In 2019 Walt Disney World opened the Disney Skyliner to the public.
Sporting over six miles of cable across three lines and approximately 300 cabins, the system
connects two theme parks with four resorts.
Seven if you’re willing to do some walking.
The Skyliner isn’t Disney’s first journey into the world of cable transportation.
Both Disneyland and Magic Kingdom have featured smaller gondola attractions in the past.
But where the Skyway was just a fun way to get from A to B, the Skyliner represents a
growing trend in the adoption of what is turning out to be a faster, more efficient, and cheaper
form of transportation.
So let’s look at the history of gondolas and where they might be taking us.
Gondolas are a type of CPT, or cable propelled transit.
There are many kinds of CPT and as with any major industry there are subgroups and sub-sub-groups
and so on.
In general however, you’ve got three big ones.
There’s your reverse aerial tramway, your gondola/chair lift, and your funicular railway.
The aerial tramway is a system with two large vehicles that move back and forth between
two stations.
These vehicles are designed to carry a lot of passengers, with some capable of carrying
upwards of 200 people at once.
Then you’ve got your gondola lift and chairlift.
Rather than wait for the two cars to keep bouncing back and forth, the gondola lift
features a circulating cable with a bunch of smaller vehicles attached to it that move
non-stop.
These vehicles typically carry 10-15 people at a time.
Most popular at ski resorts, the chairlift works in the same way as the gondola but uses
rows of seats instead of enclosed vehicles.
Lastly, there’s the funicular railway.
These, at first glance, look like trains or monorails.
They’re vehicles that sit on a track, usually one that travels up an incline.
However where a train is propelled by the engine on the vehicle, in a funicular railway
the vehicle is still propelled by a cable that’s pulling it along the track.
It’s a unique transit system, however usually when people think of cable transit, they’re
usually thinking of the first two kinds.
So where do they come from?
One of the earliest recorded instances of what we typically think of when we think of
gondolas dates back to 1644, when a man by the name of Adam Wiebe created an elevated
conveyor system using ship rope and buckets in Gdansk, Poland.The idea was to use the
system to transport dirt so that it could be used in a municipal expansion in a town
across the river and it was reportedly enough of a spectacle that people would show up just
to watch it in action.
It was understandable too.
This was the 1640’s, so the industrial revolution and the amazing machines it would bring was
still over a century away.
Yet the system didn’t explode in popularity and that was largely due to the strength,
or lack of strength, of rope at the time.
It wasn’t until the creation of the much stronger metal wire rope in the 1830’s,
that the concept could finally grow.
Systems across Europe began to pop up, and in 1866, in Germany, the first passenger carrying
aerial ropeway was constructed so that people could cross the Rhine to inspect turbine installations
in the river.
In 1893 the same idea would make its way to the United States, when the first passenger
ropeway was built to transport people across the Tennessee River in Knoxville.
Now, right around that same time, a fellow by the name of Konrad Doppelmayr started a
business named after himself in Austria.
At that point Doppelmayr made tools, and later moved on to wine presses, but a few years
after the turn of the century, Konrad found a new opportunity in lift transportation.
By the outbreak of World War I, the systems found use in transporting munitions and soldiers,
not to mention constructional supplies.
After the war the transportation system began to grow in popularity in the Alps, primarily
for utilitarian reasons, shuttling goods and construction materials across rocky terrain.
However, the gondolas had another use that was growing as well...
Announcer: Whenever the weather man says “there’s snow on them thar hills” over half a million
active sport fans start off for the mountain slopes, to take part in America’s fastest
growing winter recreation, skiing.
The ancient sport of the vikings brought up to date.
Skiing was nothing new in Europe.
It was a mode of transportation, it was a recreational hobby, and it was even used by
soldiers in warfare.
But for a long time skiing was limited by the need to slowly work your way up the mountains
that you intended to ski down.
That all changed with cable propelled transportation.
Suddenly a journey that would have taken hours could take minutes.
And so gondolas made it easier and more accessible for people to ski for sport.
That sport had already made its way over to the United States, but with the added convenience
that gondola’s brought, along with soldiers returning home from WWII who had learned the
skill for combat and wanted to do more, skiing was able to grow in popularity, particularly
in the Northeast.
And really, as far as public perception goes, that’s more or less where the state of gondolas
stood for a long time.
They were seen as this novel form of transportation that had a very specific and limited use.
You came across them at ski resorts, theme parks, and the occasional expo, but rarely
anywhere else.
That’s not to say there were no practical CPT systems in cities, but usually they were
small and so out of place that they still felt like an attraction.
However today that’s beginning to change.
Over the last ten years cities in countries such as Venezuela, Columbia, Taiwan, and Algeria
began to use the transportation system for more than just recreation and novelty.
In 2019 that same company from over 120 years earlier, Dopplemayr, completed the world’s
biggest urban ropeway network in La Paz, Bolivia.
Spanning 10 seperate lines and 30km, the La Paz system has transported over 200 million
people to date, and is capable of handling up to 68,000 passengers per hour.
Perhaps they’re seeing growth because in these cities that are starting to expand their
transportation, they see the benefits that cable propelled transit offers.
Gondolas are relatively cheaper than subways, monorails, and trains.
Railways take up lots of valuable space on the ground.
Elevated railways and monorails solve that problem, by lifting the track into the air,
but it still involves manufacturing all of that track.
A gondola system however goes one step further, replacing that track with cable, further reducing
the cost and shrinking its footprint to the bare minimum.
Beyond that, as we grow more aware of our impact on the environment, CPT systems have
been found to be more energy efficient.
One report in 2018 from the International Scientific Conference on Mobility and Transport
found that on a kilowatt-hour per passenger basis, cable transportation was found to be
more energy efficient than trams, metros, and buses.
Of course that doesn’t mean cable transit is perfect.
Busses can drive around broken busses and even trains can often be rerouted around other trains.
But if the gondola system you’re on breaks, you’re not going anywhere.
To that end, they’re also far more difficult to evacuate compared to a bus or train,
so really: you’re not going anywhere when they break.
They’re also more sensitive to extreme weather compared to other forms of transportation.
Granted, they’re getting better with every year, and some modern systems can withstand
winds of up to 100km per hour, but it’s likely not a pleasant experience.
However flaws and all, the benefits seem to be looking more desirable for those looking
for more transportation options, which recently included Disney.
Bob Chapek: Riding the Disney Skyliner will give you a whole new way to experience the
resort, with unique vistas you can only get from the sky.
You’ll definitely want to have your cameras out when you ride this.
The price of Disney’s Skyliner, built by Dopplemayr, is known only to Disney since
they usually keep those kinds of numbers close to the chest.
We do know from public filings that their governing jurisdiction, the Reedy Creek Improvement
District, paid $3.8 million for the requisite electrical work to make the system run.
If we try to use other systems with public numbers as an example, mostly ski resorts
up north, and we look at estimates that experts in the field quote, we can come up with a
very loose ballpark estimate of anywhere from two to twelve million dollars per mile, which
would put the Skyliner at a cost of six to thirty-six million dollars, which is a pretty
wide range, but still cheaper than what a monorail expansion would have cost them.
Interestingly enough the Disney Skyliner was not Dopplemayr’s first cable propelled system
in Orlando.
Just a few years earlier they had completed work at Universal Studios, in the Wizarding
World of all places.
Because, you see, while the Hogwarts Express looks like a train and sounds like a train,
it’s not actually a train.
It is a funicular railway, and if you look at photos of the Hogwarts Express in the station
and look towards the tracks, you can actually see the cables that pull it along its 676
meter journey.
Gondolas are fascinating, because they’ve been around for nearly 400 years which should,
by most measures, make them boring and routine for us.
Yet they’ve spent so much of that history filling very specific needs that even to this
day the system still feels novel to many.
They will undoubtedly pop up in more cities in the future.
How many?
Well, that’s yet to be seen.
Regardless, like monorails once did, gondolas straddle this line
that allows them to both be a part of our transportation history and a possible glimpse
at our transportation future all at the same time.