Bartholet
Bartholet, headquartered in Switzerland, is another of the four big leaders in the world of traditional gondolas and ropeways. They specialize in state-of-the-art gondola systems for tourism and urban applications.
In December 2023, Bartholet launched the first installation of it’s Ropetaxi technology. As of the time of this update, over 50k riders have used the Ropetaxi in the Flims Laax Falera ski resort. The installation is called the “FlemXpress“ - but it’s *ahem* no joke - and has been showcasing the unique peronalized gondola system with the hopes of implementing it in an urban environment.
So, what is Ropetaxi and what does it do? The technology uses autonomous motors at the top of it’s standard gondola cabins to navigate through what’s called the clamping area - the part of the passenger loading areas where traditional gondola systems can unclip from the moving cable. Those electronic motors on top (which they call eMotion drives) let the cabins drive along rails to alternate cableways. It allows the cabins to skip gondola stations, offering direct trips on a ski resort hill. Not only does this improve the experience for passengers, it also means that there’s a way to remove some of the cabins from the cableway when not in use - boosting energy efficiency. It’s a pretty big gamechanger.
Roland Bartholet (CEO of Bartholet Maschinenbau AG) highlights Ropetaxi:
“With a conventional gondola lift, around 90% of the cabins travel empty. With FlemXpress, at least one person will be present in the cabin and the gondola goes wherever you want it to. That makes our gondola lift much more sustainable than it has been possible up until now.”
Look at Bartholet’s promotional video for Ropetaxi:
It’s a big innovation and update to tradional gondolas. But, it might be awhile before the technology gets to a place where it could start to realize the type of experience and throughput needed for an urban gondola network. This video from Swiss Ropeway Channel shows it taking about 4 minutes to move from the boarding area to the main cableway. That’s still worth it at a ski resort to be able to have a custom trip, however, it’s hard to see that working in a city just yet.
Is it a supergondola?
It’s certainly one of the bigger innovations for the gondola industry, and Bartholet isn’t keeping it a secret that they want to move the technology into the urban gondola transportation space. But, the current public version of Ropetaxi isn’t going to realize the big vision of an urban supergondola transportation system. It’s hard to see how Ropetaxi (in it’s currently revealed version) could deliver the kind of speed and flexibility needed to complete personalized trips in an existing urban landscape. At it’s core, it’s still needs to spin giant bull wheels to move the cable for any significant trip.
But, Bartholet is probably already secretly working in the background to take this technology to the next level - and they’re pretty far ahead of the major four gondola companies - at least publicly. So we have a lot of optimism.
When will it happen?
Ropetaxi is running now. But, as stated above, it’s not yet at the state to be a supergondola. We can only speculate when the next major update from Bartholet will come.