Mexico City’s Urban Gondola Is Designed to Beat Dense Urban Sprawl

The views from Mexico City’s Cablebus are unbeatable, but its primary purpose is for commuters.

Linea 3 is the newest expansion of Mexico City’s Cablebus system.

Courtesy of Doppelmayr

Hello and welcome to Bloomberg’s weekly design digest. I’m Kriston Capps, staff writer for Bloomberg CityLab and your guide to the world of architecture and the people who build things.

This week Design Edition and the rest of CityLab traveled to Mexico City for the Bloomberg CityLab 2024 conference. Sign up to keep up: Subscribe to get this newsletter every Sunday.

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The newest Cablebus line extends about 3.5 miles out from central Mexico City.Courtesy of Doppelmayr

MEXICO CITY — The route from central Mexico City to the ancient pyramids of Teotihuacan is a well traveled one. Even in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, traffic for the one-and-a-half hour car ride to the pyramids was bumper to bumper, both there and back. So when I looked up from my phone and spotted a gondola flying effortlessly over the outskirts of the city, I felt more than a little jealous.

Mexico City’s Cablebus system is a modern marvel. Not quite on the order of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid, maybe, but Cablebus boasts the longest gondola line in the world. The system is the linchpin of the city’s latest efforts to relieve the heinous commutes that plague the working-class residents of the city’s outer boroughs.

After visiting Casa Luis Barragán, I found myself just a block from a brand new Cablebus station at Bosque de Chapultepec, the city’s central park. I could hardly resist, so I lined up with throngs of commuters heading out on a Friday evening.

Riding is cheap at 7 pesos, roughly 35 US cents. Long lines at rush hour move fast. The stations, designed by Austrian ropeway manufacturer Doppelmayr, are simple platforms built over a series of stairs. Cablebus is easy and fun. The views at sunset in particular can’t be beat.

After riding out and back again, I’d put Cablebus up there with lucha libre and pan de muerto as CDMX musts. But as public transit? Even after just a single round trip, some of the benefits (and drawbacks) of the urban gondola were clear.

Tourists and commuters line up outside Estacion Los Pinos.Photo: Kriston Capps/Bloomberg

The first is speed. Even at rush hour, the long line stretching outside the station never stopped moving. Riders climb a series of stairs to reach the platform and hop on a moving car. According to Doppelmayr, the gondola moves at 20 feet per second, or 13 miles per hour. For many riders traveling long distances from the city’s outskirts, Cablebus has cut commute times in half.

Cablebus is speedy in another way. Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo inaugurated Linea 3 on Sept. 24 (at the time she was still president-elect and Mexico City mayor). That’s the third Cablebus line to open since 2021. Her successor, Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada, is promising to build five new lines in short order. Thanks to the city’s low rooftops, it’s possible to string up ropeway lines over whole swaths of the city. Cablebus stations have small footprints, so building them as infill close to the city’s Metro stations is feasible.

As my Bloomberg News colleague Alex Vasquez reports, residents view the Cablebus as safe. That’s a huge deal for a city where women report so much harassment that transit authorities responded with so-called pink zones — subway cars and bus sections reserved exclusively for women.

Did I mention the views? The six stops along Linea 3 take passengers past some amazing sites. Panteon de Dolores, a vast and quite dense cemetery, is perhaps best seen from above. The highlight of Linea 3 might be Centro Constituyentes, the architecture school designed by Ten Arquitectos. And Cablebus showcases the hospitality of Mexico City residents: Passengers greet every new rider who boards with a “buenas tardes.”

A Cablebus car at the newly opened Estacion Los Pinos.Photo: Kriston Capps/Bloomberg

The biggest problem with Cablebus may be that the cars themselves are so small that they create bottlenecks. Linea 3 has some 180 cabins, each one seating a maximum of 10 riders. During peak hours, most riders are going in the same direction; once the cars fill up, nobody else can board until someone else exits. This is fine for riders at Vasco de Quiroga (the last station on the line) traveling to center-city Los Pinos (the other terminus) or vice versa, but people waiting to board at the four intermediate stations will watch as one full car after another passes them by. Urban gondolas just can’t match the throughput of the subway or bus rapid transit.

With a stop near the heart of the city in Bosque de Chapultepec, Linea 3 has a lot of appeal for tourists. The newest line doesn’t reach areas nearly as dense as Cuautepec (which is served by Linea 1) or Iztapalapa (Linea 2). In the suburbs along the highway that stretches out toward Teotihuacan, where riders use Cablebus to connect to subway or bus stations, ridership dynamics might be different. The city’s population and geography means that for many riders, Cablebus is more than a tourist amenity.

Cablebus riders will get this same aerial view of Centro Constituyentes.Photo: Courtesy of Ten Arquitectos

Mexico City is both sprawling and dense, with housing spread along arterials that radiate far outside the city center. These highways are hopelessly clogged, turning residents into super-commuters. Unlike cities in the US, both the hub and spokes are densely populated in Mexico City. Car traffic limits how residents travel, both along the arterials and between the outer boroughs.

Cablebus isn’t some one-neat-trick solution, and it can’t rival rail or bus rapid transit for a public option. But it’s cutting commutes for tens of thousands of riders, and for transit infrastructure, it’s expanding incredibly rapidly. As Brugada explained at the CityLab 2024 conference, the gondola is making an impact on social and economic mobility — fast.

“One of our objectives is for Mexico City’s periphery to not be equivalent to abandonment and inequality,” Brugada says.