Watch How Bolivia Built the World's Longest Urban Cable Car System

[Judi Lynn]

Watch How Bolivia Built the World's Longest Urban Cable Car System
Today 12:51pm

In most parts of the world, cable cars are relegated to ski areas or amusement parks. But in South America, cities use the gondolas to navigate undulating terrain as public transportation. This fall, two more lines will open in Bolivia's La Paz-El Alto network, making it the longest urban cable car system in the world.

This new "subway in the sky" (which looks pretty much like a bunch of ski lifts) is able to lift residents up and over the urban gridlock, allowing them to move between the two city centers faster and more efficiently. As part of a story this weekend, the New York Times made a beautiful video celebrating this rather elegant transit system, which residents call the "red line."

- VIDEO -

The potential for this new method of transportation to transform cities like La Paz is huge, where the city is built on veritable alpine cliffs 12,000 feet above sea level. Cable cars provide a light touch on city infrastructure, and can connect steep neighborhoods where trains are too impractical or expensive. It's also cleaner and safer than the other alternative—the addition of more crowded minibuses, which will only lead to more streets choked with traffic and pollution.

But the biggest takeaway for riders is that they now feel their city is moving forward, and modernizing in a way that will help it keep pace in the global economy (it's no coincidence these new lines are being finished in time for an election year). Besides their new perspective-changing commute, the cable cars have given the city a signature method of transportation—which brings residents a sense of pride. [New York Times]

http://gizmodo.com/watch-how-bolivia-built-the-worlds-longest-urban-cable-1623280417

[Peace Patriot]

1. I love stuff like this--innovative transportation...

...and it especially warms my heart to know some of the background:

....that the LEFTIST government of Bolivia, led by Evo Morales (whom the U.S. tried to overthrow in 2008*), strongly opposes and has stopped transglobal corporate PRIVATIZATION of public infrastructure like this. (Morales was catapulted to power and election as president by successful protests against Bechtel's privatization of a city water system);

...that Morales furthermore nationalized Bolivia's main resource--natural gas--and renegotiated Bolivia's gas contracts to DOUBLE Bolivia's revenues, which Morales has used to provide pensions for workers who never had pensions before and for other aids for the poor, and, of course, which can be used for projects like the cable cars--i.e., development of "the commons";

...that Venezuela--also a LEFTIST government--helped Bolivia renegotiate its gas contracts, and may also have inspired the cable cars, which also have been developed in Venezuela to help the poor in favelas that have been built on steep hillsides and to help the rural poor in steep areas.

As transportation, cable cars are the best! They provide a completely no hassle ride above the city, giving everyone who uses them a new perspective on life on earth--or a chance at a new perspective. Also, the ambience--for lack of a better word--is so much better in every way. Instead of being stuck in smelly, polluting tin cans on wheels--cars, buses--subject to traffic jams and all kinds of inhuman inconvenience--you are wafted through the air nearly free as the birds. And the disruption of nature is minimal, compared to building roads, highways, tunnels, bridges and other highly invasive infrastructure or building subways or laying railroad tracks. Cable cars are beautiful!

This is what democracy looks like! Good leadership, good decisions for the benefit of all!

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*(The Bush Junta funded/organized a white separatist insurrection against Morales right out of the U.S. embassy in Bolivia. They killed dozens of people, torched government buildings, sabotaged gas lines. The white separatists wanted to split the country in two and gain control of Bolivia's gas reserves. South American countries united to stop this insurrection--one of the finest moments in the history of the New Left in South America over the last decade.)