We want to make sure we have this right.
At least five local cities — Dallas, Arlington, Plano, Frisco and DeSoto, along with the Regional Transportation Council — are in some way considering the possibility that a solution to some of our region’s transportation problems is … hold on, let us look at this again … aerial gondolas.
So we did read that right. Our next question is, where is P.T. Barnum when we need him?
Never doubt the pull a silly gadget pitch can have on local government. In this case it comes from a company called — we didn’t make this up — Whoosh, according to recent reporting in our news pages.
Don’t be fooled by the name. Gondolas — really elevated cable cars like the novelty ride that’s been at the State Fair of Texas forever — are neither fast nor efficient. They move a limited number of people at a time. They are extremely costly to construct, tens of millions of dollars at least, and they need densely populated terminuses to be of any value at all. It is also worth noting that this proposed concept of on-demand autonomous gondolas has not been tested in any other U.S. city.
Despite that, the North Central Texas Council of Governments has invited cities to apply for gondolas in 2023, and Plano was the first to do it. Now, the developer, Google spinoff Swyft Cities, is in conversations with other cities.
Plano, however, is probably the most engaged with this project. It received a federal grant to study the viability of aerial transit compared with other transportation options, according to Smart Cities Dive, a publication focusing on cities and municipalities.
In February, Plano’s transportation manager, Brian Shewski, told Smart Cities that the proposed gondola route would connect to DART. This was before the Plano City Council approved a resolution to cut funding to our regional transportation system, shedding doubt on the city’s commitment to public transportation.
In the same interview, Shewski acknowledged that the proposed gondola system poses right-of-way issues and the challenge of getting public buy-in. Good luck with that.
Elevated cars have become a mass transportation solution in a handful of Latin American cities like Mexico City; Medellín, Colombia; and La Paz, Bolivia, which has the largest network of gondolas in the hemisphere. These are cities that depend on affordable public transportation.
They also have complex mountainous topographies. Elevated cars can be helpful in moving people over high terrain between urban areas. La Paz, the most elevated capital in the world, uses its tramway to connect to an even higher city, El Alto (The High Place). All of these cities were also developed before the rise of the automobile, and cars aren’t always a good option. Plano, meanwhile, is a city almost totally dependent on cars, and its name literally means flat.
North Texas cities have a bad habit of dreaming wild dreams for the next big thing in transportation, from autonomous gondolas to flying taxis to solar-powered water taxis. But some want to cut funding at the first opportunity to a working public transportation system like DART.
We’ve been here before. Remember the white elephant of a monorail system in Las Colinas? It ceased operation in 2020.
North Texas has real mobility issues, and cities are right to seek transportation solutions. But planners should work on how to move large numbers of people, not boutique alternatives more suited for tourism and sightseeing than mass transportation.
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