Cable cars certainly have their uses. They are dope in situations where you do not have an existing alternative (like up a mountain) and still want to move a reaonable amount of people. Places where the terrain is not condusive to a straight connection on ground level (like up a mountain). Places where you have a somewhat steady and reliable but not overly huge stream of people (like up a mountain).
But they also have issues: They’re not actually that fast. On a level path even a casual cyclist can keep up. While you can have intermediate stops - every gondola has to stop there. You can’t have express gondolas that skip it in order to get from end to end faster.
They can also be useful for water crossings or informal developments (e.g., favelas) where it’s hard to acquire linear rights-of-way. Tricable gondolas can go faster (up to around 30 km/h) and carry more people (5k to 8k pax per direction per hour), which puts it comparable to a single-lane BRT. But yeah, they’re certainly not a replacement for heavy metro or suburban rail for servicing longer distance and/or higher capacity routes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvvA_GToc0M
Cable cars certainly have their uses. They are dope in situations where you do not have an existing alternative (like up a mountain) and still want to move a reaonable amount of people. Places where the terrain is not condusive to a straight connection on ground level (like up a mountain). Places where you have a somewhat steady and reliable but not overly huge stream of people (like up a mountain).
But they also have issues: They’re not actually that fast. On a level path even a casual cyclist can keep up. While you can have intermediate stops - every gondola has to stop there. You can’t have express gondolas that skip it in order to get from end to end faster.
They can also be useful for water crossings or informal developments (e.g., favelas) where it’s hard to acquire linear rights-of-way. Tricable gondolas can go faster (up to around 30 km/h) and carry more people (5k to 8k pax per direction per hour), which puts it comparable to a single-lane BRT. But yeah, they’re certainly not a replacement for heavy metro or suburban rail for servicing longer distance and/or higher capacity routes.