While F1 fans flocked to Austin last weekend for the inaugural USGP, a team of industrial designers were hard at work on plans for a series of aerial gondolas to connect the city. It may sound futuristic, but it isn't as far-fetched as you might imagine.

Already, gondolas have become popular ways of connecting destinations across rivers, valleys and areas were major altitude differentials make other forms of transport untenable. Roosevelt Island in New York; Medellin, Colombia; and Portland, Oregon, all use some form of gondola as public transit systems. The Wire (not the TV show), from Frog Design, uses a similar design to traverse busy streets.

According to the Wire's designer, Michael McDaniel, a gondola setup allows for the implementation of a public transit system in a busy city while avoiding the thorny and pricey issue of land rights.

McDaniel, who's based in Austin, came up with the idea after a chat with Frog Principal Technologist Jared Ficklin. They were looking at a photograph of downtown Austin taken in the early 1900s and noticed that all the major arteries were covered in streetcars. Rebuilding those lines would require purchasing land for rights-of-way at high prices, negotiating with owners who may not want to sell, and competing with other forms of traffic on the same roadways.

"We kind of got into an interesting discussion on why we have a fixation on rail-based transit," McDaniel told Wired. "Jared used to work at ski resorts up in Colorado. He said, 'Well, you could just use ski lifts.'" Suddenly, a side project was born. "It's grown beyond that once people started crunching the numbers and seeing how feasible it was," McDaniel said.

It just so happened that McDaniel and Ficklin's home city had just debated whether to install a little more than five miles of light rail at a cost of $550 million – around $100 million per mile.

"Putting in an aerial ropeway, we're talking a fraction of that," McDaniel said. "A gondola can be put in for $12 million a mile. It's a fraction of the cost because you're not looking at eminent domain or rights of way, and you're not disrupting local businesses or cutting out vehicular traffic."

A gondola, on the other hand, only needs a few aerial cables and air rights. Once installed, gondolas offer a unique method of transport, with cars relying on a moving cable instead of individual motors to propel them across long distances. Though most gondolas cross valleys between mountains, they don't have to. In cities, they can float just a few feet over traffic.

"Rail is relegated to where real estate is available. If you look at light rail in cities, you're talking about tearing out lanes that are currently used by cars," McDaniel said. "Just 15 to 20 feet above the ground, you can start layering conduits through cities. Keep your surface level as is, and have a whole other method of transit on a different level."

In Austin, the Wire would feature detachable cars that could easily be added to a cable during peak hours and removed once the rush subsides. It would also have a combination of elevated and surface stops, and connect urban neighborhoods with downtown. Stops would also have access to bike- and car-sharing programs, so a commuter could interface among different modes of transit in order to complete a journey.

McDaniel says that a gondola could also solve a major cultural hurdle to the adoption of public transit, and that's adapting to set schedules. Gondolas don't stop at stations, and they run constantly. "They essentially slow down to walking speed enough for you to get on or off of them. You wouldn't have a train schedule – they just come in intervals. If you don't like the creepy guy in one car, you just wait 30 seconds for the next one."

Gondola projects have recently been completed in Venezuela, Vietnam and Colombia, and not a single one is at a ski resort. According to The Gondola Project, fourteen more systems are in various stages of planning in countries ranging from Algeria to Saudi Arabia.

After presenting their concept earlier this month, McDaniel said the folks at Frog are meeting with officials in Austin after Thanksgiving to talk about potentially implementing the gondola system in the rapidly growing city. "We just hope that it at least shows people there are other options other than rail," he said.