Rio’s Defunct Gondola Tells a Tale of Transit Style Over Substance

Visitors landing at Rio de Janeiro’s Galeão International Airport are greeted by a spectacular skyline that includes two gondolas. One is for tourists headed to the top of the iconic Sugarloaf Mountain. The other is for public transit, connecting one of the city’s sprawling favelas to the rest of the city. Only one of them works today—and it’s not the one that served Rio’s poorer residents.

Several years after closing the gondola that served the Alemão favela, the state of Rio de Janeiro has kept up hope that it would restart service. In May, the state said it would reopen the line by the end of the year. But with three months left in 2019, there’s little sign of action. “They keep saying on TV that it’s going to come back, but it never does. We have hope that it will come back one day, God willing, because it’s very useful,” says 43-year-old Alemão resident Rosangela Coutinho Cardoso. The state’s financial woes may have been the trigger that ended the service, but this gondola was always likely to leave its riders hanging.

Complexo do Alemão is a group of favelas (the name Brazilians have given to low-income, unplanned and unregulated neighborhoods) that houses about 70,000 residents in the north of Rio. Lacking in critical infrastructure and public services, it has long been one of the city’s most violent areas, home to conflict between drug factions and lethal interventions from police. Things took a turn for the better in the years leading up to the 2016 Olympics. Along with efforts to clean up its bay and bolster its airport, the city and the state of Rio de Janeiro launched “pacifying unit police forces” to regain control of the favelas. Alemão was “pacified” in 2010. And in 2011, Rio’s gondola, also called a cable car, was inaugurated in the favela. (The tourist network dates to 1912.) Six stations connected the hilly, hard to access neighborhood’s residents to Rio’s main train network.

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The arrival of the first formal public transit was supposed to transform the favela. Residents would no longer have to rely on the preexisting informal system, using mototaxis and minivans. They wouldn’t have to convince taxi and ride-hail drivers to enter the neighborhood. “They don’t come up because they’re scared,” says Cardoso.

She loved the cable car, whose fares were far cheaper than those to ride the city’s metro. It made it faster and cheaper to send kids to school. It gave adults access to the bigger and less expensive supermarkets down the hill. It doubled as a tourist attraction that created jobs for locals who opened small shops and bars to welcome curious passersby with money to spend. The stations housed much needed post offices, health clinics, and social services.

What seemed a new era for Alemão didn’t last. In September 2016, just a month after the Olympics concluded, the consortium in charge of operating the cable car shut it down, citing a lack of funds for maintenance. The company is missing payments from the state of Rio, which is mired in a recession. The public services within the stations were shut down as security in Alemão deteriorated. Many of the shops and bars have closed for lack of customers. It’s not just Alemão: A gondola serving the Providência favela has stopped running for similar reasons.

Originally made for carting skiers to mountain tops, gondolas have proved a compelling public transit option in hilly cities where urban sprawl tends to take place informally and in hard-to-access areas. Medellín, Colombia; Caracas, Venezuela; La Paz, Bolivia; Bogota, Colombia; and Mexico City have all found these setups cheaper and faster to build than other transit options, with less disruption and the need to displace fewer people. This way of improving transit service has helped enrich neighborhoods and curb violence, most famously in Medellín.

Rio’s favelas seemed a great candidate to follow suit. But building public transit in vulnerable areas comes with particular challenges, and must be approached thoughtfully. Medellín ran a careful consultation process with residents prior to building its cable car to make sure the community would be on board. This wasn’t the case in Rio de Janeiro, residents say.

“There was never any dialogue,” says Carlos Coutinho, a resident of Alemão and a member of Papo Reto, a community journalism collective. “If they had called residents and asked them, What do you want? I have a hospital, a school and a cable car. Which one do you want? I think the majority wouldn’t have gone for a cable car.” He and other critics say the state designed a system that catered more to its international image than Alemão’s needs.

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While many appreciated the service, the cable car was never as useful as it could have been. Designers had failed to understand mobility patterns through the favela, residents say, and the system didn’t reach the most isolated residents. In its last year of operation, the cable attracted 9,000 daily riders on average, less than one-third of its capacity.

All urban cable car lines are politicized—especially because the speed of construction means one can be proposed and finished within an election cycle—yet Alemão’s gondola appears to have been designed less for the benefit of its users than that of those in power. “The idea was to show the rest of the world that the city had institutional stability, that it was dealing with its problems,” says Sérgio Veloso, who teaches international relations at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. “The end of the cable car doesn’t indicate that we don’t have enough resources, but that putting resources there is no longer strategic,” he explains. (Meanwhile, Eduardo Paes, the former Rio mayor who pushed for its construction, is being investigated for fraud and bribery linked to the cable car and other pre-Olympics infrastructure projects.)

Similar projects elsewhere have been much more successful—so much so that cities of the global North, like London, have begun building their own. But Rio’s bitter experience with the cable car serves as a reminder that transportation projects used for political goals can fall short. “A mobility project comes with a very big transformative power. If it’s used for mobility, then it’s a positive power. But if it’s used to other ends,” Veloso says, “then it’s got a very negative transformative power.” That’s true in wealthy cities, too, which are just as vulnerable to building infrastructure that prioritizes style over substance. But failure stings more in places where locals have little to begin with.

In a sad and perhaps fitting twist, Alemão’s now vacant cable car stations have been repurposed by police as high levels of violence have returned to the favela. A library housed within the last station has been turned into a makeshift garage for damaged police vehicles. Other buildings have become watchtowers of sorts during clashes with drug traffickers. “They shoot from the top,” Coutinho says. “An armored truck drives up on the main street, leaves a sniper here, the sniper climbs on top of the cable car and he stays there to see if he can hit a trafficker.”

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