Aerial Ropeway Transportation Systems in the Urban Environment: State of the Art B. Alshalalfah 1 ; A. Shalaby 2 ; S. Dale 3 ; and F. M. Y. Othman 4 Abstract: The evolution of public transit modes has been remarkable, fueled by the need for different transit modes to handle different demand levels, urban environment patterns, and natural constraints and barriers. One of these needs is the desire to overcome geographical and topographical barriers such as mountains, valleys, and bodies of water, which cannot be conquered by conventional transit modes without very large investments and changes made to the natural topography. Aerial ropeway transit (ART), a type of aerial transportation mode in which passengers are transported in a cabin that is suspended and pulled by cables, is one of the solutions to such cases. ART has its origins in aerial lifts that have been used for decades in Alpine ski resorts to transport skiers and tourists in cable-suspended cabins. The use of aerial transportation in the urban environment, which was once considered an unlikely possibility, has gained more attention worldwide, and it is now used as a public transit mode in several terrain-constrained urban areas around the world. This article describes the origins of aerial transportation and its advantages, components, service characteristics, available technologies, and applications around the world. The paper concludes with a fair assessment of the existing ART technologies. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)TE.1943-5436.0000330. © 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers. CE Database subject headings: Public transportation; Urban areas. Author keywords: Aerial ropeway transit; Topographical barriers; Gondolas; Aerial tramways. Introduction Conventional public transportation systems offer a wide range of transit modes to serve people in urban areas. Bus and streetcar routes are usually aligned along corridors of low to medium pas- senger demand, whereas rapid transit systems (i.e., subways) are typically built where passenger demand is the highest in dense urban areas. Semirapid transit, such as light rail transit (LRT) and bus rapid transit (BRT), is more appropriate for corridors with medium passenger demand and population density. However, real- world applications of these technologies in urban areas might not always be feasible because of several factors that are not necessarily attributed to passenger demand. In many urban contexts, geo- graphical and topographical barriers such as mountains, valleys and bodies of water, and the very large infrastructure costs associated with overcoming these barriers, may not permit the consideration and/or the implementation of conventional public transportation systems for such areas. In such cases, transit agencies may look to unconventional modes of travel to serve the needs of the resi- dents of geographically constrained areas. Several unconventional transit technologies and modes that are designed to deal with specific functions have found significant applications in many areas around the world (Vuchic 2007). One of these technologies that are increasingly used in areas with geographical and topographical barriers is aerial ropeway transit (ART). The term “aerial ropeway transit” was coined for the pur- pose of this paper to describe any form of aerial ropeway systems that are implemented in the urban environment as a public transit mode. This paper begins with an overview of ART, its origins, system components, and system characteristics. The overview is on the basis of information gathered from the limited available literature on the subject and other resources such as ART vendors and applications around the world. Following that, a detailed review of available ART technologies is presented. The service and system characteristics of this technology are then compared with those of conventional transit modes. A discussion of the existing ART applications around the world is then presented, including applica- tions in Portland (USA), Roosevelt Island (USA), Medellin (Colombia), Caracas (Venezuela), Hong Kong, and Constantine (Algeria). The last section of this paper presents an assessment of the present ART technologies, their benefits and limitations, and the advancements needed for ART to be a fully recognized transit member. Introduction: What is ART? ART is an aerial public transit technology in which cabins (also called carriers, vehicles, or cars) are suspended and propelled from above by cables. The underlying technology of ART has been around for more than a century, where it has been applied mostly in terrain-challenged recreational contexts (e.g., gondolas/ telepherique in ski resorts) to transport skiers and tourists 1 Postdoctoral Fellow, Univ. of Toronto, 105-35 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 1A4 (corresponding author). E-mail: baha.alshalalfeh@utoronto.ca 2 Associate Professor, Dept. of Civil Engineering, Univ. of Toronto, 35 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 1A4. E-mail: amer@ecf .utoronto.ca 3 Founding Principal, Creative Urban Projects (CUP), Toronto, Ontario, Canada. E-mail: steven@creativeurbanprojects.com 4 Center of Research Excellence in Hajj and Omrah, Umm Al-Qura Univ., Makkah, Saudi Arabia, P.O. Box 6287. E-mail: fadelothman @gmail.com Note. This manuscript was submitted on February 28, 2011; approved on July 18, 2011; published online on February 15, 2012. Discussion per- iod open until August 1, 2012; separate discussions must be submitted for individual papers. This paper is part of the Journal of Transportation En- gineering, Vol. 138, No. 3, March 1, 2012. ©ASCE, ISSN 0733-947X/ 2012/3-253–262/$25.00. JOURNAL OF TRANSPORTATION ENGINEERING © ASCE / MARCH 2012 / 253 J. Transp. Eng. 2012.138:253-262. Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by Umm Al-Qura University on 06/08/14. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved.