Look up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it’s a gondola?. Or it will be if the city of Sugar Land can get a federal grant to study bringing in an elevated rail and cable system and then the additional funds to actually build it.
City planners and leaders hope to install a system that would enable residents and visitors to leap over the city’s most congested areas, for example where highways 6 and 59 meet, which happens to hold the record for the most crashes. The system would connect prime locations such as Sugar Land Town Square and Smart Financial Centre. Planners are looking ahead to connecting up with say the Methodist Hospital System and the expansion of the University of Houston Sugar Land campus.
This would be the first such system in the country, according to Sugar Land leaders, and would accompany what they say is a determination to develop innovative approaches to transportation and other services for residents. “We like to be pioneering,” says Melanie Beaman, the city’s transportation and mobility manager.
Over the past three years, the city of Sugar Land has been busy surveying residents and what it discovered is that the No. 1 priority for many of them was an alternative way of getting around town. Besides more walking and biking connections, Beaman says what residents said they wanted were more transit options. What they want is public transit that works.
“Fifty nine percent of residents say it’s difficult to get around with existing public transit. So they basically give what we have now an F.” she says. And while many Texans have a well-known love for automobiles, that doesn’t extend to everyone, she says.
“Just because you drive a vehicle doesn’t mean that everyone else does, Not everyone can afford it. Not everybody can physically do it. Thirty percent of the population doesn’t even have a driver’s license,” Beaman points out.
The city has partnered with a firm called Swyft Cities which initially began planning for elevated transport for Google and its employees. When Google decided not to go forward with the project, the group that had been working on the plan split off and formed its own company: Swyft Cities.
Sugar Land has applied to the Houston Galveston Area Council for federal funding, Beamon estimates the cost of the engineering study at $12 million, pointing out quickly that the cost of adding a freeway lane can run to $300 million “and nobody blinks an eye.”
According to an FAQ on the city’s website, the elevated rail and cable system would not be taxpayer supported, but would depend on partnerships with the private sector as well as, they hope, state and federal funding. The gondolas would be autonomous; no one would be driving them. The idea would be people could go to one of the gondola launch locations and using an app on their phone, pay their fare, jump aboard and go directly to their desired destination with no stops along the way. Most of these gondola stations would be on city-owned property.
Under the so-called Whoosh system, the air-conditioned gondolas traveling about 35 mph would move independently, carrying riders along cables. The vehicles would be on-demand and could transport a small number of people at the same time. They would be wheelchair accessible and capable of transporting bikes for connections to the two major trail systems in the city.
Although this was part of the city’s master plan last year, city leaders have been pretty quiet about it until now, Beaman says, because they wanted to make sure that it could really work in their city. “So we did a feasibility study and found that sure, Sugar Land would work great because gondolas are great at getting people in mountainous regions or across large bodies of water. So why not a freeway?”
The city had considered a pedestrian bridge at the intersection of 59 and 6, but discarded that idea as limited and too costly. “They take up a lot of space; they’re ugly; they’re very, very expensive,” Beaman says.
“And then we thought, besides just connecting Point A and Point B, which is pretty much all a pedestrian bridge would do, what if we expanded it? What if we go to some of the regional activity centers.?”
In a just-released city statement, City Manager Michael W. Goodrum is quoted as saying: “We couldn’t be more excited to partner on a project that’s unlike anything else in the nation. “Whoosh (r) checks all the boxes. It’s innovative, bold, and trailblazing. Our residents have told us that mobility is among their top priorities, and we are committed to being responsive to their needs by providing opportunities for projects they tell us are important.
“We will be relentless in looking for opportunities like this one to partner with state and federal funding sources to reduce the financial impact to our residents while also delivering mobility projects that support quality of life, economic development and tourism.”
Besides the environmentally friendly aspects of the system which Beaman says tie into the city’s master plan to be “more sustainable, more environmentally friendly,” it would cost considerably less than adding another lane to the highways.
Also, the use of a fixed route bus system doesn’t work well in a suburban city like Sugar Land she says. “They’re big buses. They take up lanes. They move slow. You have to have enough population to sustain a service like that.”
But what the suburbs do have that many more urban centers do not, she says, is plenty of free parking, some of which could be used for the space needed to set up a gondola station. Beaman estimated each station would need the equivalent of about 18 adjacent parking spaces. “They have smaller ones that could fit into tighter areas like for example Sugar Land Town Square where we don’t have a lot of space, but we have plenty of parking spaces. Most of the traveling infrastructure where the cables and rails are is city-owned property.”
“We have plenty of parking that is totally underutilized. So our city is looking at how to redevelop these areas, whether you add some restaurants out there, more shopping, aero-gondola stations There’s all kinds of things you can do with the space that’s more beneficial economically to the city.
“We want to redevelop some of these area like Lake Pointe. Well then, who wants to build a huge $80,000 parking garage when you can have a station there instead and utilize the parking that we already have? Why do we keep building these parking lots and wasting space and making no income for the city. And if people could move around more easily, park once and do all your traveling, eat lunch, meeting your friends, doing whatever, then you go back to your car and you go home.
“There are cable cars that go over the Potomac River but it’s just basically like a ferry. It goes from Point A to Point back and forth. This is modular. We could do the entire city if we wanted to, if we had the money. We could go into Houston if we wanted instead of sitting in traffic,” she says.
“The vehicles, they have a battery. So each vehicle moves itself along the cables. The cables themselves are not electrified at all; it’s purely structural, So if the power went out, they would still have power to operate probably for a few hours.
This is not the first alternative transportation project the city has undertaken. Sugar Land also announced a partnership with Wisk Aero “for development of vertiports for autonomous air taxi operations,” according to its press release. What this means is that riders could take a quick hop on airborne vehicles that look like airplanes but that operate more like helicopters taking them from the Sugar Land Regional Airport to either Hobby or George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Presumably this would be for travelers with more money than time to spare.
As for the gondola system, Beaman says: “The cost of operating the system is very little. There’s no drivers. I’m actually working on my master’s degree in sustainable transportation. So the micro transit is something that I knew the city needed. And anything that gives people choices and is as exciting as this, I’m completely thrilled. I just need money, If we can just get the first phase built and people see it in action, I think it will be transformative to how people get around.
“You’re up above traffic and passing everyone who’s stuck down below. And it’s fun. It’s public transit that people would actually want to use.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
