To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
West Pasadena Residents' Association Annual Meeting
Wednesday May 1
Rose Bowl home team locker room
The meeting is open to the public and free of charge.
Free parking is available to all in Lot F.
Enter the stadium through Gate A.
Carts will be available for those who need a lift to the stadium and back to their car.
“CELEBRATING SUCCESS AND INSPIRING CHANGE”
Program of events:
4:45 to 5:45 p.m.
Tour the Rose Bowl renovations. See the remarkable
progress the City has made in modernizing America's Stadium. Tours
take about 20 minutes. Last tour leaves at 5:45 p.m.
5:30 to 6:30 p.m.
Refreshments & exhibits
6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
Program, including video of Huell Howser on
Paadena, Steve Madison's City Council update, election of WPRA board and
officers (see below), service awards, and featuring...
Eric Walsh, M.D., Dr.P.H, director of Pasadena Department of Public Health
‘Building a healthier Pasadena’
Dr. Walsh is Director of Public Health and Health Officer of the City’s
Department of Health. In addition, he is on staff at Loma Linda
University School of Medicine and at the University of California,
Irvine, as an adjunct professor. Dr. Walsh has served under the current
and previous White House administrations on the Presidential Advisory
Council on HIV/AIDS.
Dr. Walsh will discuss findings of the 2012 City of Pasadena-Altadena
Quality of Life Index, identify the top priorities of the Public Health
Department and discuss strategies to improve citizens’ health.
Nominating committee recommended slate of officers & directors
President: Bill Urban Vice President: Catherine Stringer Secretary: Bob Holmes Treasurer: Blaine Cavena
Directors: James Boyle, Bill Crowfoot, Sarah Gavit,
Joan Hearst, Chuck Hudson, Laura Kaufman, Audrey O’Kelley, Marilyn
Randolph, Priscilla Taylor, Michael Udell, John Van de Kamp, Fred Zepeda
and Linda Zinn
Philadelphia is 101 miles from Manhattan, and the current travel
time between the two cities is about 75 minutes on the Acela, a bit
longer by regional rail.* Suppose that Amtrak could achieve the speed of
China's bullet trains and move at 175 miles per hour. The one way
commute time would decline to 35 minutes. Common sense suggests that
home prices in Philadelphia would soar from their current median of $140,000
as businesses and households would come to view the city as a new
Manhattan suburb, and the demand to live and work there would sharply
increase. Philadelphia would benefit from the population increase and
all the amenities that private enterprise would build to support it.
That is exactly what happened in China as a consequence of the country's enormous investment in bullet trains, as work that I did with Siqi Zheng of Tsinghua University
shows. But the question is what level of public investment do the
United States and other governments want to make to relieve congestion
in mega cities and spur growth in second and third tier cities,
especially at a time when many are questioning the role of government
and pushing for fiscal austerity.
Here's China's story. Between 2006 and 2010, the Chinese central
government spent billions of dollars on new bullet trains that connect
second and third tier cities with the mega cities of Beijing, Shanghai,
and Guangzhou — but of course bullet trains don't connect every smaller
city to a mega city. So my coauthor and I looked at the differences that
bullet train connections wrought on "connected" cities by comparing
them to similar cities that the bullet train had bypassed. Using data
for 262 cities, we documented large home price increases for newly
connected cities. Based on the ridership data for two major bullet train
lines, we calculated that the average city house price growth per
billion passenger-kilometers is 4.2%. Effect 1: a capital gain windfall for land owners in second and third tier cities
High rents in the mega city also nudged the subset of households and
firms with the lowest willingness to pay to locate there to consider
relocating to the secondary cities. But these decentralized households
can easily travel to the major cities for unique shopping and restaurant
options. Effect 2: dispersed population
What other changes can these lower tier cities expect? In our past work
examining the consequences of new subways built in Beijing, we have
documented that the private sector responds to major public transit
investments through two different investment strategies. First, real
estate developers respond by building new housing towers in close
proximity to the new public transit stops. Second, commercial real
estate demand is stimulated as upscale restaurants and shopping
agglomerates close to these transit stations. The extent of this effect
will depend on whether the area is zoned for residential or commercial
activities, and also the density limits defined in zoning codes. Effect 3: private investment in amenities to support the growing populations of the lower tier cities
The bullet train simultaneously alleviates some of the congestion
costs associated with urban growth in the mega cities and triggers the
growth of the nearby second and third tier cities. In this sense, the
bullet train creates the possibility that the nearby lower tier cities
become a "safety valve" for the mega city and this alleviates concern
about such cities growing "too big." In the case of China, such
investments strengthen center cities as the bullet train connects to
downtown subway stations in the big cities. In this sense, this
investment is a low carbon strategy that lessens the need for both
in-city and cross-city car trips. Effect 4: lower carbons emissions
There's even more to the story for companies. The bullet train has the potential to play a similar role as the Internet [PDF],
attracting back-office activity and helping firms fragment so that they
keep their deal makers in the expensive commercial real estate in the
center cities while sending their routine activities to cheaper land at
the periphery. The rapid transport will allow for a more efficient
allocation of business activity across space, helping firms to control
costs. It's a "win-win" as the scarce mega city's land is efficiently
used and the secondary cities experience local growth. Effect 5: more efficient use of space for private enterprise
In the United States, Amtrak seems unlikely to accelerate any time
soon, so Philadelphia, Providence, and other cities on the Northeast
Corridor will not enjoy the full benefits of their geographic proximity
to Boston and New York City. In the west, though, California is going
ahead with its High Speed Rail. And while our work quantifies some of
the spatial consequences of investing in high speed rail, we cannot
claim to have conducted a cost/benefit analysis of such irreversible
investments. Our work suggests that cities with bullet train stations
will offer new investment opportunities for cities such as Fresno and
Bakersfield.
But bullet trains cost billions, and California is expecting the
federal government to provide much of this money. Critics will note that
it is easy (and quite tempting) to spend "other people's money." In
this new age of fiscal austerity, public finance arrangements for major
urban infrastructure projects will become an important topic for debate.
* An earlier version of this post misstated the travel time between New York City and Philadelphia.
'LA Voices' Video Celebrates Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's Administration
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is set to deliver his final State of the
City speech Tuesday night, and he wants you to feel a little misty about
it.
To that end, the media-savvy politician plans to screen a five minute video
celebrating all the reasons Los Angeles is the best city in the world:
the beach, weather, food, creative industries, sports teams and
diversity.
Of course, the subtle send-off film also praises the Villaraigosa
administration's achievements, such as 100 percent traffic light
synchronization, 20,000 new port jobs, more than 50 new parks and a 49
percent reduction in violent crime.
The Los Angeles Times notes,
however, that the sunny video fails to disclose a few "inconvenient
facts," like Villaraigosa's failure to make good on his promise to plant one million trees.
The Mayor has also recently faced criticism from those who want to replace him; last week, candidate Wendy Greuel said Los Angeles was in danger of becoming Detroit and decried City Hall's "failed" leadership on job growth.
But since when has a little reality ever gotten in the way of a good
LA party? Sit back and let the video make you smile -- or at least make
you feel smug about the weathe
Air Pollution From Traffic Linked With Childhood Cancer
Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, found
that women who were exposed to high levels of traffic pollution
(emissions from cars and trucks) while they were pregnant also had
higher risks of their children going on to develop pediatric cancers,
including acute lymphoblastic leukemia and retinoblastoma.
Because the risk was increased with higher traffic pollution exposure
regardless of the mother's pregnancy trimester -- and even going into
the child's first year of life -- researchers were not able to tease out
if there is a particular trimester where air pollution has the worst
effect on cancer risk.
"Much less is known about exposure to pollution and childhood cancer
than adult cancers," study researcher Julia Heck, assistant researcher
in the department of epidemiology at UCLA, said in a statement. "Our
innovation in this study was looking at other more rare types of
childhood cancer, such as retinoblastoma, and their possible connection
to traffic-related air pollution."
The study included 3,950 children born between 1998 and 2007 who were
part of the California Cancer Registry. All children could be linked
with a birth certificate for California, and all were diagnosed with
cancer for the first time before reaching age 5.
Researchers estimated how much traffic pollution the children's
mothers were exposed to during their pregnancy and while the child was
an infant (the first year of life), judging on traffic volume, emission
rates and other factors.
They found that the more the traffic pollution exposure increased,
the higher the child's risk was of having acute lymphoblastic leukemia,
retinoblastoma (with more cases affecting both eyes instead of just
one), and germ cell tumors.
"It would be interesting to determine if there are specific
pollutants like benzene or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are
driving these associations," Heck said in a statement.
Because the cancers in the study are rare, the researchers said more
work is needed to confirm the findings. Also, it's important to note
that the study has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, and
thus the results should be considered preliminary.
But still, this is hardly the first time air pollution has been
linked with cancer risk. A 2011 study in the American Journal of
Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine showed that living in a highly
air-polluted area raises your death risk from lung cancer
by 20 percent, compared with living in a less-polluted area. And in
2009, the Environmental Protection Agency released data showing that
people who live in certain neighborhoods may have a higher risk of cancer because of higher concentrations of toxic chemicals in the air.
Susann Edmonds of Altadena, left, steps onto the stage at the Pasadena
American Legion Post 280 Sunday, April 7, 2013, after being voted 2013
Doo Dah Parade Queen.
The zany and somewhat irreverent Doo Dah Parade in Pasadena has a new
queen -- a singing, dancing, outrageously dressed pirate with a
guitar-wielding slave and her own brew.
Altadena artist and
specialty foods entrepreneur Susann Edmonds was crowned queen of the
upcoming parade during a raucous selection party on Sunday that drew
some 250 revelers to American Legion Post 280 in Pasadena.
With
her pirate slave in tow, she sang, danced and found favor with an
amorphous panel of judges by distributing a special “Doo Dah” blend of
fermented pirate elixir.
The drink will be bottled and traded for
donations to benefit the Light Bringer Project, the nonprofit arts
education group that produces the parade and the annual Pasadena Chalk
Festival.
“I’ve been going to the Doo Dah Parade since 1984 and I
thought I had something important to bring to the Doo Dah community:
I’m good at fun,” Edmonds said.
Edmonds topped a list of 16 queen
hopefuls who let their freak flags fly with a variety of theatrical and
at times raunchy music and comedy numbers. All were invited to take
part in the April 27 — which will be the a counterculture spoof of the
Tournament of Roses Parade —along East Colorado Boulevard.
Makeup
artist and art model Taryn Piana, 27, of Los Angeles wore condoms as
pasties and a prophylactic-decorated corset as she performed a punk-rock
burlesque routine that climaxed with the spraying of Silly String.
“I’m
a habitual line stepper,” Piana said. “I’m having so much fun being
with a lot of likeminded people, which is rare for someone like me. I
usually feel like the weird one.”
Another crowd favorite was Mia
Bonadonna, a writer for the blog LAist who professed her love of pizza
by suggestively slathering it onto her vintage prom dress.
“This girl likes her pizza naked — just cheese,” said Bonadonna, 31, of Long Beach.
A few hungry guests ate some of the leftovers.
“Now that’s sloppy seconds,” said an Altadena woman who called herself Cat Man-Doo.
Other
aspiring queens included a musical whistler, a woman who played music
on a saw, a singing chef who cooked meals for the judges, a costumed
belly dancer, an undead beauty pageant contestant and an American Legion
barfly who performed a comedy routine.
The beer-soaked ritual
also saw the return of Snotty Scotty and the Hankies, a four-decade
mainstay of the Pasadena’s barroom music scene and Doo Dah’s unofficial
house band.
“Somehow they manage to get the lunatics back in the
asylum once a year. It’s the most absurd thing in the universe, but
somehow I can’t avoid doing it,” front man Scott “Snotty Scotty” Finnell
said of the gig. Plus, “it’s the only place [the band] makes any
money."
HopStop, the number one ranked transit app in iTunes and Google Play,
today launched HopStop Live! — a free, real-time social transit app that
allows public transportation riders to contribute, receive and share
real-time transit information about stations, lines and transit systems.
The new service will launch exclusively on the iPhone platform with
other platforms, including iPad and Google Play, to follow in subsequent
releases. The real-time transit service includes every market, across
every transit agency, for every line/route that HopStop currently
supports.
HopStop Live! is the only all-in-one transit app,
providing door-to-door walking and transit directions, schedules and
officially licensed transit maps and, for the first time, real-time crowd-sourced information from fellow transit riders.
The service benefits from an immediate install-base of 2 million
monthly active users. The service also fills a large void left by the
lack of real-time information currently available from most transit
agencies — especially in periods of disruption caused by unforeseen
incidents, according to a company statement.
Real-time, crowd-sourced information will be available both within
HopStop’s familiar step-by-step direction search experience and also
through a new standalone service with the iPhone app called
“Live!.”Through the standalone service “Live!,” users can follow their
specific lines and stations of regular use.
"HopStop Live!
analyzes real-time user reports on lines, stations and routes across its
entire global footprint to give transit riders a real-time snapshot of
whether their ride is delayed, by how long, and an indication of the
likely reason," says Joe Meyer, CEO, HopStop.
A geographic look at L.A.'s mayoral primary election last month.
The growth of the city's Latino and Asian populations since Tom
Bradley left office in 1993 after 20 years as the city's first black
mayor has left African Americans facing an inevitable decline in
political power. In the May 21 election, an African American may lose a
South Los Angeles council seat for the first time in 50 years.
In the mayoral contest, South Los Angeles remains a major
battleground, and — if the candidates' attention to the community is a
fair gauge — black voters could hold the key to selecting the city's
next chief executive.
Their political power may be on the wane, said political scientist
Jaime Regalado of Cal State L.A., but "they're counted on heavily to
make a difference with their feet, at the polls, in this mayoral
election."
"In some ways, it seems like a contradiction," he said.
African Americans were pivotal in choosing the city's last two
mayors. In 2001, they were a pillar of support for James K. Hahn, the
son of South Los Angeles political icon Kenneth Hahn, a Los Angeles
County supervisor for 40 years.
But by 2005, black voters were instrumental in bouncing Hahn from
office, switching loyalties to Villaraigosa after Hahn pushed for the
ouster of a black police chief, Bernard C. Parks.
Blacks made up 17% of the mayoral vote in 2001 and 15% in 2005. Much
of that vote could be up for grabs in the May 21 mayoral runoff between
Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti because African Americans make up a large
share of the electorate in South Los Angeles, an area that went heavily
for Jan Perry in the March primary.
Read Michael Finnegan's full story on the role of African Americans in the mayor's race here.
Police Stings for Drivers Who Don't Yield in Crosswalks: Does It Really Work?
There were at least 56 very unhappy people in Fort Lee, New Jersey, last Friday, after a police sting operation
resulted in a flurry of traffic tickets for drivers who failed to yield
for pedestrians in crosswalks. The blitz, which is part of a more
comprehensive effort to educate both pedestrians and drivers about their
responsibility to follow the law, drew angry comments from motorists
who were stopped and issued $230 tickets, according to NorthJersey.com.
This surge in enforcement is just the latest attempt in Fort Lee – a
municipality that bears the unfortunate burden of providing several
shortcuts to and from the George Washington Bridge – to address
pedestrian safety. Sixty-eight people got hit by drivers in Fort Lee
last year, and four died. Twelve were struck through the first three
months of this year. Last year at this time, the cops were cracking down on jaywalkers. Will switching tactics make a difference?
It sure will make a lot of people mad. Righteous outrage is the norm
when police conduct pedestrian decoy stings, which they do around the
country on a regular basis. Some drivers insist they don’t see the
officers, which tells you something right there. Others say it’s just a
revenue-generating scheme, or that pedestrians are the problem, not
motorists. From NewJersey.com’s report:
“Pedestrians are idiots, especially in New Jersey,” said Julie
Mendelowitz, of Hoboken, who vowed to contest her $230 ticket. “If
someone jumps out into the walkway, what makes you think that that
driver can stop in enough time to not strike that pedestrian and not get
hit by the cars behind them? Are the pedestrians not endangering the
drivers just as much? Where’s their ticket?”
Well, actually, pedestrians are not endangering the drivers just as
much, and everyone involved knows it. That intimidating fact is exactly
what drivers are counting on when they barrel through marked crossings.
And when pedestrians are crossing in crosswalks – which is where the
Fort Lee police are doing their thing – you, as a driver, are supposed
to be watching out for them and traveling at a speed that will enable
you to stop in time to avoid hitting someone.
The problem is that roads in much of the United States are engineered
for speed. Straight, wide, free of any obstacles, the modern American
thoroughfare sends drivers the clear message that this is their domain,
over which they should reign undisputed. Bright yellow signs with
silhouetted figures and white lines on the asphalt can’t begin to
convince people behind the wheel of anything different, not to mention
some rule from driver education that they forgot as soon as they got
their licenses.
In this TV news segment showing an “investigation”
into a recent crosswalk enforcement action in Orlando, Florida, you can
see what the cops are up against here. As they walk out into four lanes
of traffic on what looks like a suburban arterial road, some drivers
just keep coming – in one case, almost striking the undercover officer
who is crossing. "They have actually got a weapon in front of them that
they are driving," Orange County Sheriff Sgt. Tony Molina said in the
segment.
The drivers may be aware of the destructive potential of their
vehicles, but many seem to think that just means everyone should get the
heck out of their way. “I thought the guy was crazy for walking across
like that," says one guy from behind the wheel, shaking his head.
Others, like one woman quoted in Fort Lee,
go straight into full denial, insisting that the humans in front of
them weren’t actually there. "I did not see him at all, which means he
was not on the street," said Katie Graziano, of Weehawken.
Do pedestrian decoy operations have any effect on attitudes like that?
At least one study suggests that they might, if combined with a
concerted educational approach. A 2004 study published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis
looked at a two-week-long Miami Beach "driver-yielding enforcement
program," which included decoy pedestrians, feedback flyers, and written
and verbal warnings. The article’s authors found that the program made a
measurable difference in driver behavior:
Results indicated that the percentage of drivers yielding to
pedestrians increased following the introduction of the enforcement
program in each corridor and that these increases were sustained for a
period of a year with minimal additional enforcement. The effects also
generalized somewhat to untreated crosswalks in both corridors, as well
as to crosswalks with traffic signals.
In other words, crosswalks can become safer places if municipalities
are willing to do some hard work. That’s important because, as Emily Badger wrote last week,
other research shows that many pedestrians are struck when they’re in
crosswalks acting in accordance with the law – doing what is supposed to
be the right thing.
Janna Chernetz, the New Jersey advocate at the nonprofit Tri State
Transportation Campaign, says that her group sees pedestrian decoy
operations as part of a bigger picture. “These programs are one tool in a
toolkit,” she says. The others include education, as well as better
infrastructure that sends a clear signal to motorists and pedestrians.
One example is HAWK crosswalks (that stands for high-intensity activated
crosswalks), which use an unusual cluster of lights to get a motorist’s
attention when a pedestrian is entering the roadway. (You can watch a
video demonstrating the HAWK here.)
But maybe we need to reconfigure space more radically to be able to
truly see each other again. In a shared-space intersection like the one I
wrote about last week in Poynton, U.K., one of the first effects is
that people’s awareness of other road users changes dramatically. And
the classic defense of “I just didn’t see him” becomes a lot harder to
swallow.
Video: Gil Cedillo Voicing His Support for the Completion of the SR-710 Extension
Gil Cedillo is running against Jose Gardea for a Los Angeles City Council seat.
Gil
Cedillo is guilty of spreading BS as usual. Pasadena, So. Pasadena are
not in favor of the 710 extension. Get is right pendejo!
No
On 710 in El Sereno does not support this fool. This vendido is in the
pocket of corporate interest that do nothing for nuestra gente.
Never
mentions that we're a broke ass city,full of lots of broke ass
commuters,whom will never pay a toll to go 4.5 miles. Never mentions a
toll. If his lips are moving,he's lying.
Thanks
for posting. He infers that the City of South Pasadena supports the
completion of the 710, WHICH IS AN OUTRIGHT LIE! The City has never
supported the completion of the 710!!!!!! Next I expect him to say
black is white.
Gee,
Gil, I guess you haven't read the Alternatives Analysis report or
learned yet that only 23% of the vehicles exiting the 710 at its
northern terminus that you talk about are actually trying to get through
to the area and that the remaining 77 percent
will still need to use the local arterials for their local
destinations, and those trying to avoid the toll will do the same. You
are right about traffic from other freeways using a new connection --
it's called induced demand and it clogs up virtually every new roadway
within five years of opening. You need to do some research.
Money causes blindness & a great deafness indeed.
The Golden Age of Gondolas Might Be Just Around the Corner
Laugh all you want (or cower in fear), but cable-drawn aerial transportation just might be the next big thing.
To hear the evangelists tell it, the skyborne pods that have ferried
skiers through the Alps for most of the last century are an integral
part of the future of urban transport. Cheaper than terrestrial fixed
guideway transit and quicker to build, the gondola is finally taking its
rightful place in the urban landscape.
"Depending on how you measure it," says Steven Dale of the Gondola Project, "it is the fastest growing transportation method in the world."
Comparatively, that is. Until the last decade, the idea of relying
largely on gondolas for mass transit was considered comical, if it was
considered at all. Into the 1990s, Dale says, "there was no literature.
There was nothing."
Today, as gondola construction accelerates, Dale's Gondola Project is
probably the single most valuable database on the subject. And yet when
the talk turns to gondolas, there are still two kinds of people in the
world: those who think the gondola is the answer to a city's short-range
transportation needs, and those who can't understand why everyone is
talking about those tippy Venetian boats.
It's a strong dichotomy, and one that seems to imply that the
gondolistas are either members of a insular transit cult or miles ahead
of the rest of us.
Perhaps it's a little of both.
Medellin, 2004
The gondola renaissance began, more or less, with MedellÃn. 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.
MedellÃn 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.
So why is this only happening now? Cable-drawn transport has existed
for thousands of years, and was widely used during the 19th century in
mines and at mills. Like industrial technologies before it, the
machinery slowly crept into city life nearly 150 years ago.
But as the 20th century progressed, the technology retreated to the
mountains. Most of San Francisco’s cable cars were replaced with
streetcars and later buses. The two companies that manufacture cable
systems, Leitner-Poma and Doppelmayr, seemed little interested in
hawking their wares to cities, and few planners came a-calling. Advances
like two-speed cables were developed for skiers, and their potential as
urban people-movers was largely overlooked.
The technology never entirely disappeared from cities, of course. The
Roosevelt Island Tramway was completed in 1976 (albeit as a stopgap
while subway service to the island was under construction). As
transportation to hilltop monuments around the world, aerial transit
continued to be popular: the tram to Rio's Sugarloaf opened in 1912; to
Bogota's Monserrate in 1955; to Jounieh's Our Lady of Lebanon in 1965.
The mountainous cities of Algeria are threaded with gondolas that serve both tourists and commuters.
But until the last couple decades, there was very little information on gondolas and trams as a transit device.
"In the late '80s and early '90s," Dale says, "the planning
profession's understanding of the technology was 180 degrees inaccurate –
they thought the technology was expensive, dangerous, slow. They
thought it wouldn't move enough people. Difficult to procure, difficult
to implement – everything you know if you're familiar with the
technology is demonstrably false."
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.
Michael McDaniel, who is trying to convince Austin, Texas, to develop a
transit network of gondolas, framed the costs like this in an interview with Marketplace:
"Running subway lines under a city can cost about $400 million per
mile. 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."
It's not that boosters think aerial transit can or should render fixed
guideways on the ground obsolete. Theirs is the more modest claim that
in certain cases, cable-drawn is the best solution.
There have been growing pains. Critics have called the Rio gondola an instrument of gentrification and "de-densification," intended to push out rather than serve residents of the favela it runs through. The Portland project cost nearly four times the projections, and the current round-trip fare ($4 for tourists) is more than twice the initial estimates.
Worse still has been the saga of the Emirates Air Line, the towering
gondola inaugurated for the London Olympics last summer. Like
cable-drawn transit in Portland, New York, Medellin, and Rio, it was
framed as an addition to the city's transit network. It appears on the
Tube Map, is accessible via Oystercard, and is run by Transport for London.
But though the cable car registered over 1.5 million trips between June
and November, exceeding expectations, it proved virtually incapable of
attracting commuters: in the two months after the Games ended in
September, only one in ten thousand journeys was a discounted commuter fare. Officials remain optimistic that number will grow as the area served continues to develop.
Dale thinks the London system was an unfortunate anomaly. Contrary to
government marketing, he says, the route is plainly not intended to
serve commuters.
Beyond that, though, gondola systems face an uphill battle in the
public opinion. They look, frankly, silly and constitute something of a
political gamble. Aesthetically, it's unclear if they will sit well with
preservationists or neighbors.
And they tend to unnerve commuters (and planners) much the way
underground journeys did during the early days of subway construction.
(Studies indicate that claustrophobia and acrophobia each affect approximately 5 percent of the population)
"You apply a stricter standard to new ideas than you do to old ideas," Dale notes.
And then, at least in the United States, there's the language barrier:
we tend to associate gondolas with Venice, cable cars with San
Francisco, trams with streetcars. Would you want to be suspended 100
feet in the air from a "ropeway"? If cable-drawn aerial transportation
is going to catch on in U.S. cities, it will need to win over minds and
mouths alike. And perhaps stomachs, too.
