Lifestyle
Gondolas: The Solution to Austin’s Traffic?
No matter what day of the week it is, you are bound to hear someone complaining about the traffic around Austin, so one company thinks gondolas could be the answer.
Steamrolled by Argo Design, the plan to utilize gondolas has been a long time coming. As Jared Ficklin, Creative Technologist and Designer at Argo, told KVUE, “Our city, all of our tourism and all of the reasons we live here are based on the culture of the city…Traffic is putting the culture of this city at risk.”
While there are no definitive answers yet on exactly what streets would be turned into waterways (although South 1st is an obvious choice based on its straightaways), the company just wants to slowly gauge public interest through social media before taking their plan to City Hall.
So how would this plan work, should it come to fruition? “The system Ficklin is proposing would be built at about a second-story height above existing roadways and over over waterways….Their system, unlike traditional buses or train lines, would operate continuously.”
This idea is a wild one, that’s for sure, but for a city like Austin, it just may work.
