Can Swyft Move the Urban Mobility Needle?
Gondolas aren't open streets. But they're still a gamechanger.
If I asked every subscriber of this newsletter to submit a list of the four or five things that would make up their ideal urbanist city, I’d likely get several hundred lists featuring the same few things: open streets, bike lanes, mixed-use zoning, etc.
That’s because we all have a shared general concept of what peak city-building looks like.
But due to political realities and other roadblocks, that’s often not possible. This leaves us with a choice: We either build around the roadblocks, or we join John Mayer and wait on the world to change.
Swyft Cities has taken the former approach. The mobility startup was the winner of the 2022 TechCrunch: Mobility pitch contest, and promises better mobility outcomes through a series of modular, autonomous gondola cars suspended above street level.
The solution was created by former Google team members, built for corporate campuses and other environments (universities, airports, etc.) where traveling even short distances can be difficult for one reason or another. But this mindset and approach is also what gives the technology such potential to grow.
In 2021, more than half of all car trips were less than three miles, and 60 percent of all trips were under five miles. While gondolas alone won’t eliminate the majority of those trips, they provide a critical alternative particularly as municipalities and organizations across the country battle bus driver shortages.
In much of the United States, the road to undo the damage of the last 50 years is a long one. It will require a transitional urbanism approach that seeks to make due with the present state of so many poorly-built places while we do the slow work of making change. Targets and values shouldn’t change when you’re cleaning up or responding to a disaster, but the tactics and tools are often different than when you’re building from scratch.
Swyft’s modular and flexible approach make me particularly bullish on its ability to be a critical tool in this transitionary period, if not a permanent fixture in a multimodal future. And that’s why they’re one of the companies I’m most excited to watch in 2023.