Urban cable car transit system

This is not your grandad’s cable car gondola. Born of an amusement ride and opening to the public in 2026, this remarkably clever kiwi idea offers quick, cheap, on-demand urban transit – that’s much more direct and private than public transport.

It looks a lot like a big urban gondola system – but Whoosh’s as-yet-unnamed autonomous transport pod system is much more interesting. Gondolas are fixed to their cables, which are pulled in long loops; the Whoosh pods have their own motors and autonomous route-switching systems on board, and are free to navigate their way from point to point across a complex, super-modular network that could stretch from one side of town to the other.

Cable cars, in other words, that don’t all have to go the same way, switching freely between cables that can be much shorter and cheaper than several miles of regular gondola line. In a network that’s super cheap and easy to extend, that doesn’t have to be constrained by geography or existing road networks. It’ll look something like this:

Whoosh

It’s an entirely new and very clever way of thinking about urban transport. Like an eVTOL air taxi, these pods can happily float over traffic – not as quickly, but certainly much more efficiently and with far less hullabaloo in terms of noise, safety and downwash. Like monorails, they take up minimal space on the ground – even less, actually – but they’re not stuck on a set route, so there’s no public transport-style connections to switch between; they’ll go from any stop in the network, directly to any other, intelligently choosing routes to maximize speed.

And they’ll be much more like a ride-share service than public transport. “Our view is: people don’t want to wait for the bus – they want the bus to wait for them,” says Chris Allington, founder and CEO of Whoosh, on a video call from his office in Christchurch, New Zealand.

“Everyone wants that Uber experience,” he tells me. “You want to go from point to point, without any stops in the middle. So you have an app, you either book a vehicle and have it waiting, or walk to your nearest small-footprint station and grab one if it’s there. The vehicle knows it’s you, the doors open and close, it knows the temperature and lighting and music you prefer, and it takes you on the network without stopping to another small-footprint station, very close to your desired destination.”

Check out an animation:

Whoosh’s pod vehicles and infrastructure

The smallest “stations,” says Allington, fit within a standard car park space, just big enough for a spiral up to the elevated height of the Whoosh network, about 12 m (40 ft) off the ground. Larger stations could easily be built right down at ground level. Stations will have their own loops of rail off the main network, so that when pods stop, they don’t hold up any other traffic.

The ‘tracks’ will all be completely static, a combination of tensioned cables stretching 150-300 m (500-985 ft), and shorter sections of steel rail for smooth turns and junctions. “The cool thing about cable is that you can span difficult terrain without any cost,” says Allington. “We can cross over a river, a bridge, a highway. We don’t have to fit down existing road corridors. We can have a network that runs along the tops of buildings – one of our clients overseas is looking to connect rooftop to rooftop between about 10 hotels he’s got, so you don’t even need to go down to the ground floor.”

The pods will carry internal underfloor batteries to run their onboard air con, Wi-Fi, comfort and entertainment systems, as well as sending torque to the drive wheels that pull the cars along on the cables and tracks. The system will optimize the paths of all vehicles in the network, and each pod will switch between different track options at a junction using small switching wheels that can either switch the pod onto a track to the left or right, or allow it to go straight ahead, which is also the failure mode.

Whoosh

Whoosh is predicting an average speed around its network of 40 km/h (25 mph) – but that’s without stopping, so it promises to be much quicker than driving in congested urban areas. The pods will happily switch between cables and rails at the tops of the towers at that pace.

Check out a simulated ride to get a sense of how it’ll work and what the infrastructure will look like:

Replacing the the stop/start flow of traffic with constant motion is incredible for efficiency, says Allington, and the rolling resistance of the small wheels is tiny compared to rubber tires on a road surface. “We’re probably about twice the efficiency of a small electric car, the team was telling me the other day,” he tells me. “A standard length ride in the Whoosh system would use less power than you would in a 10-minute shower.”

Faster cornering could be more comfortable here than you might expect, too. “We’re a bit more like a motorbike than a car,” says Allington, “and by that I mean we can lean over. We can swing out a little as we go around a corner, bringing the G-forces more into line with your body, and then swing it back down to straight. We have some really cool control algorithms which allow us to dampen and control the swing as you come out of a corner. And the cables are amazing for a smooth ride. There’s always rigidity in a rail, and you do feel that, but once you’re on the cable, you really feel like you’re floating. It’s a cool sensation, a great way to travel.”

What about top speed? “Well, the engineers keep telling me we haven’t taken it out of second gear yet,” says Allington, “but we’ve had the vehicles going well faster than 70 km/h (43 mph). Maximum speed is always fun, we’ll turn the dial up to 11 and find out what it can do in the next stage of testing. But the faster you go, the smaller the volume of traffic you can move through the network, because you need more headway between your vehicles. Slower speeds will ultimately mean higher throughput and a more functional transport network.”

Holmes Solutions

The prototype: An amusement ride

The Whoosh initiative was born of a couple of projects from Allington’s other company, Holmes Solutions, which Allington describes as “a bit of an outsourced R&D arm to some of the world’s largest companies. “

The Holmes team originally came up with the idea without a particular application in mind, says Allington: “the ability to have cable-based systems turning corners was always something that generally fascinated me, we had concepts we were working on, just playing around in the background, thinking there might be an application for this somewhere one day.”

That opportunity arose as part of a project for “a very large American Silicon Valley company” – that’d be Google, which was looking for a better way to ferry employees around its large campuses without having to crowd them in with masses of car parking.

By that point, says Allington, “We were already playing with it, and we had a vision for where this could go. So the timing was pretty good!”

Whoosh

Google funded some early warehouse prototypes, but the project was scuppered by COVID – and by then the entire project team could see the enormous potential of the idea on a larger scale. Several members of the Google team left to create Swyft Cities, to help commercialize the idea as an urban transport solution.

But in the meantime, Holmes found another way to get going on the idea. “How did we make so much progress on this? Well, a lot of firms will sit back and complain when nobody wants to buy the first big city transportation network – it’s a tough sell,” says Allington. “We took the other approach: let’s just get it out there and prove the tech, validate it as a true feisty startup model. So we created a smaller system, and rolled it out in the amusement industry over the last few years.”

Holmes bundled up some of the core innovations of the system into the world’s first cable-to-rail transitioning zipline ride. It’s called the Switchback, and it was first opened to the public as ‘The Flying Ox’ at LumberJack Feud, Tennessee. Check it out:

The Switchback gave Holmes a way to make a buck while prototyping the larger public transit system, and testing it at high speeds.

Among other things, the ride proved two of the carriage system’s most important functions. Firstly, the ability to seamlessly switch between rails and cables, as shown in the video below:

And secondly, the “eddy current braking system” below, that’s used to gently control swing-out as the ride goes around a corner – that’s something you certainly want to dial in differently between fun park rides and urban transport systems!

The super-flexible, highly personal nature of the ride means it’s finding all sorts of different use cases; something like a zoo could let people use it as a sedate sightseeing ride offering extraordinary perspectives over the exhibits, or at the touch of a button, accelerate it into a full-on extreme G-force ride, depending on what else is happening in the network.

“One person hops in and wants a meandering tour? No problem,” muses Allington. “The next person hops in and wants to crank the dial to 11, we can go full thrill and spit their kidneys out their backside. It’s a great ride. It’s a good business in its own right.”

“Everyone in the amusement industry wants to be innovative,” says Allington. “They want to be first, they want to be creative, they want the new experience. So being untested and unproven? As long as you can show you’re safe, that’s not an issue, it’s gonna be a benefit. So now we’re validating our wheel performance, our throughput, our battery systems – all at a small, easily solvable scale – and bringing those learnings back to Whoosh. It lets us accelerate progress without sitting back and complaining that nobody wants the first one. Now we’ve got data, and data is king in this area.”

Whoosh

The first Whoosh transit system: Queenstown, New Zealand, 2026

Right now, the Whoosh team is working on scaling up to full-size prototypes in preparation for a fully, privately funded pilot project that’ll be formally announced soon, in the Remarkables Park district of the tourist mecca of Queenstown, nestled in picturesque mountains on New Zealand’s South island.

It’s a perfect setting, says Allington. “It’s geographically constrained between mountains and a lake. High tourism numbers, but a decent size local population as well. Very limited road network, nowhere to put new roads in. Pretty big traffic issues for the size of the city, it can take you a long time to get anywhere – but it’s small enough that it’s actually solvable.”

The team will announce the specifics in the coming weeks, and needs to get the design, the compliance side of things, and the supply chain all cobbled together quick smart, shooting for a public launch in 2026. It’ll be a cut-down version of a city-wide system, says Allington, but it’ll have all the elements. “It’ll be able to do everything we want to show off,” he says. “It’ll have merge and diverge points. It’ll have multiple stations – spiral stations as well as straight-through stations with elevated points, and a bit of a display space as well.”

Whoosh

And once a pilot loop’s up and running, the Whoosh system will be incredibly quick, cheap and easy to extend. “It’s completely modular, it’s a kit of parts,” says Allington. “You can add more vehicles, you can add additional cable spans and rails, you can just keep adding to it. It’s not like cities normally have to do with roads or train lines, forecasting what the demand might be in 40 years.”

In terms of cost, Allington says it absolutely slays ground transport options, where road infrastructure costs $10-20 million per kilometer, and light rail might run you up to $100 million per kilometer, the Whoosh infrastructure currently projects a cost around $5 million per kilometer.

Oh, and it’s not just for people; it’s just as easy for Whoosh to build a similarly sized cargo vehicle, allowing businesses to set up super-efficient ‘loading bay-to-loading bay’ freight operations linking to any part of the network. Cargo pods would slot in seamlessly with passenger pods, but could be de-prioritized in the autonomous routing system to ensure passengers enjoy non-stop service as network volumes increase.

So to wrap up, it’s an affordable, low-lift micro-transport solution that cities can implement relatively quickly at small scale, and then rapidly extend out to span an urban area. It eliminates geographical obstacles, and isn’t locked in with with existing road networks. It’s free from local emissions, and green to operate on renewable energy, and extremely efficient compared to other powered transport options. It’s also not terrible to look at, and should be quiet in operation.

Whoosh

For consumers, it’s a relatively quick and affordable way to get about, in comfort, in a personal cabin with exceptional views. It floats over the top of traffic. It waits for you, rather than you waiting for it, and it takes you from point to point safely and privately without stopping or changing lines.

It’s prototyped as an amusement ride, and coming very soon at urban scale, with private clients and cities worldwide getting on board. This New Zealand company has come up with one hell of a compelling invention that could genuinely move the needle on urban transport. Super impressive.

Allington says Whoosh is keen for public feedback at this stage. “We love asking questions,” he tells me, “like what have we missed? What have we got wrong? Why isn’t this going to work? Give us some feedback. Now’s the perfect time. We can change and modify it and make it better. We’re not precious!”

Whoosh

“And beyond that,” he says, “we just want people and cities to know that this is coming. Don’t make a silly choice now and find you’ve picked the wrong technology. It’s always good to know what’s coming in the future – and it’s coming fast. We’re not trying to replace the car, we’re not trying to be everything to everyone, but in terms of helping solve transportation issues, giving people better journeys, moving people safely around spaces, freeing districts back up… We know we’ve got a part to play.”

Sources: Whoosh, Holmes Solutions, Swyft Cities