A New Zealand City Could Soon Have a Sky-High Solution for Congestion

As cities around the world grapple with congestion and seek to lower emissions, one New Zealand-based startup is looking upward for solutions. Next year, Whoosh will begin construction on a gondola-like ride-hailing network in a 370-acre area of tourism hot spot Queenstown—the first of its kind.

Whoosh resembles a ski lift, descending for passenger pickup, but operates differently. While gondolas transport lifts by moving the entire cableway, each Whoosh cabin uses an electric motor to propel itself along a stationary network of cables and rails at an average speed of about 26 m.p.h. 

Powering the cabins themselves means the guideway can be “really simple, low-cost infrastructure,” Whoosh CEO Chris Allington says. The pods have a mechanism that allows them to switch from cables to suspended rails at speed, meaning that, unlike a gondola, Whoosh can take flexible routes from pickup to drop-off without stopping.

Whoosh says its vehicles, expected to be up and running as part of the pilot scheme by 2027, could help reduce travel times and are twice as efficient as the most economical electric cars. Users will be able to hail rides on demand using an app or ticket-vending machines.

Queenstown is the ideal testing ground “because it’s got horrendous traffic,” but it’s at a manageable scale, Allington says. If the network were expanded across the city, it would have the capacity to take about “20% of vehicles off the road,” he says.

Read more: How Cities Are Clamping Down on Traffic to Help Fight Emissions

Each cabin will be complete with a stabilization system that smooths rides in windy conditions, and smart-glass windows can frost over to stop riders from peering into homes as they glide past, Allington says. While providers will ultimately set the cost for riders, Allington says that he expects it to be more expensive than mass transit but cheaper than an Uber. 

Allington says the cabins are more energy efficient than other vehicles because, by using a dedicated guideway, they avoid energy--wasting actions like braking or idling in traffic. Whoosh says it uses roughly one-sixth the energy of a U.S. bus or rail system. A one-hour ride uses “about the same amount of energy as having a 10-minute shower,” Allington says. And the infrastructure the pods glide across has roughly a fifth of the embodied carbon—the total emissions associated with materials and construction—of ground-level rail networks, Whoosh says.

Of course, the scheme remains untested, and many a futuristic transport idea has fizzled in implementation. But the company already has its sights set on the U.S. Five North Texas cities—Dallas, Plano, Arlington, Frisco, and DeSoto—are being considered for potential sites of Whoosh’s first U.S. installation, says its U.S. partner and Google spin-off, Swyft Cities, which is in talks with public- and private-sector customers. “It’s places that are fast-growing, typically were built around the auto, and now, they realize they’re stuck,” says Swyft Cities CEO Jeral Poskey. Part of what makes Whoosh a compelling option, he says, is that it can be “retrofitted into cities,” with its modular infrastructure, allowing it to start small and grow over time.

Read More: From Scooters to Microtransit, Cities Are Embracing Alternatives to Short Car Trips

“Turns out, none of the high-tech innovations that fly or drive themselves or go through tunnels are really designed to solve the problem that most of the world is facing,” Poskey says. Subways cater to high-density centers, while cars, including autonomous vehicles, suit low-density urban sprawl. Whoosh, which targets trips of 1 to 5 miles, offers a solution for those in the middle ground, he says. “We find that people want to live in medium-density areas,” Poskey says, but “they just aren’t well supported by either automobiles or mass transit.”