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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Swyft Cities - An Autonomous Cable Car System
Swyft Cities has developed a revolutionary transit concept called Whoosh that combines the benefits of gondolas with autonomous vehicles to create a flexible, efficient transit solution for short urban trips.
• Not a traditional gondola but an autonomous vehicle system using overhead cables
• Vehicles operate independently, picking up passengers at ground level and traveling directly to destinations without intermediate stops
• Costs approximately $5-20 million per mile compared to billions for light rail
• Developed while solving mobility challenges for Google's corporate campuses
• Fills the transit gap between bus capacity (1,200 passengers/hour) and light rail (8,000+ passengers/hour)
• Perfect for 1-5 mile trips which represent 50-55% of all daily travel
• Modular design allows systems to start small (3-4 stations) and expand incrementally
• Can be constructed quickly with first operational systems expected by 2027
• Works best in commercial corridors, entertainment districts, and medium-density areas
• Enables development of walkable, mixed-use districts without car dependency
If you're interested in learning more about Swyft Cities and the Whoosh system, visit swyftcities.com or find them on social media platforms X, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Woosh, looks like a gondola. It is not a gondola. A gondola is a cable that goes back and forth, usually just between two points. The vehicles are pretty dumb. They grab on and just go back and forth all day. This is an autonomous vehicle system that happens to go across cables.
Speaker 1:So, yes, you have cables on poles stretching across an area of the city, but the vehicles aren't traveling along the same path. They're independent, they're autonomous. They pick you up, usually at ground level, take you up to the main level where the cables are, take you wherever you need to go across the cable so they can turn, they can switch, they can take different paths. You're going to go right where you're headed nonstop trip every time. And then it pulls off to the side, goes down to ground level, drops you off and now that vehicle is free to move somebody else. So it's, from an infrastructure side, very lightweight, the lowest cost way of adding capacity in a crowded area and from a user perspective, it's just a wonderful trip. You've got a view, you've got this non-stop travel. It's everything you could dream of, probably doors are closing dream of probably this episode.
Speaker 3:we meet with a special guest to talk about a revolutionary transit concept that might find its way into a city or suburb near you. Is it a gondola, an autonomous vehicle or something entirely new? Find out on this episode of Transit Tangents.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody and welcome to this episode of Transit Tangents. My name is Lewis and I'm Chris, and today we have a very special guest joining us today Gerald Poskey from Swift Cities. Chris and I found Swift Cities online. I think I was scrolling through Twitter one day and I saw the amazing animation of what looks like a gondola I know it's a little bit different, we'll get into the specifics of that later Kind of floating above the city and I was like, wow, this thing looks really cool.
Speaker 2:You know, one thing led to another. We ended up reaching out and we actually found out that you all at Swift Cities had been listening to some of our podcasts, which we're very thankful for. Really cool concept. And again, yeah, the thing that really drew me in the beginning was, yes, this thing looks such like a gondola, but yeah, the concept of it being able to go directly from point to point and essentially traveling between the different stations and going exactly where the user wants to go is pretty amazing. I'm curious. I know a little bit about your background, but do you want to share with us what made you come up with this idea? What were you working on? Where you were like this is going to be the solution to the problem that I'm currently facing.
Speaker 1:I think there were two starts to the story. The first start of the story happened a few miles from probably where you are now, at the UT undergraduate library. When I read about people making autonomous monorails, like this sort of on-demand vehicles, on a monorail setting, I fell in love with that and have dedicated my career, across multiple paths, to making that happen. But the real turning point came when I was in Google's real estate division. We were building out millions of square feet of office. I'm now adding in residential and mixed entertainment areas and open space to make these really incredible corporate campuses. And it turned out you can't do that if you just built it all for the car. We're in a suburban setting. We Google I'm no longer with Google, but we were in a suburban setting. It's an area where 90 something percent of the people drive and you just can't build that type of environment and build thousands and thousands of structured parking spaces to make it all happen. It just doesn't work.
Speaker 1:So we were given the challenge to go find something new, something that was out. There was the original thought. There's so many self-driving cars and flying cars that we assumed that we just go find the right new technology and we will solve our problems. And it turns out nobody is solving the problem of the short distance, one to five mile congestion problem. I think a lot of people are really hooked on the 20-mile commute. That's maybe 3% of daily travels. Billions of dollars are going to solve that 3% problem. In reality, 50% to 55% of all trips are in this little smaller district area type travel and nobody was touching it. So then we got permission to try something new and we sat there with goals of it needs to be cost effective, it needs to be environmentally sustainable, it needs to be very flexible, expandable, great for the user, needs to really attract people. And we just started with those basics, had a few different ideas and this one just soared to the top.
Speaker 3:Right now you've been talking with cities to try to get them interested. Where are you making headway in potentially deploying the Woosh system?
Speaker 1:Yeah, half of the people weS, as well as certain private sorry also in the public sector, mostly in the US, and the public sector and I would say the trends tend to be a place that has a little bit of an entertainment space. It could be a ski resort, could be a more urban entertainment area, and they want to move people around. They don't want to build as much parking, but they also need it to be a little bit special of a trip In every single case. They also then imagine a future phase. So I didn't talk about the expandability before, because it's not a traditional gondola with those two fixed endpoints. It's made more like Legos you can add on, you can subtract, you can expand, you can expand the system. So they're picturing it, starting small and then growing over time. So first it may be on their property and then they want to reach the train station, or then they want to reach hotels that are some one or two miles away and they want to make this tighter district network. It turns out the cities think the same way. Actually, a lot of them are fast-growing cities that are in a more sprawling environment and they're having a hard time figuring out how to retrofit transit. It's like, wow, what's going to be the right transit for us in our less dense land use?
Speaker 1:Or it's cities that have train stations that could be effective, but the actual end use is like a mile or two away from the train station is perspective, but the actual end use is like a mile or two away from the train station is um, I sometimes tell the story and you have a texas audience. I took uh dart from the airport down to downtown dallas and I'm familiar from that area and there's a university of dallas station like oh, that's cool, it's got a tower it'd be awesome to look at. Then you get to that station and realize I don't know where the university of dallas is from here, but it's not at this station. Station I realized I don't know where the University of Dallas is from here, but it's not at this station. Turns out it's about a mile away but it was. You know you got to get that last mile and sort of Texas weather, texas heat. You need something else to make those last mile connections.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I think Dallas is such an interesting example because, you know, while they do have some decent transit oriented development happening around some of their stations, once you get a certain radius away from that it turns into kind of sprawling suburbs very quickly that are currently very difficult to serve by transit. And something that's really unique about the Woosh system is that it can kind of solve some of the issues that buses can't in a lot of cases where a winding bus route through you know, a bunch of cul-de-sacs and whatnot through a neighborhood are difficult to do, whereas if you can, you know, implement this system into the right areas, feeding folks into those train stations, feeding folks into those other destinations that are more suburban. It feels like a perfect kind of complement to those existing systems, something I appreciate that you all kind of talk about in a lot of your online presences. Whatnot is that? And correct me if I'm wrong here, but you're not saying that this is like the solution to transit everywhere. But it's a piece of the puzzle, right?
Speaker 1:There is no the solution to transit. We are not it either. Yes, we are. We are the piece that fits if you think capacity-wise. Trains, I really feel like, need a good 8,000 to 10,000 passengers per hour to be effective. Buses it's about 1,200 passengers an hour is where you could really peek out a bus route. In most places in the US that's a huge gap between transit systems that are effective at 1,200 versus 8,000. We're in that middle range to fill that massive, massive gap of opportunity.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, I'm curious. I know that in Sugar Land, Texas is one spot that this has kind of been talked about. Are you able to talk about kind of where things are or how that project kind of came to be? I know, like you mentioned, we have a lot of folks. We're based here in Austin, Texas, but Sugar Land's not too far away, a suburb of Houston. I'm curious if you're able to share anything about that project.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, it's a problem that is. What they have is what we call a barrier problem. Sometimes that's a river, sometimes it's a railroad track, but in Texas it's often just a freeway and you can have development on four corners and it all looks dense, but you can't get from one corner to the other without a lot of hassle, basically without a car, and so that's the origin. They have a nice central sort of downtown community center area. They have some other pockets of density and there's just a lot of traffic everywhere. But there's a lot of traffic interconnecting and I really think there's a lot of averted. There's like trips that aren't happening.
Speaker 1:If you could just get from one to the other you could make the whole area more lively. So that's the problem they are looking to solve. They find us to be an effective solution and now they're in a very that's our most I'd say, most public sector client. So they're going through the traditional funding routes of checking for the different grant sources and such. So I like that system, I like what it can do Really and also bring people into. They've got some BRT type routes that go into Houston and that direction, so helping serve those routes would be ideal for us.
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Speaker 3:One thing that I'd be interested to hear. So Lewis and I, when we first became obsessed with gondolas, when we first started talking about this podcast, it started with a happy hour discussion where we spent a long amount of time talking about Austin specifically and how, if Project Connect, our current light rail initiative, didn't happen, we were like, oh, just replace it all with gondolas. Didn't happen, we were like, oh, just replace it all with gondolas.
Speaker 3:One of those reasons that we were worried about Project Connect is just the sheer cost. Do you have kind of an estimate on how you would compare the cost of deploying a system like Woosh in a metropolitan area versus what we see with light rail, which can cost billions of dollars per mile?
Speaker 1:Well, they're not apples to apples. I mean, that's number one. We're not trying to replace light rail. We're not going to serve your 25 mile route from downtown to Georgetown or wherever no, but what we look at are these pockets where our infrastructure cost is $5 million a mile. Adding in vehicles, adding in other things you're planning, other things you're planning. I think an early system is probably $20 million a mile for the first one or two. Everybody really has talked to us. It's like just give me three or four stations to start. We do have one client in the US who's likely to be one of the very first. That's doing 12, which is great, but most people want just that small, like a 40, 50, $60 million system. Let's prove that out and then we can start expanding from there, because the economies of scale it gets more cost effective as it grows. So getting that first one checked off, proven, tested out, is really how people are starting to think about it.
Speaker 1:And for comparison that $40, $50, $60 million in the transit world is not much, and that's when we have real estate clients, private sector clients. A parking garage is going to cost you $50 million, just to start. I think the most expensive one I've worked on is $386 million for a single parking structure. So this is small dollars, even in public sector, but it's also even small dollars in the real estate world.
Speaker 3:I think a good comparison in the urban setting is sort of again, I understand you're trying to connect sort of point to point service, getting to larger transit lines, but I think of like streetcars. In a lot of cases cities have deployed streetcars where they only move so many miles, you know, five miles of streetcar line and I feel like this is kind of could be a good alternative for cities if we're looking for a cost effective measure.
Speaker 2:I almost want to disagree with you on the street car a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I think. So we just left kansas city is why we're mentioning the street car and I, I, I get, I get the point you're trying to make, but I almost think, like, like this isn't gonna be something that's like replacing, like a fixed line service, and like I like in kansas city, like that is, that gets quite a bit of things, but to feed people into the street car, maybe more so I don't know Kansas City is a bad example because it's a good streetcar.
Speaker 2:A bad example, because it's so good.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but think about what we experienced in Dallas where we went from South Dallas into downtown. That's a use case where you're crossing a large river. Maybe the light rail wasn't the best solution.
Speaker 1:Whether you're facing you're hitting a problem where transit brains struggle with figuring out where to put us, because our whole lives have been trained on. It's a, it's a line, it's a bus line, it's a train line and the idea of something that operates either as loops or even as a spine, with spurs, buying with Spurs. It's a little bit of a. It's not a one-to-one replacement for any of those things, which is both a tremendous advantage but also a little bit of a curse when you're trying to make apples to apples comparison or just fit it into a brain that's always been trying to figure out where to draw the lines.
Speaker 2:Totally Again. I think to me, like I love the concept of, I really do think that this can help fill a void in the end of the line connecting into the suburbs, like more difficult to fulfill areas where, like, traditional transit is kind of lacking. I'm curious, though so whoosh is just the the name of this one piece of Swift cities? I'm curious, why? Why the name Swift cities? And is there kind of something else you're going for with this whole thing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, when we were at Google and it was originally Project Swift, we had those goals we tried to figure out there was a solution. We had several companies under engaged to try to find the right solution. A company called home solutions out of New Zealand came up with this switchable cable-based system, and so Woosh is their name for the cable-based system. The hardware, Swift Cities is here to put in the software. That's the magic behind the scenes to run it all and keep the vehicles getting where you need to be, when you need to be there. And also we are there because in doing implementation, we're not here to be Swift Transit Company and just put in the system.
Speaker 1:The fact of why Google needed this is there's a maximum density you can build out. When you have a car-based world, there's only so many cars. When you start to add in something like this, you can now make a different style of development, you can make a different density of the city. That's basically impossible to cost effectively do today. So we are Swift Cities, not just to deliver the transportation but to enable these like cool six to eight to 12 story type density where you still have your coffee shops, you're not overwhelmed by skyscrapers, you still have open space, you still have the world of Paris, of barcelona, of those places that you want to go to on vacation. You can get that by having the right mix of transportation and land use, and that's a mix that just it's hardly it's rare for it to be cost effective today, because the transportation is just so hard to get right absolutely no, I, uh, I I can't stop.
Speaker 2:I said to chris just before you came on, I was like I can't stop thinking about this. I know, I know you're I'm not how not sure how familiar with austin you are, but I would love to see this as a uh, a connector from the mueller neighborhood and connecting into the red line, which currently the red line goes so close, but not close enough to really be able to walk to connecting mueller to ACC, to that red line station, to a few other areas and they're just like. I mean, there are a million places in my head. I'm like, wow, this would be such a cool piece to the puzzle to really solve some transit problems.
Speaker 1:Well, I think Austin and a number of just so many of our, of our sprawling cities that have been built really without being planned for transit. The phrase transit oriented development means the transit is there. How do we put development around it? In most of those cities, it's more like the development is already there. How do we bring transit to it? So I would call us development-oriented transit because, unfortunately, the ship has sailed where the development's going to be. Now. How do we provide a transit system that will work with reality, not with what we wish would have happened, you know, 30 years ago, 50 years ago, absolutely.
Speaker 3:I'm curious have you had any direct conversations with people in some of these communities that have expressed interest in a solution like this, and what's some of the feedback you've gotten, even from people that aren't necessarily on the government side or the planning side, but actual community members?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's been. We've been 100% responsive. We haven't been going out and knocking on doors. We've been responding to people who have a problem and so by the time they come to us, there's been a bit of a problem identified. And when you talk to the people, I think the number one concern is around where is that going to go? Aesthetics do I want that? And so.
Speaker 1:I'll take Dallas as an example where we use them. We took a map and you draw red lines over all the parts of the map that are single family homes and tree line streets and all the places you don't want to go. You don't want this kind of thing and I'll say that took off 85 percent of the city, but that remaining 15% is 70% of the economic activity in the city of Dallas. So we're not trying to go everywhere. In fact, most places we're not needed. But then you look at the places where we do fit, where people aren't going to screen that you're going over my swimming pool, that's fine. There's a tremendous amount of opportunity. That's the places where we want to be. That's the places you need to move people. So I think as long as we come out and tell people we're not going over your backyard, it's a true.
Speaker 1:NIMBY. I mean and I would be the first to agree with them. Not in my backyard, but there's plenty of places to go across the city.
Speaker 2:that is not in anyone's backyard, absolutely. I've got one more question for you and then I don't. Chris, if you've got another one, go for it. Uh, can you walk us through? Like, how are you envisioning the rider experience? Like, kind of, you know, you walk up to a station, how do you tell it where to go? Like just, you know what, what are the? And I know you don't, you know it's not, we don't have it yet but uh, what is the? The interface, the system that you feel will kind of the end user will be able to experience while they're riding this?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I will say that most of our early customers are imagining it being free at their site, their ski resort, their development, and so you just get on and push a button. But the long-term what you'd be picturing is the Uber app. You're telling it where you're going, you don't need to be looking at a route or a schedule. The stations are generally at great, so you just go up like a bus stop. You're going to wait for it there on a sidewalk. You step into a vehicle, tap your phone to enter the vehicle. That tells it the station you've already picked out, so you know you're in the right vehicle and then at that point you're done. You sit back, it takes you up into the air, it does whatever turns and switches it needs to do, and you're not going to stop again until you get to your destination. And so you don't have to worry about missing your stop or falling asleep. It only stops when you're at your destination.
Speaker 2:It feels similar to like the Waymo. I don't know if you've had it. We've had Waymo here in Austin for a while but that's to me how the Waymos kind of operate. You fill it in ahead of time, you press a button, the doors open and then you're just kind of getting whisked away where you're going.
Speaker 3:But you're stuck in traffic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Waymo without the traffic.
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah, I think the only thing I can think of in the US that I haven't really personally experienced, but the only thing I can think of that's similar to this, would be something like the PRT system in Morgantown, west Virginia, where you have a car that I think that will take you point to point destinations. It's obviously a pretty small system, but you know, they're the small cars. I don't think they're on rail but they run through a track. That's the only thing that I can really think of that's similar. Are there any other types of systems that even come close to this?
Speaker 1:No, not I mean there's. There's a similar system at Heathrow airport and one in Abu Dhabi, but uh, nothing that's like this. There's no word port in the transportation lexicon, so uh, whooshes is it?
Speaker 2:Awesome, uh, I guess. Uh, is there, is there anything we haven't covered that you'd like to get to, that you've got coming up, or anything like that.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean listening to some of the past episodes, the tie in between land use and transportation. I think just we just have to beat that drum that the two are intricately tied and it's hard but not impossible to kind of undo I'm going to say mistakes. It depends on your point of view. But I think many, many, many cities are to the point where they say, ah, traffic is far worse and it's far worse than was expected, Way worse than when I moved here. You know, everybody says that, whether you've moved here two years ago or 50 years ago, traffic is so much worse than when I moved here is what everyone says and it's just going to keep trending that way.
Speaker 1:I think all of our cities are growing and some are growing exponentially fast. So what do you do? I think I've already given you the line of development oriented transit. But I think everybody who's out there Project Connect being a good example, Everybody who's out there, Project Connect being a good example, Great, you can put in transit. The easiest place to put rail is on old freight lines, except they're not really where anybody ever wanted to live is along your freight line. So the rail is kind of in the wrong place. But building it from scratch, as you said, is now billions of dollars to take over, right of way. So finding that mix is important, but I just go back and say it is a land use problem as much as it's a transportation problem.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I couldn't agree more, and I mean, chris and I've said this a whole bunch of times to each other. But, like we, when we started this, we didn't think we would talk about housing nearly as much as we do in land use. And it's like I have learned so much about land use and zoning and all of this stuff in the last year or so, since a year and a half, since we kind of been doing this so well. Thank you so much for taking the time. I'm curious where can folks learn more about this? You know social media website, that sort of thing website, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:Sure Online, it's Swift Cities, s-w-y-f-t, and your usual places your internet, your Instagram, your LinkedIn, and then very soon, and we're recording this. One thing I didn't emphasize was how quickly we can build. So we have several clients that are lining up for 2027 operations we're recording this in early 25. Yeah, this is full operations, from planning and design but not construction started to operations in 27, with even the first vehicles moving in 2026. So, in 13 months, from construction start to having vehicles moving. So very, very soon. Soon we're going to have a couple of announcements on the two leading locations, uh, and then we look forward to you being able to come to a site near you or maybe not so near you and uh, and actually take a ride on a system to get a, get that sense of what it's really like, because it's. I think a lot of people just feel like we're fairy tale, good idea, hypothetical, and don't realize, uh, how close it is to reality. So hopefully we'll be on the show. Maybe we can all go together to visit one of these places absolutely.
Speaker 3:We'd love that love the gifts of a firsthand experience absolutely well.
Speaker 2:Uh, gerald, thank you so much for taking the time. We really appreciate it For folks who are watching. If you have questions, thoughts about this episode, please leave a comment down below. We'll. Maybe we'll take some of them. We'll make sure Gerald gets them and we can maybe get you some answers. We'd love to be able to, in the future, be able to come and ride one of these things soon. So, thank you so much for taking the time For folks watching.
Speaker 2:If you have not liked this video already, please consider doing so. It helps us out quite a bit. You can also subscribe or you can support the show directly via our patreon. We also have a brand new merch store, so if you want to support the show that way, that is another way to do it. Uh, gerald, if you, if you don't mind playing along with us here, we always end the show by saying uh, enjoy the rest of your transit tensions tuesday. If you don't mind joining us for the transit tensions tuesday, um, awesome, so, uh, thank you all so much for watching and enjoy the rest of your transit tangents that's gonna be a funny one with zoom, but that's okay.