BY RANDY GRAGG
Plans to string gondolas over American cities abound.
FROM THE JULY 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
In the early 2000s, one of Portland, Oregon?s leading employers and research institutions, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), faced a steep, downhill battle. Sited on a hilltop, surrounded by unbuildable canyons and neighborhoods unwilling to yield another inch to expansion, OHSU?s nearest sizable hunk of developable land lay on the Willamette River less than a mile away?for a blue heron. Cars and buses contended with winding, traffic-snarled commutes of anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes.
A campus planner?s brain brightly blinked: Why not an aerial tram" Protests erupted, politicians tangled, and costs lurched $47 million over the earliest budget fantasy of $9.5 million. But in 2007, two sleek, bubble-shaped cars (their shiny artisanal shells carefully machine-hammered by craftsmen from Gangloff Cabins of Switzerland) began flying to and fro across the campus. Today, they ferry more than 50,000 riders per week to a 2.35-million-square-foot cluster of new OHSU buildings. At the time, the tram was only the third urban transit ropeway system in America, after Telluride?s in Colorado and Roosevelt Island?s in New York. Now, however, proposals for urban tramways are becoming more prevalent. A consortium in Washington, D.C., is poised to launch a $1 million environmental impact study for an aerial connection between Rosslyn, Virginia, and...