favela cable cars

Rio de Janeiro has opened a cable car line that makes 5 stops up the hill into the Complexo do Alemao collection of favelas in the city's Zona Norte. Dow Jones Newswires reports that the $134 million system can transport 3,000 people every hour (though this may not be the exact truth: each of the system's 152 cable cars would need to make two trips per hour at the full capacity of ten people to move 3,000 folks up and down the hill.) "We're already looking at an extension of the Alemao cable car, as well as putting cable cars into Rocinha and Mangueira," the head of the state-run company that built the system told the news service.

While it's great that the government is willing to make an investment in mass transit, the article doesn't report what residents must pay to use the cable car system, nor what its hours are, nor how many people were forced to move to make way for its installation.