People who want to move around downtown Denver could glide in gondola cabins 30 feet above ground if the city were to embrace a businessman’s $350 million plan.
“The cool factor is off the charts,” Ryan Ross, director of and president of a local investigations firm, said. “The gondola system is like a ride-hailing car system in the air. You get to ride-hail your own cabin. It can seat up to six. You’d enter into your phone where you want to go.”
A public presentation by , , and manufacturers on Tuesday evening will unveil more about the envisioned “automated elevated transit network” — broader than the single-gondola concept city officials considered a few years ago. The presentation is scheduled for 6 p.m. in the auditorium at 101 W. Colfax.
New Downtown’s designs show gondola cabins moving above streets in three loops with 14 stops — one linking Denver Union Station with Civic Center, and another circling Civic Center. An eight-mile loop would link Union Station with the Burnham Yard (near the Denver Broncos’ preferred site for a future new football stadium), the Auraria higher education campus, Elitch Gardens and Coors Field.
Ross’s other proposals for reviving downtown include a 500-foot-tall Ferris wheel off Little Raven Street and an amphitheater along the 16th Street Mall.
Five years ago, gondola transit surfaced in a plan linking Denver Union Station with the Highland neighborhood west of downtown — crossing Interstate 25, train tracks, and the South Platte River. Cities elsewhere have installed gondolas for transit “where obstacles such as waterways, highways, or topography would make other alternatives less feasible,” DOTI planner Riley LaMie said. In ., city officials installed an aerial tram connecting the South Waterfront District with a university campus across diverse terrain.
For Denver, “this was proposed as a transit solution because of the highway, river, railroad, and topography changes that are all in close proximity to each other,” LaMie said. But DOTI hasn’t studied the feasibility of a downtown-wide system, potential benefits, and how gondolas would compare with other transit, he said.
The gondola cabins would move separately in the same direction along a fixed guideway, Ross said. At stations, the cabins would detach, and pulleys would lower them for passengers to get on or off. Speeds would range from 25 to 35 miles per hour, slowing at turns. They’d stop at every station or carry riders to stations they’d designate using a Den-Vair smartphone app, he said. “Commute to work. Rent a cabin for a private party. Ride alone and meditate. Ride with a group and get married in the air. Your ride. Your design.”
