Ian: Who needs another bridge ? Gimme a pretty gondola any day! (And let’s toss one climbing up to SFU while we’re at it)
From dezeen:
UNStudio unveils plans for Gothenburg cable car
Dutch office UNStudio has designed a cable car system for Gothenburg that will be supported by a network of latticed towers based on shipyard cranes. …
One cable car line will be suspended from six of these towers, stretching three kilometres and connecting through four new stations. …
The new towers will provide a striking addition to Gothenburg’s skyline, but their shape has also been designed to minimise impact on the city at ground level. …
The Gothenburg cable car is due to be completed to coincide with the Swedish city’s 400th anniversary in 2021. It will be the first new form of public transport in Sweden since Stockholm got its subway system in 1950.
I’ve been playing with this idea for quite a while. There frankly aren’t any good corridors to for a gondola to connect downtown to the North Shore.
The one where it might work is SFU, but not in the limited way envisaged in the previous studies. It wouldn’t be very difficult to run a gondola to the Ioco Townsite / Burrard Thermal site if the gondola ends up at the SFU Bus Loop.
The Ioco area, could easily be redeveloped to have quite a large number of homes. If 20,000-30,000 people were to live in a couple sq. km. of moderately dense housing, then you could probably justify having a 1 seat ride from Ioco, to SFU, then down to Production Way Skytrain. This would make this area a lot more accessible, and give an alternate way out that isn’t a bus or car. The trip would be about 6.5km, or ~16 minutes at 25km/h.
That being said, it wouldn’t be hard to do a bridge across to Admiralty Point from the south side of the inlet.
A funicular would work better for the hill up to SFU.
The distance from the north Vancouver to downtown is similar to the peak to peak in whistler . It would be very affordable and a much better service than the seabus.
While that’s true, there is the problem of line sags. Peak 2 Peak was a reasonably cheap project because the line can sag into a valley, while I don’t have exact numbers, I’d say it probably sags about 300m on a 3km span.
The gondolas would also need to clear the shipping channel, adding about 50m onto the height.
Thirdly, to connect to the CBD, the gondola would be right adjacent to the seaplane port and the heliport.
Other alignments not near the CBD, in general connect nowhere to nowhere.
Why not connect from upper londsdale to central downtown at the higher elevation points.
Because a longer distance between the towers means the gondola sags more, which more or less cancels out the height gain.
Add two more towers at the waterfronts that are higher than the on-board and offboard towers.
And those towers will still need to be 350+ metres high – bear in mind, that’s twice as high as Trump Tower. At this point in the argument, even a SkyTrain tunnel from Waterfront to Lonsdale is the easier and more convenient option.
… Agree the sag makes it trickier … but borrowing from the tech supporting the bridge in Kelowna (and boats) … it would make things a lot simpler and lower if there was a tower in the middle. While a fixed tower would be *tricky* … how about a floating one (or two)?
Also, for the towers at each end, there are already proposals for pretty significant towers on both sides of the water, incorporating some cable hardware into one wouldn’t change them all that significantly – they’d be something akin to the Vancity building on Terminal, except the transit hope would be at the top (with a potential stop/termination also).
Its true that the seabus route is the most obvious corridor, and that’s already serving the function well, but this assumes the entire port and lands to the east stays as industrial/low density forever … when having both are becoming anomalies unique to Vancouver – a Copenhagen/Stockholm/Oslo/London/Glasgow/NYC/etc handover from shipping to urban use seems to be ultimately inevitable, and if this happens on both sides it presents a natural connection route, by water or by air. I can’t think we’re but one or two shipping disasters away from no more hazardous cargo transport in Burrard Inlet.
A tower above burnaby shoal ???
I was thinking more Loch Katrine Bank … creating a big triangle between downtown, Lonsdale, and Commercial/Clark area
Better would be a new LionsGate bridge with 3 or 4 decks, one for rail, one or two for cars and one for pedestrians.
It was built 80+ years ago and indeed we need fresh, new 21st century ideas here such as this one.
The third crossing idea under Brockton Point to N Van needs revisiting also. Perhaps only for trains/subway.