Oakland International Airport line Tram BART - Doppelmayr Cable Liner

The Coleseum-Oakland International Airport line is made by DCC Doppelmayr Cable Car. It is a very nice, quiet, and smooth ride.

Doppelmayr Cable Liner

[lohphat]

This project was a long time coming. When BART was launched in 1972 they avoided a direct connect to the airport terminals for both OAK and SFO airports. You needed a slow bus to transfer to the airport.

Now BART goes direct to SFO and there's this new shuttle to the terminals. Much better.

[buddyclem]

What a fascinating, modern-looking, and overly complicated people mover! I really like the way light passes through the track, or guideway, or whatever it's called. More elevated rail should be open air like that. Fantastic video. The editing was as slick as a video game intro.

[BayAreaTransitNews]

This is some truly great footage! Nice work!

[Highbury]

3.50 is interesting where you show the tram mechanism changing from one cable to the other for the return trip.

[uberlanpereira]

3:50 entendi o que você quis dizer! Eu pensava que fosse um cabo percorrendo toda a via, mas há dois! Um corre no sentido de ida enquanto o outro corre no sentido de volta.

[IainHendry]

I really like Doppelmayr for ropeways (aerial tramways, gondolas, detachables, and other lifts), but I have to admit, I've never really understood how they manage to sell these things.  There's one at the Toronto airport and it's awful (clunky and slow).  In Toronto, I imagine they won the job because of the climate/snow, but here, I scratch my head why they went with the insane complexity of the cable-hauled system over something like Siemens VAL or Bombardier INNOVIA in California where it's warm.  The grip-exchange station just seems so unnecessary - and that cable swap mechanism in the station, whaaaat!

As always, great video though Luke.  :)

[peterojas]

I remember riding on San Francisco BART in the 1980s. It wasn't from an airport.

[archostest]

Респект электромагнитному транспорту Окленда! А увеличить скорость на 10 -- 15 км/ч есть перспектива?.. Чтобы не уступать в скорости городскому наземному автотранспорту?..

[tjejojyj]

I read that one of the reasons for the $484 million cost was extra engineering required to make it earthquake proof. It looks very nice but I really don't see the benefit-to-cost in these kind of systems. It's a little faster and more reliable than the bus it replaced.
(Great vid. nonetheless. It seems super smooth and very, very quiet. Better than anything else I've seen.)

Edit: one thing I forgot to mention. Why does each vehicle set need four power collectors? Is that really simpler than running power across the articulations?

[erichuxel]

Automated with windshield wipers on the front?

[Seawiz]

Oakland got played lol. That looks like a ride at a county fair.

[thomaspinto]

An idiotic system. 😒😣😖 Rubber tires have to be replaced and inspected regularly. High-maintenance. Cannot use off-the-shelf light rail. Switches regularly malfunction. Reminds me of the line from Butch Cassidy: " I got morons on my team". Custom vehicles incompatable with any transit vehicle on the planet. The designers had to be on recreational drugs. And the system is going broke. Unnecessary automation . And they still need an employee on board for safety purposes.