Ski Lifts Can Could Help Get Cargo Traffic Off the Road

An anonymous reader writes with this except from a beautifully illustrated, thought-provoking article: "These days, we use them almost exclusively to transport skiers and snowboarders up snow slopes, but before the 1940s, aerial ropeways were a common means of cargo transport, not only in mountainous regions but also on flat terrain. An electrically powered aerial ropeway is one of the cheapest and most efficient means of transportation available. Some generate excess energy that can be used to power nearby factories or data centers. An innovative system called RopeCon (not to be confused with a role-playing convention held annually in Finland) can move up to 10,000 tonnes of freight per hour."

Comments

overhead wires or third rails

[Anonymous Coward]

what advantage does this technology hold over trains?

Re:overhead wires or third rails

[SuperKendall]

You don't have to displace a ton of land with an overhead system, a ski-lift kind of thing would involve far less massive support pillars and also a less noise for the surrounding area (although more of a constant noise than a train would have).

Highly optimistic claims

[Kjella]

This does not only concern energy use: contrary to a road or a railroad track, a cargo ropeway can be built straight through nature without harming animal and plant life (or, potentially, straight through a city without harming human life).

Then scroll down to the big ugly modern cargo ropeways/conveyor belts in the bottom of the article and you can see they're ugly as fuck and can be seen for many miles around. Compared to that a road or railroad is almost invisible. They also generously ignore that we've gotten a lot better at building bridges and tunnels than before, not worse.

I suppose it makes sense if you have a huge, stable amount of materials moving point-to-point, but for the most part such a cargoway will only add another exchange point where goods must be unloaded and reloaded which costs time and money. Also there's very little flexibility, with trucks or trains you can run more or less and even sell parts of it if things are slow. With this you have almost only fixed costs and if you hit the capacity limit it's a very hard limit.

This reminds me a little of the people that try to revive the zeppelins, it's only going to work in some really niche cases and those places usually already have one.

problem

[Eivind]

The principal problem of this, and most other similar suggestions, is that while such a system is good for a-b transport, reality is a network. Such a system helps you not at all, unless the goods to be delivered are already at the start-station, and are being transported to the end-station.

If not, you need to *first* load it on one mode of transport (typically some kind of car) -then- drive to the nearest "station" where the goods are repackaged, then near the destination, repeat.

It turns out the delays and costs of reloading cargo, frequently makes the economy such that it's better to simply go the entire distance by lorry. The advantage of the lorry is that it goes from where your goods are, to where you want them, with zero intermediary re-loads. (typically anyway, sure there's exceptions)

The lack of a robust network, also makes the system vulnerable. When (not if!) one ropeway breaks down, what do you do ? Reroute onto roads ? Wait ?

I think the best hopes are for dual-mode-transport, that is, vehicles that can drive both on normal roads -and- on special-purpose tracks of some sort. Doing this, gives you the best of two worlds. Have a look at http://www.ruf.dk/ for an example system.