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London's New Thames Passenger Cable Crossing
In April 2011, Transport-for-London (TfL) announced that the Thames spanning cable car crossing project connecting the ExCel Exhibition Centre on Victoria Dock in London Docklands to the O2 arena site on the North Greenwich peninsular will start construction this summer.
In case you haven’t heard by now it will cost £25+ million and it will have a capacity of 2,500 passengers per hour. It comes with the prospect of magnificent views over 50 metres above the Thames, of Docklands and London and it will give London Eye a run for its money as a London Icon according to London Mayor, Boris Johnson. It will be the first mass transit aerial tramway in the UK and it will join others including Barcelona, Cologne, Hong Kong, Singapore and Memphis (memorable for the action scenes in “The Firm” featuring Tome Cruise).
When first planned in 2010, this new link was to be completely privately funded and take two years to construct. Boris Johnson and TfL are now pushing to have this ropeway transit link operational by London’s 2012 Olympics to link two Olympics venues, the O2 and the ExCel Arena as well as the main venue just a few hundred yards North of the Victoria Dock. This will undoubtedly provide a real wow factor to the Olympics.
You can see that the time to build this significant structure in time (11 months) is quite an engineering and logistics challenge and to make it happen, TfT will fund the whole cost up front – a bold move some may say in these straitened times. Whilst this has not really impinged on the national news to any great extent, the race to get it ready for the Olympics has undoubtedly accelerated the project to give the operators a chance to get an early boost to their revenues.
Transport and construction industry commentators believe that whilst completing the project and getting it operational in 11 or 12 months will be a huge challenge. The aerial tramway would provide both a medium-term benefit to the transit infrastructure to the East of London and across the Thames, as well as a long term money-earning tourist attraction once the cross-Thames rail link tunnel comes into use in a few years time.
There have earlier, largely unreported attempts to provide a very similar capacity scheme based on aerial tramway technology in 1992/3 a for a privately funded aerial ropeway across the Thames. It’s raison d’etre was to provide a short and medium-term solution for North Kent Rail passengers to quickly get into Canary Wharf, London City Airport and to kick start commercial development in East London and the Royal Docks.
The aerial ropeway service was a simple idea to get things moving to the East of London prior to any rail tunnel under the Thames from North Woolwich to South Woolwich, was planned to be an extension of the North London line on the North Woolwich peninsular. We are still waiting for a rail link under the Thames in this area and perhaps it will still never happen. This latest “temporary” solution is little difference from the previous one except there is another, more prestigious, reason for promoting it.
The only worries are likely to be the current scheme’s business model and the airport safeguarding. If it is built in time with the TfL up-front funding, then there is a good chance that the 2012 Olympics will give the scheme a great financial boost right at the start of its life. If, as the engineering lobby think, time is too short for completion in 11 months from a summer start, then it has to have other longer term attraction and longer-term funding to achieve a reasonable pay back period.
In setting up London City Airport’s 1,200 metre long runway operation less than a mile away to the East, the runway safeguarding surfaces were also set up as a set of “safety zones” for aircraft operation, within which no structures should be present. Let’s hope that 55+ metre high tramway construction is sufficiently far away to the West on the extended runway centreline not to further limit the now successful London City Airport operations.
What do you think? – White Elephant or future London Icon. I think the latter (with a “fair following wind”).
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