Gondola: Thy Name Is Boondoggle

As if we need any more evidence of profligate waste in the transit industry, Chicago, Austin, and other cities are considering aerial trams, also known as gondolas. Portland’s infamous aerial tram, which opened in 2006, cost 500 percent more than the original projection, carries a mere 3,200 round trips per day, and collects fares that cover just 22 percent of its operating costs. The economic development that was promised if Portland taxpayers helped build it went to Florida instead.

Given this terrible track record, it’s not surprising that other cities weren’t lining up to follow Portland’s example in building aerial trams. So what’s changed to get cities interested in them again? According to Bloomberg, it is lobbying by ski lift manufacturers. They’ve somehow managed to convince people in Austin that a tram will reduce congestion and people in Chicago that a tram will attract tourists, even though Portland’s tram has done neither.

Disneyland used to have an aerial tram, but Disney shut it down in the 1990s “citing its lack of popularity and the number of workers required to operate it.” Such factors tend to be ignored by transit agencies, which merely cut popular routes to pay for unpopular ones and draw upon tax dollars to pay workers.

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The industry’s obsession with expensive and unproductive forms of transit is one of the reasons for this decline. According to APTA’s data, bus rapid transit in 2014 produced 12 percent more fare revenues and 64 percent more riders per operating employee than light rail. Add capital employees and the difference would be even greater. Yet many cities want to build light rail partly because of the mistaken belief that it carries more riders per worker. Light rail may carry more riders per driver than buses, but drivers make up only a tiny fraction of the number of employees required to keep a light-rail line going.

Rail transit is inferior to buses because of its inflexibility. Aerial trams are even more inflexible because, once built, it is extremely difficult to add capacity. At least with rail lines, agencies can run more trains per hour until they reach capacity–and few outside of New York and Washington are close to capacity–but that can’t easily be done with aerial trams.

A boondoggle by any other name would smell as foul, and aerial tram, thy name is boondoggle. Taxpayers will have to hope that no one takes this idea too seriously.