Could aerial transportation like the Disney Skyliner arrive in Disneyland by 2028? If city planners have their way, the answer could be yes. Anaheim is exploring construction of an aerial gondola network to move tourists from Disneyland and California Adventure to Angel Stadium & Honda Center, and Anaheim Convention Center.
The City of Anaheim is considering aerial gondola routes that would connect the Anaheim Resort District and the Platinum Triangle. This system would start with a station near the Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center (ARTIC), which connects to the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner and Metrolink trains that serve routes from San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and beyond.
You’re probably familiar with the Anaheim Resort District; it’s Disneyland plus the nearby off-site walking distance hotels. The Platinum Triangle is just beyond that, around the Honda Center, Angel Stadium, and the Grove of Anaheim. Urban redevelopment is adding high density, mixed-use, retail & restaurant, and residential projects to replace rougher and older areas, making this an up-and-coming area of Anaheim. It’s trendy and has some lovely spaces–if we were going to live in Anaheim, it’d be here.
Based on a public records request to the City of Anaheim, the Anaheim Investigator obtained internal documents revealing that Anaheim city planners are exploring the option of constructing an aerial gondola system to connect the Platinum Triangle with the Anaheim Resort District in preparation for the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, which will have events hosted in Anaheim.
While the exact aerial gondola route has yet to be finalized, the primary interest is an alignment running east-west along Katella Avenue featuring six or seven stops (see below). At Harbor Boulevard, the line would split into two branches, one ending near the eastern entrances of Disneyland and Disney California Adventure, and the other over at the Anaheim Convention Center.
The proposed gondola system would be built by Swyft Cities, a crowdfunded high-tech startup based in Northern California. The company’s CEO and co-founders have already discussed their gondola concept with key stakeholders such as Disney and OCVibe, the latter of which is a $4-billion mixed-use district being developed on 100-acres of land surrounding the Honda Center.
Swyft Cities boasted to Anaheim city planners that the meeting OCVibe went very well, and that the development is supportive of the proposal. A floor plan created by OCVibe demonstrates they’re on board with the gondolas, and willing to offer space for a maintenance facility and even an on-site gondola station, all within walking distance of the ARTIC.
The public records request revealed no such communications with the Walt Disney Company or Swyft Cities boasting about any success in meetings with Disney leadership. That’s not necessarily conclusive of anything (we’ll circle back to this in the commentary), but nevertheless worth mentioning.
During conversations with Swyft Cities, city planners were told that gondola support towers could be customized to resemble the Los Angeles Angels’ iconic “Big A” logo.
Renderings reinforce this, with some concept art showing the stylized “Angels” tower and others with the “standard single” tower. This art offers an aerial idea of how the gondola might look real on Katella Avenue facing the Anaheim Convention Center and Disney California Adventure.
However, building a gondola system along Katella Avenue might be problematic. Many palm trees would have to be removed to make way for the gondola support towers, which could generate opposition from residents and hoteliers in the Anaheim Resort District.
This is to say nothing of the costs and construction. Swyft Cities made a presentation last December indicating that their 35-pod gondola system could be implemented at an estimated cost of roughly $33 to $37 million. This equated to just under $11 million per mile, subject to variation based on final design and alignment considerations.
That’s a steal of a deal for mass transit, especially in California. City planners noted that it was substantially cheaper than the $70 million rapid bus transit system planned by the Anaheim Transportation Network to accommodate the expected influx of tourists during the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.
However, the Swyft Cities estimate had ballooned dramatically by this July. In another presentation, the start-up reported the gondola system would now cost $125.7 million, or $33 million per mile. It is not known why these numbers tripled.
Currently, no source of funding has been identified to pay for the Swyft Cities gondola system. That’s hardly an insurmountable obstacle, as there are public-private partnerships, grants, and the state-funded California Infrastructure & Economic Development Bank that could all cover the costs, even if it ends up costing $126 million.
The bigger obstacle is that Swyft Cities has never delivered a fully operational gondola system. Given that, there are understandable fears about the start-up’s ability to to execute on-time and on-budget. If there’s one common “theme” of California transit projects, it’s that they waste taxpayer money; significant cost overruns, multi-year delays, and reductions in scale & scope are all par for the course.
Anaheim isn’t the only city in Orange County exploring at aerial gondolas. The City of Irvine is working closely with Swyft Cities on developing one that will transport visitors around the Great Park, a recreational area that’s 1,347 acres and larger than San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The aforementioned city records request revealed that Anaheim city planners have contacted their Irvine counterparts for due diligence on Swyft Cities.
Mike Lyster, the city’s chief communications officer, also told The Anaheim Investigator that gondolas aren’t the only option being explored to connect the Platinum Triangle and Anaheim Resort District: “We continue to look at transportation technology from a half-dozen or more different providers. It would be incorrect to suggest we’re focused on a single one.”
“In the months ahead, we could issue a potential request for information from many different types of transit tech companies out there, including gondola, trackless, autonomous, trams and others,” Lyster added. “We may need a consultant to help with this process … But nothing has been decided, and nothing is scheduled at this point.”
It’s also worth mentioning that the DisneylandForward pitch included a variety of themed transportation options for somewhere within the resort, with the Disney Skyliner gondola as an example. However, it’s also worth mentioning that the examples in DisneylandForward were pure fantasy, and included a lot of eye-catching international projects in order to garner public support. It’s safe to say that Disney does not plan on cloning Fantasy Springs from Tokyo DisneySea, and yet, that was also in the deck.
There’s no reason to believe there’s any appetite to build any novel forms of transportation within Disneyland Resort, unless it ends up being a cheaper option for transporting guests around property. Whether that means from Mickey & Friends Toy Story Lot, or a future development. The fact that this was not mentioned with the Eastern Gateway announcement–which clearly shows a flyover walkway–suggests to me it’s not in the cards anytime soon.
Also worth mentioning is that we’ve been down this road (flight path?) many, many times before. The Disneyland Resort Specific Plan No. 92-1 (“DRSP”) that was adopted in 1993 stated that PeopleMovers were planned to transport guests from the (future) parking structures to the Esplanade. Has anyone here taken a PeopleMover from Pixar Pals to the parks?!
This is to say nothing of the streetcar saga. That started in 2012, as a lower-cost alternative to a monorail, automated people mover, maglev, and other options. After several years of back and forth on that, the Anaheim City Council passed a resolution in 2017 opposing plans to revive a controversial $300 million streetcar project between the city’s transit hub and the city’s resort district. That effort was driven by an empowered Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait, who gained a strong majority as a result of the November 2016 election.
Fast forward to 2019, and Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu quietly resurrected the controversial Anaheim Rapid Connection streetcar project that had been killed by Tait in 2017. At the time, there had been detailed discussions about transit options to connect the Platinum Triangle with the Anaheim Resort, with streetcars emerging as the favorite.
Around that same time in 2019, Mayor Sidhu established a Transit Options Task Force to explore new transit technologies. In so doing, he directed attention to Walt Disney World in Florida, where the Skyliner was about to open and connect resort hotels to theme parks.
Subsequent to that, city staff during the Sidhu administration worked with consultants on a feasibility study for projects modeled after the Disney Skyliner and the Georgetown-Rossyln Gondola project in Washington, D.C. This continued even through the COVID years, and it’s not clear what killed that–my guess is that it had something to do with the scandal that eventually landed Sidhu in the slammer.
Our Commentary
Where to even start with this one?!
Anaheim wants to build an aerial gondola system (or maybe something else?) using a start-up that has never built an aerial gondola system for the price of $11 to $33 million per mile (perhaps more?) from the ARTIC to Disneyland and ACC (or maybe a different route) all by the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, once they figure out funding. Oh, and there are potentially concerns about the removal of palm trees. Do I have all that right?
HAHAHAHAHAHA.
If the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics got delayed until 2038, I’d still be skeptical that timeline. As it stands, there’s a 00.0000% chance that an aerial gondola project can be built in Anaheim ahead of the 2028 LA Olympics.
You read that correctly–there’s no missing number there. This has a zero percent chance of happening in that timeframe. This isn’t Asia; it’s Anaheim, California. Honestly, the only reason I’m covering this at all is because I’ve seen way too much excitement about this gondola “project.” A car tunnel in Orlando has better chances of happening by 2028, at 0.001%.
There isn’t a chance on earth that this type of project is possible, in California of all places, on that timeline. They haven’t even settled on anything or figured out funding, both of which need to be finalized before environmental review and bids go out, there’s a period of public comment, and myriad stakeholders come out of the woodwork to involve themselves and slow this project to a snail’s pace.
And speaking of which, Anaheim better hope there are no rare snails along the route, otherwise “environmentalists” will spend tens of millions of dollars to protect those little fellas, and ensure cars reign supreme in SoCal!
Just for reference, the Disney Skyliner took over two years just from the point when permits were publicly filed. And that was within the (then) Reedy Creek Improvement District and State of Florida, where regulatory hurdles are nothing like California.
I would hazard a guess that Disney had mulled gondola systems for years there, and was already two years further into the process when those permits were filed than Anaheim is today. And that was a collaboration with Doppelmayr, which actually has experience and expertise in aerial gondolas, not some unproven startup that has never deployed a gondola system.
Look, I love California. But I’d also like to think of myself as a realist, and there’s absolutely no way that a 3-year timeline for this is reasonable. And that would be true even assuming Anaheim had concrete plans and wasn’t still in the exploratory phase.
This state is not conducive to getting things done, and there are way too many opportunities during the drawn-out process for “environmental” activists, competing developers, NIMBYs, and others to block or significantly slow (to the point that they’re effectively killed by cost overruns and delays) development.
Everything gets bogged down in bureaucracy; it’s not a state where infrastructure projects happen anymore. This should come as a surprise to approximately no one, with California’s high-speed rail project garnering nationwide headlines as a massive boondoggle. Thankfully, an aerial gondola system in Anaheim shouldn’t be as difficult or expensive to get off the ground, but it does face some similar challenges.
I also love public transportation. But I’m also realistic about that, recognizing that this is the United States and there’s only the capital (political and monetary) for so many of these projects. Is a connection from the ARTIC to Disneyland really all that important? The idea is that locals and tourists could use these to connect from San Diego and Los Angeles, maybe even LAX!
But the immediate problem is ridership, with Metrolink and Amtrak consistently underperforming and ARTIC seeing far less volume than originally projected. This could theoretically change once other LA ’28 infrastructure projects wrap up, but I’m skeptical. The options between LAX and Anaheim still are not efficient, even once all of that’s done.
I would love to be wrong and for this gondola project to be built quickly. Eventually, I do think something along these lines will happen, but it’ll need to be a public-private partnership with Disney on board and, ideally, an experienced company helming the project as opposed to an unproven start-up. This is one of those ideas that sounds great on paper, but the devil is in the details, and those are (charitably) suboptimal.
This gondola proposal will probably die quietly once it becomes abundantly clear that it’s an impossibility by the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Honestly, that’s probably for the best. Let Irvine (a city more suited to expeditious development) be the guinea pig and figure it out first. If it goes well there, revisit the idea in another decade or two as Disney looks to actually expand in a manner consistent with DisneylandForward.
Planning a Southern California vacation? For park admission deals, read Tips for Saving Money on Disneyland Tickets. Learn about on-site and off-site hotels in our Anaheim Hotel Reviews & Rankings. For where to eat, check out our Disneyland Restaurant Reviews. For unique ideas of things that’ll improve your trip, check out What to Pack for Disney. For comprehensive advice, consult our Disneyland Vacation Planning Guide. Finally, for guides beyond Disney, check out our Southern California Itineraries for day trips to Los Angeles, Laguna Beach, and many other SoCal cities!
YOUR THOUGHTS
What do you think about Anaheim exploring an aerial gondola system to connect Disneyland Resort, ARTIC, and Anaheim Convention Center? Chances it’ll be built by 2028? Think it’ll eventually happen? Excited and optimistic about this? Think this lays the groundwork for the bigger-picture DLR expansion plans and growth throughout the City of Anaheim? Do you agree or disagree with our assessment? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
