Cable Cars: The Multimodal Approach to Urban Public Transport

The possibility of combining several forms of public transportation on the same route, known as multimodality, is not a new concept. However, applying it as a strategy to promote a more sustainable, less polluting mobility that reduces the use of private cars with the natural advantages that this entails, among them, improving users' quality of life.

Population growth in Latin American cities, due to factors such as labor supply, health, and educational services, has caused the expansion of urban centers to the suburbs, which also require safe, reliable, affordable, and effective public transportation services that connect them with areas where are the jobs, health services, and commercial areas, as well as with educational and leisure centers.

This is where the need to implement multimodal urban public transportation strategies and models becomes evident. The cable car offers excellent advantages over other transportation systems by acting as “user collectors” in areas that are difficult to access and serving as a feeder system to the central infrastructure.

In large Latin American cities, traffic is among the factors that most contribute to acoustic and atmospheric pollution, long trips that cause economic losses, and stress to the detriment of the health of citizens, among other issues. The implementation of multimodal transportation strategies that include systems like the cable car contribute to reducing both vehicular congestion and pollution, as well as increasing the quality of life of users derived from spending less time in public transportation, benefits that are achieved thanks to the interconnection with areas that are difficult to access.

In this sense, the decisive factor is the right of way that the cable cars have, since the route is conducted "by air," cutting vehicular congestion and minimizing the topographic limitations of the areas where it is implemented. The integration of these alternative transportation systems has another additional advantage: the reduction of the total cost of travel, which for users means actual sustainable transportation.

If, in addition to all the above, these systems are integrated into the transportation network through a single payment method, such as multimodal cards, we get a transport ecosystem that adapts both to the needs of users and to the morphology and structure of the city and not inversely, as has happened in other cities with less successful mobility strategies.

Universal Mobility as part of Social Inclusion

A determining factor for the success of the adoption of multimodal models of public transportation is universal accessibility to the public service network. Speaking of universal accessibility in public transportation, it is understood that both facilities and vehicle services offer the possibility to people with different types of disabilities to access them in a fluid, safe and inclusive way. In the long term, the population with disabilities has managed to open the way to effectively and functionally integrate into public transportationñ      nevertheless, it is essential to have the necessary elements for it, such as correct signage, special access ramps, courtesy gates, elevators, haptic maps and Braille signs.

Success Is Impossible Without Citizen Involvement

However, perhaps the main advantage of cable cars is found where they open the door for further urban intervention in sectors with low-income populations. Multiple Latin American examples of cable car-based solutions show how they have the ability to reduce costs and increase access to the services of the population served as well as improving the urban environment in which they live, including public spaces, creating high-quality equipment urban projects and strengthening the social fabric through community participation in project planning. The determining factor for this model to be successful is that it forms part of an integral project that aims at social progress and is considered in this way by the communities that benefit them.

As well as the Bus Rapid Transit Systems and the Recreational Cycling Routes, the use of cable cars to improve mobility in marginalized areas is a contribution from Latin America to the rest of the world.

An example  is Mexico City’s Cablebús Line 1, part of Mexico City’s Integrated Mobility System, which in the first year of operation in June 2022 had transported about 14.5 million people. It has an installed capacity to carry 144,000 passengers a day. It currently has an influx of more than 50,000 users in 18 hours of daily operation. In other words, Cablebús Line 1 still has the capacity to transport almost three times the number of passengers it currently carries. The 9.2km-     long cable car connection takes passengers directly to the second-     busiest subway station in the city, Indios Verdes, where they can easily access other transport systems of the metropolis, thus contributing to a multimodal urban public transportation scheme.

The multimodal transportation scheme, an interconnected, autonomous and shared state, will revolutionize how we understand efficiently coordinated and integrated transport, as if it were a single journey, especially in the large Latin American cities.