Concept art for Bandung Skybridge project from developer PT Aditya Dharmaputra Persada’s website
Bandung may soon be the showcase for a new era in Indonesian transportation infrastructure. In addition to plans to build a high-speed train connecting Indonesia’s third largest city to Jakarta, Paris van Java is also supposedly getting an aerial gondola system (which resembles a ski-lift or elevated cable car) that could move as many as 4,800 people per hour between two of the city’s busiest shopping areas.
Although plans for “Bandung Skybridge” have been in discussion since at least 2010, Bandung’s urban planners have now given the go-ahead to project developer PT Aditya Dharmaputra Persada to start construction.
“We just need to begin. Once people see it, they will say why don’t we use it all over Indonesia?” said Sandjaya Susilo, the company’s president director, as quoted by Bloomberg News.
The system will stretch 875-meters between two shopping malls, reducing what would be a 30 minute slog through Bandung’s traffic choked streets to a 4-minute cruise in the sky.
Bandung’s popular Mayor Ridwan Kamil (who is also a trained architect) voiced his approval of the project, saying the technology had come a long way and could now support larger cabins that hold eight people.
Proponents of the aerial gondola system say it has lower building and operational costs than projects such as a monorail, while also requiring a smaller land footprint.
Critics says that the technology is unproven for use in high-density urban environments and that the system’s carrying capacity is not enough to make a significant dent on the traffic situation in a city like Bandung.
But Ridwan hopes to eventually expand the aerial cable system into something far more extensive, envisioning a network covering over 10km of the city, which would make it the most complex aerial gondola system in the world. Currently such systems are used on a limited basis in Bolivia’s La Paz, London, and Portland, Oregon.
