BY RANDY GRAGG

Plans to string gondolas over American cities abound.

FROM THE JULY 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

In the early 2000s, one of Portland, Oregon’s leading employers and research institutions, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), faced a steep, downhill battle. Sited on a hilltop, surrounded by unbuildable canyons and neighborhoods unwilling to yield another inch to expansion, OHSU’s nearest sizable hunk of developable land lay on the Willamette River less than a mile away—for a blue heron. Cars and buses contended with winding, traffic-snarled commutes of anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes.

A campus planner’s brain brightly blinked: Why not an aerial tram? Protests erupted, politicians tangled, and costs lurched $47 million over the earliest budget fantasy of $9.5 million. But in 2007, two sleek, bubble-shaped cars (their shiny artisanal shells carefully machine-hammered by craftsmen from Gangloff Cabins of Switzerland) began flying to and fro across the campus. Today, they ferry more than 50,000 riders per week to a 2.35-million-square-foot cluster of new OHSU buildings.

At the time, the tram was only the third urban transit ropeway system in America, after Telluride’s in Colorado and Roosevelt Island’s in New York. Now, however, proposals for urban tramways are becoming more prevalent. A consortium in Washington, D.C., is poised to launch a $1 million environmental impact study for an aerial connection between Rosslyn, Virginia, and Georgetown across the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., to bypass the clogged Key Bridge. New York is angling for two flights: a midtown connection to Roosevelt Island and a three-stop connection between the Lower East Side and Williamsburg. Boston’s megadeveloper, Millennium Partners, is dangling a one-mile line over the congested South Boston Seaport. And Austin, Texas, is studying a 19-stop, eight-mile tramway that would alleviate its now-notorious traffic. Other cities pondering aerial options include Chicago; San Diego; Seattle; Cleveland; Cincinnati; Buffalo, New York; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Tampa Bay, Florida; Miami; Albany, New York; Toronto; and Burnaby, British Columbia.

“There are now clear examples of these systems succeeding as fully integrated components of transit networks, particularly in Latin America,” says Steven Dale, a ropeway system planner and creator of the website The Gondola Project, an aggregator of information about the systems. “The technology has proven itself, and people are looking for new solutions.” Medellín, Colombia, blazed the urban ropeway trail in the 2000s, building gondola systems to connect long-clustered favelas where topography, budgets, and narrow, often self-built roads would never allow subways, rail, or buses. Cities in Venezuela, Colombia, Russia, Turkey, France, and Vietnam all opened gondolas in the past 10 years. “When alternative modes pop up—personal rapid transit, monorail, hyperloop—people position them as the best, brightest, fastest, cheapest, everything-est,” Dale says. “Gondolas and cable systems work well in certain situations—unbelievably well in some. They’re not going to work everywhere.”

The Emirates Air Line in London. Image courtesy Matt Buck.

Mike Deiparine, an engineer with SCJ Alliance, an engineering and landscape architecture firm with offices throughout the Pacific Northwest, is a veteran of 50-plus ropeway projects, many of them for ski resorts. He says aerial systems “offer a lot of transit for a lot less money” than light rail or bus rapid transit but work best for “getting people past a barrier: a hill, a river, or the man-made one of bad traffic.”

Views from the cars are often a selling point for aerial transit systems. Views of the towers, cables, and cars are hotly debated. But with an international design competition, Portland embraced its tram as a bold addition to the landscape. The winner, the architect Sarah Graham, shaped the curving, stainless steel cars to reflect the sky and the single 197-foot tower into a striking, sharply contoured icon of engineering forces. Carol Mayer-Reed, FASLA, led a team that further enhanced Graham’s tower at ground level, encircling its constricted base with a stairstepping landscaped path leading to, and processing the rainwater from, a pedestrian bridge. “We embraced it as the monument it is,” she says.