Michael McDaniel & Jared Ficklin are designers at frog design, a firm in Austin, TX responsible for a multitude of products, from ovens to compost systems to apps to breast scanners. At this year’s TEDxAustin, the pair introduced their plan to re-invent urban mass transit through flying cars: high-flying gondolas running via cables stretched over cities — a little bit like ski lifts.
How would this crazy idea work? From their talk:
What if I told you — in the whole area of mass transit, there is one industry that competes on the basis of how many people they can carry per hour without a schedule? Further, they do it moving only 1 to 6 people at a time.
I’m talking about the ski industry: the Zillertal ski area in Austria — they hold the record for lift capacity. They have a system of 174 chairs and gondolas that can move 298,000 people per hour. So if you ran that on a 24-hour cycle, that would be 74 million people a day,and if they weren’t skiing down, and you were carrying them down, that’d be 14 million people per day. That’s a lot of people. And to put those max capacity numbers into perspective, the New York City subway only has to carry 5.3 million people on a given weekday…
Now we’re not exactly saying chairlifts are the best solution for urban transit — there would be a lot of dropped iPhones — but if you were looking for inspiration on how to move a lot of people without a schedule, the ski industry is an excellent place to start. And one innovation you’re going to find there is called the high-speed detachable gondola.
Now these are essentially 4-6 person cars that cruise along at about 12 to 15 MPH attached to a cable supported by towers. For all practical purposes, they are flying cars. So they’re called “detachable” because as they come in through a station, they actually let go of the cable — release from the cable — and slow down to just below walking speed (about 2 MPH) as they glide through the station. Now this allows people to easily load and unload off the cars across a flat, level platform. Then the cars essentially accelerate back up and to line speed and reattach to the cable.Now, the operation is continuous — it doesn’t stop — so you catch the first available car as it drifts through the station. Some of the other advantages of it being a detachable car is that, essentially, we can add and remove vehicles to the line in real time. Now this really eases maintenance, cleaning, and also helps us save energy by matching peak demand…All of this together forms a new form of mass transit for cities called urban cable.
The Wire is our vision for a user-centered, practical mass transit system for cities like Austin...The Wire can cover the exact same routes as [urban light rail], but it can go places surface rail simply can’t go.…Imagine flying into Austin, and catching The Wire at the airport. The stop could be located right on top of the attached parking garage, so you would simply walk and roll your luggage right on the first available car and fly out. There’s not waiting and no schedules because it’s constantly in motion…there’s no stoplights in the air; these things run constantly…The ability to put [stations] in the air means they can sit on top of parking garages or they could be over the top of intersections…You could have one that had a rooftop pocket park, or one integrated with retail.
With all these possibilities, it creates new opportunities for public / private partnerships. You could even envision a stop integrated into the lower floors of an existing high-rise building. This means more ways to share costs. It encourages smart growth. It allows us to build community around commuting.
For more information on urban cable and The Wire, watch Michael and Jared’s entire talk, “A mass transport system in the sky” from TEDxAustin 2013.
Why is Super Mario Bros. so popular? Like a lot of video games, the reason for its popularity is that it really plays off of a sense of adventure and curiosity.
If you hit on that question mark, a gold coin emerges. If you know where to look in that cloud, there’s a special reward, and if you have the guts and the curiosity to think about what’s in that green pipe, a whole new exciting world emerges.
…Similarly, New York City, where I live, is a city that has quite a few distractions, and excitement, and things to explore at street-level. And many New Yorkers really think about their streetscape as the city, and they think about the underground as a dark, nasty, smelly place that you go to — maybe — to go on the subway. But it’s not really a space of any value. There’s not really anything to explore.
…There’s actually 13 acres of unused spaces underneath New York City…[and the Lowline] is an effort to build the first underground park [underneath the city].
—From Dan Barasch’s TEDxEastHampton talk, “Imagining the Lowline,” about his and his partner’s plan to transform a long-abandoned trolley station beneath Delancey Street in Manhattan into a dreamy retreat from the noise, litter, and clamor of the city above. Watch Dan’s entire talk here »
(Photos, clockwise from top: Flickr user Jack Siah; Flickr user jcoterhals; Flickr user MichaelTapp; Flickr user clevercupcakes)
Photos: The “Imagining the Lowline” exhibit, and the proposed site of the Lowline, Williamsburg Trolley Terminal. Credit: Delancey Underground
In 2011, friends James Ramsey and Dan Barasch decided they would do something yet to ever been done: make an underground park in New York City.
Hence, the Lowline was born — a plan to transform a long-abandoned trolley station beneath Delancey Street in Manhattan into a dreamy retreat from the noise, litter, and clamor of the city above.
A year later, at TEDxEastHampton on Long Island, Dan explained the impetus behind the project and the pair’s journey to making a mini Lowline prototype in Manhattan’s Lower East Side:
“The region that’s bounded by the East Village, Lower East Side, and Chinatown, known as Community Board District 3, [is] one of the least green areas of New York City,” Dan says in his talk, “which, in turn, is one of the least green cities among other cities of comparable density.
“…It’s incredibly dense: [the Lower East Side] is an incredibly dense place. There’s a lot of people crammed into a very, very tight space…It is full of concrete and not very green.
How is it possible to think about creating a green space in a crowded city in a particularly crowded corner of New York City like this? We think, actually, that the solution is with technology.”
What technology you might ask? Primarily, something Dan and James call remote skylights. These lights, designed by James and a collaborator named Edward Jacobs, are composed of outdoor sunlight-capturing dishes, which accumulate and then transmit sunlight underground through a system of specially-designed fiber optic cables. Light is then projected onto a giant canopy of hexagonal tiles that line the Lowline’s ceiling, an installation that spreads the light throughout the subterranean park. To maximize sunlight collection, the disks are equipped with GPS tracking systems that follow the path of the sun. 
A diagram of the remote skyline system. Source: Inhabitat
“Even underground,” a Core77 article on the technology explains, “the light will carry the necessary wavelengths to support photosynthesis for growing plants, trees and grasses underground. And because the cables block the harmful UV rays that cause sunburn, you can leave the SPF-45 at home.”
Dan and James hope that this system will provide the means necessary to make the Lowline (and the Lower East Side) a place people want to be. “If anyone’s ever been down to the Delancey Street area,” he says in his talk, “it’s very clear that it’s really quite miserable walking around Delancey Street at the street level. It was never designed for humans — it was designed really as a multi-car expressway…
“[The Lowline] would potentially provide a different kind of passageway and a different walkway and a different kind of experience for people to actually engage [with] and experience the city. “
After raising over $150,000 from a Kickstarter campaign, Dan and James created a faux Lowline in an old warehouse in the Lower East Side — an exhibit they called “Imagining the Lowline.” Above, you can see pictures of the exhibit and of the abandoned trolley station that Dan and James hope the Lowline will someday inhabit.
For more on the story behind the Lowline, watch
Dan Barasch’s entire TEDxEastHampton talk, “Imagining the Lowline.”
Eat this TEDx Talk: 7 talks on food and its future
From the molecular underpinnings behind good wine and cheese pairings to engineering medicine into milk. From eating bugs to simply eating local. These talks encourage you think more carefully about what’s on the end of your fork — and might even impact your next diet.
Cooking with chemestry: Francois Chartier at TEDxUdeM
What makes certain foods pair so well? Why do other combinations fall short? Francois Chartier uses molecular chemistry to investigate the dominant ingredients in our favorite foods — uncovering some surprisingly tasty blends. (French with English subtitles.) (Filmed at TEDxUdeM.)
Eat less meat, more bugs: Florence Dunkel at TEDxBozeman
Insects are high in protein and — if prepared well — delicious. And according to Florence Dunkel, their low-cost, ecological production means we need to incorporate them into our diets if we want a stable future for food security. (Filmed at TEDxBozeman.)
The brain cafe: Gary Wenk at TEDxColumbus
What’s the best diet for your brain? Gary Wenk sheds light on some of the controversial, and often contradictory, studies linking eating habits to health, mood and behavior. (Filmed at TEDxColumbus.)
Medicine from milk: Harry Meade at TEDxBoston
Medicines can involve complex, intricately folded proteins that are expensive to produce with traditional methods. Harry Meade shares his ingenious work-around —breeding goats that can generate these medicinal proteins in their milk. (Filmed at TEDxBoston.)
Delicious, healthy hospital food: Joshna Maharaj at TEDxToronto
If hospitals want people to get better, why do they serve unhealthy food? Chef Joshna Maharaj wants hospitals to serve tasty, sustainable and fresh food. (Filmed at TEDxToronto.)
The local future of food: Rob Spiro at TEDxSoMa
Rob Spiro exposes some of the systemic problems with large scale grocery chains and calls on us to change our food culture to focus on locally farmed foods. (Filmed at TEDxSoMa.)
Urban farming: Roman Gaus at TEDxZurich
Roman Gaus never thought he’d be a farmer. Now part of an urban farming collective in his city of Zurich, Switzerland, he harvests his own fish and produce on a regular basis. In this talk at TEDxZurich, he explains aquaponics: self-contained agriculture that relies on a symbiotic relationship between plants and fish — the fish provide nutrients for plants while the plants filter water for fish — all within portable containers made from recycled materials. (Filmed at TEDxZurich.)
Stephen Ritz: A teacher growing green in the South Bronx
Featured on TED.com in July, the frenetic, exuberant Stephen Ritz explains how teaching a group of high-risk kids in the South Bronx to garnden spun off into a student run movement to green New York City. (Filmed at TEDxManhattan.)
