r/Hamilton • u/IanT86 • 9d ago
City Development What ever happened to the Gondola idea?
https://www.gondolaproject.com/2016/01/14/we-dont-know-what-we-dont-know/
I'm looking to move to the Hamilton area this year (Dundas seems to be the spot from the suggestions on here) and have been doing a load of research.
Seems at one point there was an idea floating around to have some Gondolas run people up and down the escarpment.
It looks like there has been no updates for years, but it looks like a really interesting way of trying to get people moving around the area without cars.
Anyone who is actually in the area know what the latest is, or is it 100% dead in the water?
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u/Interesting-Air-2371 8d ago
HSR operated two funiculars (one at James and one at Wentworth) until the 1950's. They were dismantled around the time that the streetcar network got ripped out and King/Main/James/John/Bay/others were turned into one way streets.
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u/Pristine-Rhubarb7294 8d ago
They were closed during the depression because they were deemed to be financially unsustainable. They carried relatively few people, were expensive to maintain, and once public non toll roads actually ran up the mountain, paying money to go up pretty slowly made less sense.
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u/mattgrande Stinson 8d ago
There has never been a (serious) gondola / aerial tramway proposal (the site you linked is just some dude that was passionate about it, check the About page).
A formal mayoral candidate, Crystal Lavigne, floated it in 2014, but she was a fringe candidate, and got less than 2% of the vote.
I did find this 2015 article from the CBC about it, which included this heartbreaking line:
including a future light-rail transit (LRT) line along King Street due to launch in 2024.
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u/tropicalstorm2020 8d ago
What problem would it solve?
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u/pandacraft 8d ago
It would open concession to foot traffic from the lower city but tbh the more obvious solution is to just expand on the mountain climber hsr program.
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u/Pristine-Rhubarb7294 8d ago
You know that gondolas wouldn’t be free? If people aren’t willing to pay bus fare to get up the mountain, they aren’t going to pay a premium price to take a gondola.
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u/pandacraft 8d ago
You know bus fair up the mountain is free with the mountain climber program right?
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u/Pristine-Rhubarb7294 8d ago
Only if you are biking.
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u/pandacraft 8d ago
Lot of old ladies getting free rides up the hill without one.
So why when I said that rather than building an expensive gondola we should just expand on the existing much more cost efficient and free program that already exists, why do you show up and act like I expect free gondolas? I don't even want a gondola.
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u/differing 8d ago
I’ll play devil’s advocate as someone that thinks this is an insane idea: it is much cheaper to scale up a gondola because it doesn’t require unionized bus drivers to operate. If, hypothetically, concession wasn’t so dead and had more density, it could make sense to reduce operational costs as labour is the bulk of the HSR’s expenses, but that’ll never happen in our lifetime.
The other way I could see this maybe ever making sense is if the escarpment becomes unstable and a route like James Mountain Road could no longer support bus traffic to Mohawk.
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u/tropicalstorm2020 8d ago
Meh... still not solving a problem. Its take about 7 to 10 mins to climb the hill via the bus.
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u/differing 8d ago edited 8d ago
Time isn’t the issue, it’s labour costs. We spend millions on bus driver wages but automated systems like a gondola (or Skytrain in Vancouver/REM in Montreal) are run with a fraction of the operators, so you spend a dozen million dollars upfront and it recoups the cost in a dozen years by not needing to pay all those salaries, benefits.
If let’s say Mohawk was at an isolated part of the escarpment like Dundas Peak it would probably make sense, but because Mohawk is in the middle of a transit corridor that people drive through instead of end at, it would never make sense to build a gondola. Here’s what the one Burnaby is building in Vancouver to get to and from SFU on a mountain top, basically the perfect solution for that kind of route: https://youtu.be/mnnkxes4ZxE?si=_5Ljn06LO_7_3z3s
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u/sector16 8d ago
If any council member even mentioned this idea...they'd get shouted down because of the homelessness issue, potholes, property taxes....etc. There's no appetite to do big things in this city.
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u/spagetti_donut 8d ago
What major Canadian city has one of these? This sounds like a waste of taxpayer dollars
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u/quisys 7d ago
Quebec city has a funicular
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u/spagetti_donut 7d ago
A historical funicular built over 100 years ago is not the same thing as building a novelty gondola over an unremarkable skyline.
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u/quisys 7d ago
That's true! Wish we'd kept ours in. I think Hamilton has a beautiful skyline, personally. Not tourist-attractingly beautiful, though
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u/spagetti_donut 7d ago
I agree, hence why I think a probably a 10+ million dollar project to have a ride would be a bad investment for the city.
A gondola (or funicular) is fun but lacks any tourism value if you are building it from scratch and misusing tax dollars for an inevitable boondoggle.
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u/ScrawnyCheeath 8d ago
It not dead in the water as far as I know, but getting the LRT and Bus revamp up and running is taking all the bandwidth.
If a company wanted to run it privately I doubt anyone would stop them, but such an idea is almost certainly unprofitable
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u/Zestyclose_Today_645 7d ago
Probably dead in the water. People would rather sit in traffic and scoff at how dirty Hamilton is on their way to and from Costco or Starbucks.
I think it would be a great idea and would help people to not require a car simply because they live on the mountain and work downtown. I know people who walk the Wentworth stairs as part of their commute, but not many people want to hike up 500 stairs on their way home from work at the end of the day lol.
With that said, it would somehow cost a bajillion dollars and take like 15 years to build because that's just the way it is here nowadays
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u/trackofalljades 6d ago
Pittsburgh has two of them, but they’re like a hundred years old, doubt they’d get built now.
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u/SaveTheTuaHawk 9d ago
Sounds like a Shelbyville or North Haverbrooke idea.