Photo: The Canadian Press
Jeffrey Hansen-Carlson, President of the Prairie Sky Gondola.
Residents and visitors can one day use lifts to cross rivers in two of Alberta’s central cities.
A 350-meter city cable car, also known as a gondola, has been proposed to connect the Red Deer business district with the Bower Ponds recreation area.
“Red Deer is really simple. There are two stations. It crosses the Red Deer River,” said Jeffrey Hansen-Carlson, president of Prairie Sky Gondolas, who said he would invest $ 25 million in the project.
Prairie Sky also wants to run cable cars across the North Saskatchewan River between downtown Edmonton and White Avenue, a popular street with bars, restaurants and shops. Geotechnical and environmental assessments are carried out and public opinion is gathered through meetings with local communities and others interested in the project.
The projects are two of many proposed in North America as a way to move people across waterways or to climb tourists on mountain slopes.
Stephen Dale is an urban specialist who created the website of The Gondola Project and has consulted on many proposals. He said interest in urban cableways is growing.
“Five years ago, most of my business was outside of North America,” Dale said. “It’s probably 85 to 90 percent in North America today.
“Apart from the systems you’ve heard of, there are many other cities that are looking at this and discussing it very seriously.”
Dale said cities have begun to realize that gondolas can be cheaper than other transit services, can be built in less time, and can be used to move people quickly from one place to another.
“No one likes to travel to work… so the shorter and more predictable it is, the better.”
Toulouse, Grenoble and Paris in France are fully integrating gondolas into their transit networks, Dale said.
A similar idea is being considered in Burnaby, British Columbia, where the city council approved a gondola lift in January connecting the SkyTrain fast transit lines with Simon Fraser University.
“The ‘gondola project’ will create a safe and secure transit option for Burnaby residents traveling to and from Mount Burnaby,” Mayor Mike Hurley said in a press release at the time.
The project is part of the 10-year vision of the council, which directs the priorities and investments in transit.
Dale said gondolas in Latin America “spread like wildfire” after the first integrated ones were built.
“North America is beginning to understand and is spreading here.”
SJC Alliance, the company Dale works for, is involved in a gondola project in Los Angeles and a study for another in Tampa Bay, Florida.
“Think of the absurdity of this. “We are talking about using the ski lift as public transport in Florida,” he said. “It’s completely ridiculous, but it’s actually a good thing, because the absurdity of it attracts people’s attention.”
Ironically, Dale said, only Canadians say, “We have snow. We have ice. We have wind. We have winter. How does it work in winter?
“It’s a ski lift. How do you think it works in the winter? You take it out of the mountains and put it in a city and people’s minds are screwed.”
There are already gondolas for tourists and skiers in western Canada, but others are being considered in the mountain towns of Alberta Banff and Canmore. The developers want to build cableways to transport people to the mountain tops of cities.
In Canmore, the proposal for a gondola lift at Silvertip Resort is open to the public until mid-June to determine the conditions for an environmental review. The project will connect the resort with the top of Lady MacDonald Mountain.
A gondola to take skiers and tourists from Banff to the top of Mount Norquay ski resort was rejected in 2019 by Parks Canada. However, the resort’s owners told Banff’s municipal council last August that they still hope to build a smaller version from the town to the base of the mountain.
Back in Edmonton, Hansen-Carlson said the city gondola could be a tourist attraction, but it could also be a transportation solution.
“As part of an infrastructure that simply moves people, his day has come,” he said. “Today, there are about 200 urban cableways in the world that operate successfully.
“So we’re not pioneers around the world, but we’re definitely in the context of North America.”
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