The Kamloops Gondola - A Case for Urban Ropeway Infrastructure

McArthur Island, Southeast Corner

The McArthur Island station sits on significant underdeveloped surface parking at the southeastern corner of the island. Within a short walk, riders can access the McArthur Island Sport and Event Centre, home to a 250-seat sports lounge, a 20-seat meeting room, three ice rinks, a skate park, Norbrock Stadium (1,500 seats), nine soccer pitches, disc golf, mini golf, and lawn bowling. This is the venue at the heart of Kamloops' identity as Tournament Capital of Canada.

Kamloops hosts over 100 tournaments and sporting events annually, drawing approximately 30,000 out-of-town participants each year. Tournament tourism contributed to a record $316 million in direct visitor spending in 2024, according to Tourism Kamloops' economic impact report by Larose Research & Strategy. McArthur Island is at the centre of that activity.

The riverfront location has strong existing connections to the Thompson River and offers significant room for commercial expansion, hotels, residential, retail, or conference space. The City Rivers Trail runs through the island and is popular with walkers, runners, and cyclists. The station is approximately 10 minutes from Kamloops Airport.

TRU, Lot NT

This site is already identified on Google Maps as "TRU Viewpoint" and draws dozens of visitors nightly to what is arguably Kamloops' best unobstructed view of the city and the Thompson River valley. That organic draw is not a coincidence, it is a preview of the development potential here.

TRU enrols nearly 30,000 students across all programmes, with approximately 18,000 on-campus and credit students. The university has over 2,100 employees. Parking is a well-documented problem: TRU's own website acknowledges that parking "can be a challenge" and confirms that permits do not guarantee a spot, allocation is first-come, first-served, with premium and reserved spaces distributed by lottery. Annual permit costs run from $250 to $1,475. Local media has covered the issue extensively for years.

For the university community, the Gondola is not an amenity, it is a solution to a real daily problem, on a campus that sits 5–6 kilometres from downtown on elevated terrain above the river.

The slope of the TRU site makes underground parking here efficient and cost-effective, requiring minimal internal circulation ramps. Unlike the nearby silt bluff formations, this is some of the best geotechnical land TRU controls, and the TRU Residence and Conference Centre was already developed immediately adjacent.

Above the site, amongst rocky terrain, sits an abandoned disc golf course, ideal ground for an adventure park or sky park in a setting unlike anything else in the Interior. The site also connects to the underutilised TRU Connector trail through Kenna Cartwright Park, leading to a bluff overview and the site of the historic Kamloops gondola that operated during the First World War.

Kenna Cartwright, Aberdeen Multiplex

The Build Kamloops arena project is proceeding with a significant build-out of new arenas and sporting facilities. The site sits immediately adjacent to all of Kamloops' major highway connections, the Trans-Canada, Highway 5, and Highway 97, making it the most accessible point in the city for visitors arriving by vehicle.

The location is close to the majority of Kamloops' hotel stock, readily connectable by shuttle or existing transit. It has direct hiking and biking connections into Kenna Cartwright Park and sits near the Pineview Mountain Bike trail network. Plans also exist for more than 3,000 new housing units in this area over the coming decades.

This station serves as the effective base of the alignment, the highest elevation point, providing access to the amenities being developed at the other two stations while also acting as the gateway from Kamloops' largest concentration of accommodation.

The Gondola covers the full McArthur Island to Aberdeen route in approximately 9–11 minutes. The individual legs are estimated as follows:

Journey time comparisons are estimates based on mapping data and are subject to verification.

For a family with kids playing five tournament games over a weekend, the difference between a 20-minute drive with parking at each end and a 9-minute gondola ride is not marginal. It changes how the weekend feels, and it changes the likelihood they return.

One of the most underappreciated advantages of gondola systems over conventional transit is the relationship between capacity and headway. A bus or LRT line must accumulate passengers before it can move them. A gondola is always moving.

Cabins circulate continuously on the loop. A new cabin arrives at every station every 30 to 90 seconds, depending on the system configuration. At peak capacity, a standard monocable detachable gondola can move up to 3,600 passengers per hour per direction, the equivalent of more than 50 buses per hour, a service level simply not achievable on steep urban terrain.

Because gondola operation is so staff-efficient, it is also inexpensive to run early mornings and late nights, which is precisely when conferences end, tournament evenings wind down, and university students are travelling home.

The McArthur Island station is directly adjacent to Kamloops' highway connections and within easy reach of the city's hotel stock. The gondola's tourism proposition is straightforward: it offers a visual reason to convert a Trans-Canada highway stop into a half-day experience, and a half-day into an overnight stay.

The Malahat SkyWalk on Vancouver Island provides a useful benchmark. Opened in July 2021 at a construction cost of $17 million, the attraction recorded over 800,000 visits through early 2025, approximately 200,000 to 230,000 per year, at an adult ticket price of $38. It won the 2022 BC Tourism and Hospitality Innovation Award.

A one-way gondola ride takes 9–11 minutes. Add a photo stop at the TRU viewpoint, a 45-minute walk around McArthur Island's gardens and river trail, or time at an adventure park at the TRU station, and a Day Ticket becomes a genuine 90-minute to 2-hour experience. With premium single-day ticket pricing, this is the highest per-rider revenue source in the model.

Kamloops hosts over 100 tournaments and events annually. With conference, event, and sports facilities concentrated at each gondola station, the Weekend Pass directly amplifies Kamloops' existing Tournament Capital identity.

Consider the typical tournament family: staying in Aberdeen, with five games at McArthur Island over a long weekend, needing to get back and forth multiple times per day. The current reality is a 15–18-minute drive with the challenge of parking at both ends. The gondola alternative is a 9-minute ride, departing constantly, with no parking required.

A 2–5 day pass priced below the full day-ticket rate but above a transit fare captures this market efficiently, and does so year-round. Tournament season in Kamloops is not confined to summer. Curling, hockey, basketball, and indoor sports keep the calendar full through winter, precisely when tourism gondola models are at their weakest.

The Season Ticket is the revenue layer that distinguishes the Kamloops model from Squamish and Vernon. It is also the layer most likely to grow over time.

For North Shore residents, the Gondola provides car-free access to Kenna Cartwright Nature Park, currently inaccessible without a vehicle from most of the North Shore. For Aberdeen families, it replaces the 15-minute-each-way drive to McArthur Island with a 3-minute walk to the gondola station. For TRU students and faculty, it provides a reliable, affordable alternative to Kamloops' notoriously overcrowded and expensive campus parking.

The Sea to Sky Gondola in Squamish offers a partial parallel: despite being primarily marketed as a tourism attraction, 50% of its annual pass holders are local residents, who use the gondola for hiking, trail running, and summit access. In Kamloops, with transit-use demand from TRU's 18,000 on-campus students, the local ridership potential goes significantly further.

Whether through an arrangement with BC Transit, TRU, or the City of Kamloops, the Season Ticket provides year-round baseline revenue that tourism models alone cannot guarantee. It utilises the gondola most heavily at the times tourist use is lowest, evenings, winter months, weekday mornings, flattening the seasonal revenue curve.

Bikes

Kamloops is one of the world's leading mountain biking destinations. A 2025 economic impact study by Larose Research & Strategy found 104,000 rider days per season, with approximately 40,000 from out-of-town visitors. Total economic impact across the Thompson-Nicola region is $18 million annually. Spending by visiting riders has tripled over the past decade.

The Gondola changes the geometry of biking in Kamloops in a practical and appealing way. Most commuters face a 400-metre vertical ascent to ride to work or school. With the Gondola handling the climb, almost every bike trip becomes predominantly downhill for the duration, making bicycle commuting genuinely accessible to a far larger share of the population than currently use it.

Bike, scooter, and rollerblade rentals at the McArthur Island station would also put the Tranquille Market commercial district five minutes away, connecting to the Rivers Trail for a car-free route of more than 7 kilometres along the river.

Gondolas consume approximately 0.1 kWh per passenger-kilometre, placing them among the most energy-efficient forms of motorised passenger transport ever designed. The BC grid is among the cleanest in North America, with the majority of electricity generated from hydroelectric sources. A Kamloops Gondola powered by BC Hydro electricity would have a lifecycle emissions profile well below any diesel or electric bus alternative.

The emissions conversation around vehicles often focuses exclusively on tailpipe output. But approximately 50% of a vehicle's total emissions come from non-tailpipe sources: tire wear, brake dust, and the manufacturing and disposal of the vehicle itself. This is not addressed by the shift to electric vehicles.

Every vehicle trip that the Gondola replaces removes these emissions entirely. If just 20% of TRU's daily on-campus population, approximately 4,000 people, shifted to gondola access for their campus commute, the reduction in vehicle trips on the Sahali corridor would be measurable in both emissions and road wear.

The electrical demand of a gondola system is modest relative to its capacity output. The Kamloops site benefits from existing BC Hydro transmission infrastructure along the corridor. With appropriate planning, a portion of the operational load could be supplied renewably from on-site solar on the station roofs, a viable option given Kamloops' position in BC's desert rain shadow, with among the highest annual sunshine hours in the province.

The TRU station site already hosts the TRU Residence and Conference Centre immediately adjacent. The Gondola extends the reach of that facility dramatically, connecting it directly to the McArthur Island Sport and Event Centre, and to the Aberdeen Multiplex hotel corridor, without requiring delegates to get in a car.

A Nordic Spa at this location, looking out over the Thompson River valley from TRU's elevated terrain, would be among the most compelling wellness settings in the province. CBRE's feasibility work confirms the business case for Kamloops. The gondola access enhances it further.

The TRU viewpoint site has development potential for boutique hotel, luxury residential, or both. The combination of views, pedestrian orientation, and gondola connectivity creates conditions for the kind of amenity-rich, lower-parking development that works at Sun Peaks and Whistler, but without those markets' seasonal limitations, given Kamloops' year-round climate.

Kamloops, like most cities, struggles to develop new cultural and nightlife districts due to NIMBYism and the planning complexity of inserting new uses into established neighbourhoods. The gondola sidesteps this problem by creating new development nodes at locations that are adjacent to, but not within, existing residential areas.

Both the TRU station and the McArthur Island station sit at points of extraordinary natural amenity: the best view in the city, and direct access to the Thompson River respectively. These are the conditions that drive restaurant, gallery, music venue, and hospitality investment in cities around the world. Kamloops has both, and currently has almost no cultural or hospitality infrastructure at either location.

Spas, restaurants, galleries, and music venues, all with terraces overlooking the river and the valley, connected in minutes to each other and to the city's hotels by an inexpensive, always-running gondola.

The station areas are well suited to small-lot, high-density, low-rise residential development aimed at students, young professionals, and single retirees. Low parking requirements, high amenity, and gondola connectivity create conditions for the kind of micro-suite and shared accommodation that TRU's student population, and Kamloops' broader young professional demographic, currently lacks in walkable, well-connected locations.

The Sea to Sky Gondola opened in 2014 at a capital cost of $22 million and now attracts approximately 500,000 visitors per year, more than double its original projection. Adult tickets are currently priced at $71.95 to $76.95 CAD. Notably, 50% of annual pass holders are local residents who use the gondola for hiking, running, and recreation throughout the year. The gondola has become a year-round community asset, not just a tourist attraction.

The Okanagan Gondola broke ground in July 2025 on a 285-acre site near Kalamalka Lake, with a Phase 1 investment of $50 million. The project is projected to create 200 jobs and generate $25 million in tax revenues and $100 million in tourism spending over five years. The three-station gondola rises 1,600 feet and is accompanied by zip lines, an alpine coaster, mountain biking, a summit restaurant, and an amphitheatre. The Kamloops model has a stronger multi-user rationale and a more central urban alignment.

The TransLink-led Burnaby Mountain Gondola proposes a 2.7-kilometre route from Production Way–University SkyTrain Station to SFU, carrying up to 3,000 passengers per hour with a 6-minute journey time. The estimated cost is $210 million, reflecting the complexity of navigating an established urban neighbourhood and engaging with four Indigenous Nations. The project has been named TransLink's top rapid transit priority but remains unfunded, with implementation now expected at the end of the decade at the earliest. The Kamloops alignment, with its predominantly public land ownership, avoids the majority of this complexity.

The Portland Aerial Tram carries approximately 9,000 to 10,000 riders on weekdays, with 85% affiliated with OHSU and 15% from the general public and tourist population. Annual ridership averages over 2 million trips. The tram opened in 2007 at a cost of $57 million and has an annual operating cost of approximately $1.7 million USD. Its operating hours reflect its transit-first mandate, yet even with limited weekend hours, it carries over 15% tourist and recreational riders. A system with longer hours and a multi-attraction alignment would draw more.

Yes. Kamloops has over 127,000 people in its Census Metropolitan Area and a well-established identity as a regional hub for sports, education, and tourism. Kamloops was one of BC's fastest-growing cities over the past decade. The Okanagan Gondola, now under construction near Vernon, demonstrates that comparable BC Interior cities are actively developing this type of infrastructure. The Kamloops alignment is materially simpler to execute than either the Squamish or SFU models.

The land at the three station sites has a combined development value estimated at over $100 million based on conservative comparable valuations for mid-rise mixed-use sites in Kamloops. A P3 structure in which a developer builds the ropeway in exchange for land development rights is a well-established model, similar to what has been used at Sun Peaks and Whistler. The City and TRU do not need to commit direct capital.

The three-user model provides resilience against this risk. The Season Ticket (transit and local recreation use) and the Weekend Pass (conferences and tournaments) both generate revenue independently of day-tripper tourism. The Portland Aerial Tram demonstrates that a gondola built primarily for commuter use still attracts 15% tourist ridership. The Kamloops model's tourist upside is additional to a transit and events base.

The alignment crosses predominantly public and undeveloped land. The tower footprint for a standard gondola is small, typically less than 4 square metres per tower, and the overhead passage of the cable does not require land clearance below it. Environmental assessment will be required, but the footprint is significantly smaller than any road-based alternative providing equivalent capacity.

Yes. An arrangement with BC Transit and/or TRU, similar to how TRU's UPASS programme operates, would allow Season Ticket passes to be integrated with existing transit fare structures. This would formalise the gondola as part of Kamloops' transit network, potentially unlocking provincial transit funding and expanding ridership from the student population that already holds transit passes.