Mongolia: economical and ecological cable cars as a new public transport
Audio 00:20
Ulan Bator is one of the most polluted cities in the world.
© AFP / Byambasuren Byamba-Ochi
By: Marina Mielczarek
6 min
What do a French skier and a Colombian from Medellín have in common?
Both travel by Poma cable car!
Poma is the name of the French champion of cable cars and ski lifts.
The company has just landed the first Mongolian market.
Six kilometers of cable will connect the north to the center of Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia.
It will be the very first metro-cab in the country.
Quiet and low-polluting public transport with a future.
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We enter it as in an elevator except that instead of standing, we sit on the benches!
But it is true that with their rectangular red doors and rounded on the sides, with their big black buttons to slide the door, these cabins look like mini flying elevators!
6 kilometers above the Toula, buildings and hills
122 small shuttles will slide between the pylons of this very first Mongolian cable car.
Three stops are planned to pick up users along the route (northern district, called the ghers or yurts district, to the business center of Ulan Bator, the capital.
The construction of this new public transport is a real relief for the inhabitants ... In ten years, the population of Ulan Bator has tripled.
A phenomenon due to the change of lifestyle in the hills.
Nomadism is reserved for very remote areas.
Elsewhere, closer to the cities, the families of the steppes have moved closer to the urban centers.
The cable cars will allow them to fly over the river (La Toula) which crosses Ulaanbaatar and to cross the hills.
Aluminum and electric power, gondolas are ecological
Saturation of public transport, traffic jams, city congestion, Ulaanbaatar has been ranked among the largest and most polluted cities on the planet.
Vincent Gallay, town planner, specialist in new uses, the city cable car, has a future:
"
Urban cable cars have a unique advantage, explains this connoisseur of large urban areas," they open up the space above our heads!
In a world where all transport spaces are saturated, this is an ideal field that we will have to exploit.
In the sky, he
jokes
, there is a lot of space!
Designers and architects will take it because in addition to being ecological, it is silent.
For the inhabitants too, by reducing the construction of roads or rails on the ground, they will be able to develop other possibilities of life.
"
The metro-cable brings down crime
In Colombia, in Medellín, locals called their cable car the social metro-cable.
Because like in Rio, at the top of the favelas of Brazil, these cabins have given life to inaccessible districts.
Playgrounds, libraries, the facilities have been able to allow connections with other more central districts of large cities.
Moreover, the authorities did not expect it, but there was no degradation on the sites during the installation of the pylons.
These new forms of transportation have really brought down the crime rate.
Algeria, the metro-cable country
Algeria is the example of a country where transport by cable car is ideal with its mountainous areas and towns built up high.
In the 2000s, the country had the largest number of cable TV lines in the world.
Unfortunately, due to a lack of local staff or training for maintenance, some residents complain, the gondolas often break down.
Medellín, Taipei, New York, Nizhny Novgorod and the sacred mountains of China
However, there is hope since the Poma company plans to open new cable cars in Algeria.
This year, like all entrepreneurs, Fabien Felli, from the Poma company, is suffering from the coronavirus crisis (activity reduced by 30%) but in the midst of the global economic slump, he still has something to congratulate himself on.
His company Poma has just won its sixth market in Colombia.
If Latin America is already conquered, other adventures, he would even say more, other continents await him:
“
The urban cable car is definitely the solution for developing countries,
” he says
.
In Africa, we are already in Algeria, but with these cable cars that overcome mountains, rivers such as deserts or the most populated areas, the entire continent could benefit.
We are working to make ourselves known
!
"
18 months of construction and 40 million euros
Several advantages compared to conventional public transport.
First, to save time since building a metro-cable can be done in 18 months.
The cost is interesting, the Ulaanbaatar contract, largely supported by talks between the French and Mongolian governments, is estimated at 40 million euros.
Grenoble, Toulouse Ajaccio and Cergy is not much for France!
It is a paradox, but it is in France that the constructions of Poma have the most difficulty to convince.
Lack of habit, surely, or even a lack of knowledge about this type of equipment, projects announced in the early 2000s in the Paris suburbs, were finally canceled.
Pylons at the 2022 Olympics
Asia has already been conquered, after the metro-cables in Taiwan, Korea is using Poma for ski area lifts.
And then, think about it when you see them at the Olympics, it is in China that the French went to develop the tracks for the 2022 Winter Olympics.
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