The venerable ski-area gondola does not lend itself to philosophical analysis very often. But, let us consider a paradox.

On the one hand, it can dutifully ferry thousands of hardy sportspeople up ferocious terrain, sometimes in subzero, white-out, gale-force conditions. On the other hand, it is considered a frivolity, more akin to a go-kart or roller coaster than to a serious piece of transportation infrastructure.

For all of their usefulness at Mammoth, Vail, Jackson Hole, and Disney World, gondolas have, with scant exceptions, played no role in urban transport in the United States. But, backers in at least a half-dozen cities are touting the reliability, sustainability, and, yes, fun of gondolas and similar modes of aerial mass transit.

“There’s a lot of these systems being considered across North America. There’s been quite a bit of notable success with these systems in their locations,” said Mike Manley, general manager for ropeway manufacturer Leitner-Poma of America. “We’re still trying to find the right way to get a few of them across the finish line.”

Since 2018, a group affiliated with the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team has lobbied to develop a gondola system that would conquer a barrier more formidable than any slope, couloir, or cornice: a Los Angeles freeway.

Though Dodger Stadium is located just two miles from the heart of downtown and one mile from its most important transit hub, Union Station, its hilltop location and proximity to ten lanes of often congealed freeway traffic renders it one of the best-located and least-accessible stadiums in any major sports league.

The Dodger Stadium gondola, called Los Angeles Aerial Rapid Transit (LA ART) would carry passengers over the 110 Freeway and up the hill in 30-person cabins that would collectively carry up to 5,000 passengers per hour in each direction up to 175 feet above ground level. The alignment would follow public rights of way, primarily down the middle of a major boulevard. The $500 million, privately funded project recently received environmental clearance. (It is facing lawsuits from environmental advocates and neighborhood groups.)



LA ART would be the first urban aerial cableway — the term for any mass transit method that uses above-ground cables to propel hanging cabins — to be built in the United States in decades, joining the Roosevelt Island Tram in New York City and Portland (Oregon) Aerial Tram serving Oregon Health & Science University. Both of those systems use one large car in either direction rather than smaller cabins with short headways that circulate continuously.

Each of these systems exemplifies two characteristics that favor urban gondolas: major geographic barriers and “first-mile, last-mile” situations that connect specific destinations with major population centers or transit hubs.

“A gondola is not a good system for, say, 30 miles. The sweet spot is a few miles from start to finish for the typical rider — not necessarily the whole system,” said Mike Deiparine, a consultant with transportation consulting firm SCJ Alliance.

Even if the Los Angeles gondola gets built, it will still be minor league compared to systems in other countries — including, and especially, countries not otherwise known for transit infrastructure.

Gondolas have taken hold in Latin America, where systems in Medellin, Colombia; Mexico City; and La Paz, Bolivia, have revolutionized mobility in mountainous, but densely populated, neighborhoods. They’ve also made transit safer, literally taking commuters off the streets, where pedestrians are vulnerable to vehicular violence and crime.

La Paz in particular is located in the heart of the Andes Mountains, with 2.2 million people living in a mountain valley and high plain at elevations between 12,000 and 13,600 feet. Its Mi Teleferico system (“My Cable Car”) consists of 10 gondola lines with 36 stations that serve 200,000 people per day.

“It’s staggering what they’re doing,” Deiparine said. “That is their primary transportation system for a huge portion of the geography.”

Cities do not need to be located at such dizzying heights for gondolas to be useful.

Gondolas can cross over essentially any surface-level barrier, including rivers, rail lines, streets, and, of course, freeways. They run on electricity and generally emit no greenhouse gas, and their environmental footprint is minimal — especially compared to conventional road- and rail-based infrastructure.

“In the case of a gondola … you put a tower every now and then, and your linear infrastructure is literally a rope,” Deiparine said. “They’re addictive, since they don't take up the entire surface swath.”

And, they can be shoehorned into existing cityscapes.

“We're not digging a tunnel. We're not ripping up in the streets. We got a 1.2-mile system with a relatively light touch on the ground that we can have up and running inside of two years,” said David Grannis, president of LA ART. “They're much more economical than, say, a light rail system or certainly a heavy rail system in an urban setting.”

A handful of U.S. cities have considered them, to varying degrees. Proposals have included: spanning the Potomac River between Washington, D.C. and Rosslyn, Virginia; Clearwater and Clearwater Beach, Fla.; the San Diego waterfront; and Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco.

“The beautiful thing is these things are one-third or one-fifth the cost of the other modes,” said Dan Penrose, also with SCJ Alliance. Though stations at each end, and sometimes in between, can be large and costly, towers require very little land and are relatively easy to erect. Operating costs are generally low, with far fewer personnel needed per passenger than buses or even rail require.

And yet, so far, none of these systems has spent a dime on development. Each exists only in planning documents — or simply in backers’ imaginations.

Their success has transit advocates wondering, if Bolivia can do it, why not the United States?

'A lot of people think it's a carny ride'

In many instances, attitude prevails over analysis.

“A lot of people think it’s a carney ride at the county fair. It is probably our biggest obstacle,” Deiparine said. “If you see these modern systems, that is not what’s happening. They are real transit systems that move thousands of people in each direction.”

In fact, gondolas can be deceptively effective at moving people, not because of their speed — which hovers around 15 MPH — but because of their frequency. That means minimal waiting time for passengers and plenty of available seats.

“It’s going slower than the bus, but we leave every 25 seconds and they leave every 5 minutes,” Manley said.

“The (Los Angeles) Metro study determined it would take 77 buses per hour loading full capacity — that’s every 57 seconds or something like that — to equal the capacity of this technology,” Grannis said.

Even for enthusiastic transit agencies, many aspects of their procurement and development processes are not suited to aerial transit systems.

“The challenge in our industry is lack of integration of cable-propelled transit into an analysis,” Penrose said. He added that federal funding, which many transit agencies rely on to help cover capital costs, does not generally include line items for anything like a gondola.

The upshot is that transit agencies might discount gondolas.

“The train-bus mindset is so baked in that these modes of analysis don’t really allow the ropeway an even playing field,” Manley said. So far, only Los Angeles’s proposal — as well as a system serving Simon Fraser University near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada — seems likely to get off the ground.

(A handful of gondolas at ski areas serve quasi-urban functions. In Mammoth Lakes, California, a gondola runs from the center of town to one of the base areas at the Mammoth Mountain Ski Area. Telluride, Colorado, has a similar system.)

Even in Los Angeles, gondolas still have serious opponents.

The Los Angeles Parks Alliance, a coalition of environmental groups, has sued on the grounds that LA ART would encroach unacceptably on nearby residences and on the California State Historic Park. They also contend that the gondola would be a Trojan horse for a long-planned real estate development adjacent to the stadium.

Frank McCourt, who sold the Dodgers in 2012, retained ownership of parking lots surrounding the stadium. While the lots generate revenue on game days, McCourt could likely make even more money if he develops part of the lots into housing or commercial properties, any combination of which would likely increase the gondola’s ridership.

Any such developments would be controversial. Jon Christensen, a co-founder of L.A. Parks Alliance, does not want the gondola to give McCourt further reason to advance his real estate vision. Moreover, he does not want the environmental review for a potential development to piggyback on that of the gondola.

“This is the key to unlocking the development of the parking lots of Dodger Stadium,” Christensen said. “One of our main objections to the environmental impact report is that it’s piecemeal.”

Christensen is a self-avowed environmentalist — he is a professor at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability — and he generally supports urban gondolas, in part because of their relatively low carbon and literal footprints. The Dodger Stadium gondola could be exactly the proof-of-concept that other cities need to pursue their own projects.

“I find the idea of gondola for transit intriguing, and I think it will have real utility in some cases,” Christensen said.

Few, if any, transit agencies agree. The Arlington-based North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCT COG) may be the only major transportation planning agency currently considering aerial transit through its Certification of Emerging and Reliable Transportation Technologies Program.

“We’re pretty agnostic when it comes to (modes). We want to see what’s out there,” said Michael Johnson, a transportation planner with NCT COG. Even so, Johnson said that they are not necessarily seeking out new technologies. In many cases, the technologies have to come to them, from the manufacturers.

“Those are big questions for someone like DART [Dallas Area Rapid Transit] or Trinity Metro [Fort Worth Transportation Authority] that makes them very hesitant to approach these technologies. That’s why it’s been up to technology providers dealing directly with the cities as opposed to going to the transit agencies,” Johnson said. “They need to do a good job of explaining their product. They need to do a good job of saying why do we need this instead of a bus?”

NCT COG is more open-minded than many of its counterparts.

A relatively new, and as yet untested, technology out of New Zealand called Whoosh has caught their attention.

Described by Woosh CEO Chris Allington as a “combination of a gondola and an Uber,” the aerial cabins run overhead, much like gondolas. But, instead of being propelled by a cable with a fixed, straight route running between bull wheels, Whoosh cabins contain their own electric motors that propel themselves along overhead tracks. This approach enables cabins to operate independently of each other, and it enables the tracks to turn corners and diverge, more like railroad tracks.

“Cables are great at spanning long distances … but they can’t turn corners, and you can’t merge and diverge off them,” Allington said. He said Whoosh isn’t a exactly a gondola, an aerial cableway or an autonomous car, “But we’re all of those things.”

NCT COG said that Whoosh may be ideal for areas with multiple destinations, such as the massive entertainment complex in Arlington, that houses a Six Flags theme park, the Texas Rangers and Dallas Cowboys stadiums, and a convention center. The properties aren’t within walking distance of each other but seem too close together to drive to.

“That would be a cool test case,” Johnson said. Even then, anything resembling a groundbreaking (airbreaking?) is a long way off.

Though contractors like Whoosh and Leitner-Poma may want transit agencies to consider cold facts about gondolas’ operational and environmental advantages, they hope that whimsy will not be lost on them. The Dodger Stadium gondola promises some of the most spectacular, and nearly unobstructed, views of downtown that any Angeleno has ever seen. That might excite passengers regardless of how many runs the Dodgers score.

“These have a way of becoming an experience that people seek out. If you can create a transit solution that is a transit experience, then you’ve got a winner,” Manley said.

Josh Stephens is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.