. And so over a long enough time horizon, our laneways are going to inevitably flip from back-of-house to primarily residential.
Though maybe there's even more we could do with this asset. European cities manage to fit retail, restaurants, patios, and more within 6m. Why not do the same with some of our narrowest streets?
The School of Cities at the University of Toronto and the Institute for Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley have been using mobile phone data to track the recovery of 62 downtowns across North America. This work has been being published at downtownrecovery.com, but it has also been widely cited.
First, to be clear on how this works, the data they are collecting is not dependent on people actually making calls or actively consuming data on their phone; instead it is simply based on people having a phone with them and being physically located in one these 62 downtowns. It also covers the period between January 2019 and November 2022, and includes cities with least 350,000 people.
I'm not exactly sure how long the phones need to be in a particular place or how they treat time in their data, but the unit of measure is something that they call a "Point of Interest." This includes things like restaurants and shops, so presumably this data isn't just saying, " I went downtown and sat in my office for 8 hours." It could also be, "I went downtown and ate good pasta."
I say this because, based on my understanding of the data, having a high Recovery Quotient (RQ) could mean a number of different things. It could mean that more people are back in the office, but it could also mean that the downtown isn't a monoculture and that it has other things going on besides just work.
In any event, here's what they have found:
Every now and then somebody comes forward and proposes an urban gondola. The most recent one that I have heard about here in Toronto was this one from 2016 called the "Don Valley Cable Car." But like many gondola proposals, it sort of just disappeared. Probably because it wasn't entirely necessary. (I just checked their website and it is now down.)
However, there are rare instances where a gondola makes a lot of sense. Medellin, for example, has a very successful urban gondola system that my friend Alex Feldman wrote about, here on the blog, after a visit to the city back in 2014. In this case, the gondola was instrumental in connecting hill-side communities that were previously disconnected from the rest of the city.
Another less urbanized example is the one that Utah (Salt Lake County) is planning to build in Little Cottonwood Canyon. I wrote about this project back in March when I was there and, today, the Utah Department of Transportation announced their preferred mobility option. It is called Gondola Alternative B and, as far as I can tell, it is still the longest and most expensive urban gondola ever proposed.
Here are the details in graphic form:
To summarize, though:
The system is being designed to carry 1,050 passengers per hour, with cabins departing every 2 minutes.
The gondola itself is expected to cost $370 million, but when you add in a new parking garage for 2,500 cars, tolling infrastructure on the existing State Route, and other improvements, the total all-in capital cost is projected to be $729 million. The route itself is somewhere around 10 miles, so let's call it $73 million per mile.
At the same time, the projected operating costs are relatively low at $8 million per year, so this option actually has the lowest 30-year lifecycle cost out of all the ones that were studied. The other alternatives included widening the existing roadway, enhancing the bus service, and adding rail. There was also one other gondola option, which was presumably called Gondola Alternative A.
If you're wondering why this is likely a good idea, check out my post from this past winter.
If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that I have a thing for narrow streets. Which is why when I travel I sometimes (okay, oftentimes) bring a laser distance measuring device with me. I like measuring things so that I have dimensions that I can feed back into our own development projects. But perhaps most importantly, it allows me to appear as nerdy as humanly possible while traveling. Walking around with just a camera in hand isn't enough. You need to try harder than that. And so far the narrowest street that I have come across was in Noto, Sicily at just over 1.3m wide.
If you also like to fawn over narrow European streets, you may enjoy this recent video by City Beautiful. In it, Dave Amos compares European cities, like Rome, to US cities, like Salt Lake City and Philadelphia, and then asks: Can the US build European-style street networks? His immediate answer is, "probably not." And this is something that we have talked about before on the blog. Street networks tend to be really sticky. They're hard to change. However, there is another possible solution: create new smaller mid-block streets. And that's the focus of Dave's video:
https://youtu.be/iv9fWEekFUM
But if you think about it, this condition already exists in a number of cities. Here in Toronto, we have somewhere around 300 kilometers of laneways, which tend to range in width from 4 to 6m. These are European-scaled streets and amazingly they're already in place! The only difference is that, today, they mostly serve a back-of-house function. They provide access to garages. However, that is quickly changing with the introduction of laneway suites. And so over a long enough time horizon, our laneways are going to inevitably flip from back-of-house to primarily residential.
Though maybe there's even more we could do with this asset. European cities manage to fit retail, restaurants, patios, and more within 6m. Why not do the same with some of our narrowest streets?
The School of Cities at the University of Toronto and the Institute for Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley have been using mobile phone data to track the recovery of 62 downtowns across North America. This work has been being published at downtownrecovery.com, but it has also been widely cited.
First, to be clear on how this works, the data they are collecting is not dependent on people actually making calls or actively consuming data on their phone; instead it is simply based on people having a phone with them and being physically located in one these 62 downtowns. It also covers the period between January 2019 and November 2022, and includes cities with least 350,000 people.
I'm not exactly sure how long the phones need to be in a particular place or how they treat time in their data, but the unit of measure is something that they call a "Point of Interest." This includes things like restaurants and shops, so presumably this data isn't just saying, " I went downtown and sat in my office for 8 hours." It could also be, "I went downtown and ate good pasta."
I say this because, based on my understanding of the data, having a high Recovery Quotient (RQ) could mean a number of different things. It could mean that more people are back in the office, but it could also mean that the downtown isn't a monoculture and that it has other things going on besides just work.
In any event, here's what they have found:
The headline finding is that San Francisco has the lowest RQ at 31% and Salt Lake City has the highest at 135%. There does appear to be a bias toward higher recoveries with mid-sized cities, and one of the reasons for this is that these recovery quotients appear to be correlated with average commute times:
Some of the other strongly correlated explanations, include the percentage of jobs in professional, scientific, and technical fields:
And the number of days that events were shut down during the pandemic (note the Canadian cities on the right below; welcome, New Orleans):
I suppose one way to grossly oversimplify these findings is to say that some people have been avoiding going downtown if they can't quickly drive there (and have to take transit), if their job more easily allows them to work from home, and if things were shut down for too long during the pandemic. Because if it was, they maybe forgot about all of the fun things that typically happen downtown.
Image: The School of Cities
The headline finding is that San Francisco has the lowest RQ at 31% and Salt Lake City has the highest at 135%. There does appear to be a bias toward higher recoveries with mid-sized cities, and one of the reasons for this is that these recovery quotients appear to be correlated with average commute times:
Some of the other strongly correlated explanations, include the percentage of jobs in professional, scientific, and technical fields:
And the number of days that events were shut down during the pandemic (note the Canadian cities on the right below; welcome, New Orleans):
I suppose one way to grossly oversimplify these findings is to say that some people have been avoiding going downtown if they can't quickly drive there (and have to take transit), if their job more easily allows them to work from home, and if things were shut down for too long during the pandemic. Because if it was, they maybe forgot about all of the fun things that typically happen downtown.
Image: The School of Cities
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