This winter, as streetcar lines shut down and TTC workers bashed ice from overhead wires, the question of whether a more robust technology — perhaps one proven in the harshest of alpine conditions — could be a viable alternative to Toronto’s iconic streetcars suddenly became worth considering.
Steven Dale, chief executive at Bullwheel International Cable Car Corp., says gondolas could be a reliable and remarkably cost-effective way forward for mass transit in Toronto.
“You tell someone you want to put a cable car in Toronto, and they look at you like you have three heads,” says Dale over the phone from central Switzerland.
His plan is to win over Torontonians with a privately funded tourism-focused pilot project that would take passengers from Broadview Avenue and Danforth Avenue into the Don Valley to the Evergreen Brick Works.
“Growing up in that neighborhood and knowing what I did [about cable cars], it just began to feel like a logical fit to explore how to access the Brick Works,” says Dale, who is currently in talks with Evergreen, Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, the City of Toronto, and Toronto-Danforth councilor Mary Fragedakis.
However, Dale has set his sights beyond hauling people and bicycles to and from the popular farmers’ market and hiking destination. A visit to his website, The Gondola Project, reveals a map showing full integration into the TTC network with gondolas serving as a southern relief line to the Bloor-Danforth subway.
“It’s simply about a relief valve to get people off that corridor and get them downtown, but that’s admittedly pie in the sky,” says Dale.
His plan would see a gondola line travel south from Broadview subway station, hop over Lake Shore Boulevard and the Gardiner Expressway, before making its way west with stops at Union Station and Liberty Village, as well as transfers to Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport and Exhibition Place.
Dale has an easy answer for the skeptics. “Toronto already has a cable transit system.”
The 1.47-kilometre-long Link Train at Pearson International Airport opened in 2006 and has run 24 hours a day and seven days a week, with only two interruptions.
Dale sent a colleague to check it out during the recent ice storm. “It was doing just fine,” he says.
