Swyft Cities

The 6th fastest-growing city in the US, City of Sugar Land, TX is a true trailblazer in transportation innovation. We're excited and proud to be partnering with this fast-growing Houston suburb to explore bringing Whoosh®transportation technology. Together, we're conducting an engineering schematic study to look at potential locations and routes. "City leadership has told us to be bold in what we do with transportation,” says Melanie Beaman, city transportation & mobility manage. “We’re told to be trailblazers and not be afraid to take risks.” Sugar Land has only 4% of its land remaining to build on, necessitating better transportation that also enables better land use. Whoosh is a great fit for Sugar Land to improve its transit and road networks. “Being that last-mile distributor between bus and rail, that’s where we fit in the set of transportation choices that are out there,” says Jeral Poskey, CEO of Swyft Cities. “The whole reason why you get traffic is everyone is using the same mode [of transportation] at the same time, in the same space,” Beaman says. “If you can move just a small percentage of people to other modes, it frees up the traffic flow.”  https://lnkd.in/ePwkjYva

We were able to be part of a great article by Smithsonian Institution Magazine on how aerial gondolas/cable cars are being successfully used as transit in Portland, Mexico City, La Paz, Medellin and several other cities around the world (we would have mentioned NYC too! 😊 ). "The era of the aerial cable car is underway. 🚠 Just because cable cars have historically been associated with tourism doesn’t mean they can’t be used for more practical purposes." We couldn't agree more. As cities get built out and find themselves with less room to build or expand transit, we're already seeing that cities are looking for alternatives that can not only add mobility but serve as effective first/last-mile feeders to help make existing transit more effective. And bringing Whoosh® transportation technology that resembles conventional gondolas/cable cars but in reality brings significant new capabilities including on-demand, autonomous, point-to-point networkable travel, the potential for elevated mobility to transform cities is greater than ever. We believe that we're the right solution at the right time. Our current discussions with cities are both are manyfold and productive. https://lnkd.in/gwVNWhmp

And we think 2025 is going to be even bigger. Stay tuned! 📺

Great to see people get excited when our CEO Jeral Poskey shares our vision for building better, more sustainable cities. Transportation determines urban form. Cities are the biggest source of greenhouse gases, and enabling better choices for where we live, how we live & how we move around can be the start of a cleaner future. Thanks to Symbium and Leila Banijamali for helping us spread the vision #transportation #sustainablecities

An Amazing Year of Progress. Plus: a Must-Read on the Future of Transit

Looking for a break this holiday season? Check out this fun interactive online game. Every car takes up 12 sq meters of space. See what it looks like when we transform cities for people and not cars.

This is absolutely brilliant. And certainly beats the other "augmented reality game" called driving through rush hour traffic! 🚗

One of the best explanations of how transit & density work together. "Transit follows density": Phil Veasley, PE, CNU-A. I learned this first-hand during Project Swyft at Google. We couldn't plan to build the medium-density mixed-use campuses we wanted without great transit accessibility. Conversely, transit doesn't work without sufficient density. Density needs transit, and transit can accelerate density. The difficulty is that cities & transit are often planned in different silos. Cities can grow so quickly that they realize too late they've grown to the point that they need transit. By this point, so much land is taken up by car infrastructure (roads, parking) that there is little room left to fit in transit. Conversely, transit is sometimes built on a "if you build it, they will come" basis. Build a transit line and wait for transit-oriented development to hopefully in-fill around the stations. Better coordinated planning can ensure that density and transit develop and grow in sync. We can lose sight that better transit, while necessary, isn't the singular goal. The ultimate goal is: how can we build Better Cities. Urban planning, placemaking and transit work best when they're all working together. https://lnkd.in/gXetfhug

Walkable exurbs are very often the economic powerhouses of their metro regions. But we often see one major limiting factor for additional growth: lack of transit. Many (although not all) exurbs grew up without transit, and now that they have sufficient density & could support (and need) transit, it's somewhere often between difficult & impossible to "retrofit" transit in. The cities are already too built out by the time they come to this realization. An example is Sugar Land, a Houston suburb that's the 6th fastest growing US city. Not connected to Houston METRO, but now only 6% of land is left for development. Transit needs to be part of growth planning, not an afterthought as exurbs scramble to keep up with their breakneck growth.

Can cities be built to be car-free? Culdesac is doing just that with a new community near Tempe. A bold experiment in human-centric development puts density, transit access, and walkability first. The city long ago realized it needed to grow up and not out, and it has focused on creative ways to densify without cars, because there simply isn't much space for more. "When it works, it really works." #urbanplanning #transportation https://lnkd.in/dMQfCqbU