The team, which Trey Winstead said includes Whiting-Turner Contracting Co. and Banks Contracting Co. as contractors and San Antonio-based Overland Partners as architects, will likely get some feedback on the aesthetics from the design panel tomorrow.
As proposed, eight-person cable cars would carry passengers 95 feet above Baltimore's downtown waterfront, arriving every 10 seconds at each of four terminal stops: the Baltimore Convention Center, the World Trade Center, Pier 6 and Thames and Caroline streets in the new Harbor Point development under way between Harbor East and Fells Point.
$7 fare likely
The brothers project charging $7 for an all-day pass, with a projected 1.9 million riders - tourists, commuters, students - a year.
Grand Junction, Colo.,-based Leitner-Poma, which builds cable transportation systems, would build and operate the gondola system. Seventy percent of the company' s worldwide aerial gondola business now comes from ski areas, with 20 percent built for recreation or tourism purposes, said Alain Lazard, who handles special projects for the company.
But 10 percent of the new gondola business - the fastest growing segment - is to serve as urban transportation. So far no U.S. cities have the gondolas. One system was started in Philadelphia across the Delaware River but has been stalled for years, while another is being studied in New York to take passengers from Manhattan to Governor's Island to Brooklyn, Lazard said.
Small footprint
"They have become more and more sophisticated and more reliable," Lazard said. "The beauty of those systems is they don't interfere with traffic at all, and the footprint is so small."
Other cities with some form of aerial transit include Portland, Ore., which runs the Portland Aerial Tram, and New York City's Roosevelt Island Tramway. Both systems use trams, which carry more passengers than the smaller gondolas.
Winstead said if the necessary city approvals come though, the system could be built in 18 months and up and running by the end of next year.
"We'd be the quickest and cheapest way through the Inner Harbor," he said. "We'd also be the most fun."
lorraine.mirabella@baltsun.com
