A transport revolution is storming through the developing world right now. Those who have visited Ankara or La Paz recently may know it. Anyone planning to go to Lagos or Mexico City in the next few years will encounter it. The humble cable car has been reborn, with not a snowflake in sight. The transport once regarded as belonging only on ski slopes is becoming part of the city scene. Steven Dale, strategist at The Gondola Project, says: “Ten years ago people thought the idea of urban cable cars ludicrous. Now almost every city in the developing world wants one.”

The reasons are not hard to see. Lagos in Nigeria is a good example: it has 21 million people and barely any fixed transport infrastructure. Its planned cable car system will soar over all kinds of planning nightmares, at a fraction of the cost of a subway or railway service. What is fascinating is that tourists have also taken them to their hearts. In Rio de Janeiro, a cable car built to connect the notorious favela of Complexo do Alemão with the city has been adopted by holidaymakers as a cheap tour. In fact there is now a tourist ticket that helps subsidise the cost to locals.

Bizarrely, the seeds of this transport revolution were planted by a Colombian drugs warlord, Pablo Escobar, whose home town of Medellín perfectly suited his nefarious needs, the steep-sided valleys creating isolated barrios within the city. These pockets of deprivation made great fortresses, good recruiting grounds for henchmen, and splendid markets for illegal white powder. When Escobar was killed, imaginative thinkers in the city’s transportation department saw the cable car as a potential answer to the city’s access problems.

Eventually, in 2004, Escobar’s former fiefdom, the barrio of Santo Domingo, was linked to the city. A decade later it has three banks, and according to TripAdvisor, riding the cable car up there has become the city’s number one visitor attraction.

The UK’s first urban cable car, which opened in 2012, crosses the Thames in London between North Greenwich and the Royal Docks at Canning Town. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

Other Latin American cities soon followed Colombia’s example. La Paz, Bolivia, has just become the world’s first large city to have a cable car as its primary fixed transport system, a feat it achieved in record time.

Now work has started on similar projects in cities as diverse as Mexico City and Berlin. Ankara, Turkey, has just opened its cable car, and the mayor, Melih Gökçek, is an enthusiastic advocate. “This is a breakthrough in public transportation in Turkey,” he says, pointing to savings of up to 80% over other systems.

What probably wasn’t planned was that these municipal budget-savers would become tourist opportunities. Dale says: “There’s a human desire to get a bird’s eye view of new places, to get up high. A cable car fits with that.”

Cities from Port-au-Prince in Haiti and Mecca in Saudi Arabia to Cardiff are soon to climb on the bandwagon. Perhaps even London’s Emirates Air Line will become a success. It fits in with Escobar’s aims: he loved getting people high, too.