"Far from being an outlandish, unpractical idea, gondolas are the future of urban transportation. And the sky’s not the limit, for they hold a unique potential to transform both public transit and the landscape of the city. Boston, let’s rise above and embrace them."
1. I'm gondola-agnostic, but if it's just replicating a road or transit, we're just paying to not do what's right.
2. If we can't keep trains in good repair, you really wanna dangle from an MBTA cable?
https://apps.bostonglobe.com/opinion/graphics/2023/05/blue-sky-boston/?s_campaign=opmbta:newsletter
my blue-sky idea is buses in exclusive lanes every 3 minutes.
@bikepedantic "but where will we park???"
@bikepedantic the funny thing to me is there is literally an exclusive bus lane with a station network positioned almost directly under the proposed gondola line. Like you just need to run the thing you have properly and it will be fine
@bikepedantic There's literally no argument to support that claim. Hard pass.
But if you want to put some gondolas in canals, I'm in.
@costrike yeah, building a gondola to let people gaze down upon rooftop murals is a neat attraction, not "the future of urban transportation"
@bikepedantic @costrike yeah literally the only problem gondolas solve is “we’re too cowardly to take any space from private vehicles”.
@ef4 @bikepedantic @costrike also: low operational and capital costs with zero wait time for a vehicle. Not to mention the ability to reach places that are impractical to reach (directly) by road, such as in Medellin, Columbia.
@Yendor @bikepedantic @costrike on a mountain, sure. But anywhere else, it’s a lower-capacity bus rapid transit that costs more.
@Yendor @bikepedantic @costrike as for “zero wait time” I’ve stood in way too many lift lines to believe that.
@ef4 @bikepedantic @costrike How many of those were transit-grade installations?
@ef4 @bikepedantic @costrike 7500 pphpd is "lower-grade bus rapid transit"?
@bikepedantic I think we've shown pretty conclusively that we don't maintain bridges, therefore I am a hard no on any bridge-based transit. At grade and human scale, please.
@samerfarha i suspect that Big Gondola is mostly just real-estate developers. It's a great way to dip into public transit capital funding to pay for what, if we're honest, is going to end up in many of these proposals just being a well-used recreational attraction, rather than getting to/from places.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, but we deserve honesty.
@samerfarha in the same vein, the CC2DCA bridge to National is technically about walkability, but it's more about walking to/from Crystal Drive as a $5-cheaper Uber pickup point, and monetizing JBGSmith's huge excess of parking capacity as cheaper offsite airport parking.
@bikepedantic The only use for gondolas in public transit is if you've got a city that has hills so steep in it that land vehicles have legit issues with it, possibly with good sized streams or rivers running through it too. So maybe a few places in, say, the Andes, but other than that they're just expensive tourist attractions.
@bikepedantic Gondolas are cool, but #2 was the first thing that sprang to my mind.
I’m a hard no on any gondola-based solution run by the MBTA, even if it were a serious transit solution.
"New" cities are always gonna suck, and have to resort to gimmicks to move people around, as long as we treat universal stress-free motor vehicle access to them as a nonnegotiable need.