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Things are really looking up in Medellín. Nestled in the Aburra Valley of the Andes Mountains, this Colombian city of 2.6 million people is home to the world’s first urban cable car system designed for mass public transportation. Every day, 220,000 passengers are hoisted up into the air by 8.5 miles of cables and transported across the urban and rural areas of the city.

Medellín’s Metrocable has helped lift one of the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods out of crime and segregation and helped economic activity soar. But 30 years ago, Medellín had a very different and dangerous claim to fame. Watch the story from Urban Mobility Explained (UMX) by EIT Urban Mobility.

In the 1990s, the nefarious activities of Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel had earned Medellín the title of the “most dangerous city in the world.” City officials were often powerless in the face of such widespread crime. “The city was doomed to fail at that time,” says Carlos Cadena, Associate Professor at EAFIT University. Even when the Medellín Cartel collapsed at the end of 1993, crime rates remained high, with new gangs filling the power vacuum.

That’s why it took nothing short of a miracle in 1995 to open the city’s metro system, which continues to be the only functioning metro system in the country. However, as anyone who lives up high on a mountain can tell you, railways only get you so far. Cadena points out, “One of the particularities is that Medellin has flat lands and a river in the middle, but we also have hillsides around the city, presenting immense challenges for urban planning and transport planning as well.”

Those hillsides are where the city’s poorest, most vulnerable residents flocked to during the rapid industrialization of the previous decades and formed informal settlements, often referred to as slums. Migrants took refuge in the relative safety of the neighborhood up on high, but they were cut off from the rest of the city. It was a nearly two-hour commute to the city center, where there was access to better jobs and services.

In 1998, city officials proposed a metro expansion that would take the entire system to new heights: aerial cable cars. In addition to being the first public transit of its kind, the project focused on the neighborhoods with the lowest quality of life index in the city.

Six years later, in 2004, Medellín inaugurated line K of the Metrocable, a 1.25-mile gondola route that rises over 1,300 feet from the north end of the city’s main metro line A to the Santo Domingo Savio neighborhood in the northeast corner of the city. Overnight, that two-hour commute was cut to 30 minutes.

Moreover, the move slashed what could have been a cost-prohibitive pricing structure for Santo Domingo residents. “What is very special about our system,” explains Cadena, “is that it’s fully integrated, not only physically but also from the tariff perspective. People need not pay for additional transfer, but rather it’s all built into a single ticket.” That’s huge for a population living on the poverty line, where minimum wage is around $1.60 U.S. dollars an hour, who can now travel across the city with 3,700 Colombian pesos, or around $0.95 U.S. dollars.

The Metrocable helped people recognize the value of time and money, but also the value of themselves as citizens. Local leader Yuricza Ovalle says, “The Metrocable made us realize that we also deserve to improve our quality of life. Many people thought that concrete was not ‘development’ per se. But everything must have balance, both social development as well as investment in terms of infrastructure.” Indeed, the construction of the cable cars helped bolster the local economy. Studies from 2014 show that Metrocable users received twice the number of employment opportunities.

Soon enough, the impact went beyond residents. “The Metrocable began generating such strong tourism,” Ovalle continues, “that people started fixing the facades of their houses to welcome visitors. They began organising themselves, setting up empanada and fast food stands. The Metrocable became an impressive territorial transformation.”

That transformation continues to this day, with five additional Metrocable lines in Medellín, which all connect to the same public transit system. 2021 saw the inauguration of the newest line, Line P, which stands for the Picacho, the mountain in the northwestern part of the city. “What’s very special about Line P,” Cadena shares, “is that it’s probably the most technologically advanced line that we have.” Its 130 gondolas run on a silent, energy-efficient motor, seat 12 people, and transport up to 4,000 people per hour, almost twice as much as the next most-recent cable car line.

Perhaps even more impressive is that all Metrocable stations are equipped with solar panels and also run on renewable energy from the city’s electric grid, which is mostly generated through hydroelectric plants throughout the country. Cadena reports that these measures have reduced around 650,000 tons of carbon dioxide, adding, “we’re not even considering issues related to congestion, road safety, stress, time, and convenience, which are obviously much improved using public transport in a city like Medellin.”

Medellín’s Metrocable has redefined how the city moves and who gets to move within it — bridging once-isolated neighborhoods and transforming lives. Cadena reminds us: “The story has to do with our successes in policy innovation, transport planning coherence, as well as social inclusion and the work of communities. Cities around the world have to work in more climate-resilient, socially inclusive, and long-term processes around their urban development.”

Watch this story and others on Urban Mobility Explained (UMX)’s YouTube channel, and take UMX’s free self-paced online course, Fundamentals of Public Transport: key components for success, to brush up on your skills in urban mobility planning. As Medellín can tell you, the sky’s the limit.

This post was originally published on Next City.