The Doppelmayr family is the owner of this economic group, a world leader in the construction of cable cars, which has 130 years of history that will be in charge of two cable systems in Bogotá, key for transportation in this populated sector of Bogotá. One of the cable cars will be in the Potosí neighborhood of Ciudad Bolívar and another in the Town of San Cristóbal to complete 3 cable systems taking into account that they were the ones who built the Ciudad Bolívar Transmicable.
On April 10, 2023, the administration of former mayor Claudia López, through the IDU Urban Development Institute, awarded the contract for the construction of the aerial cable of the Town of San Cristóbal. The winner of the tender was the temporary cable union of San Cristóbal composed of: Doppelmayr Colombia with 59.9%, CYG Engineering and Construction with 24.06%, Proyecto de Ingeniería SA – PROING SA with 8.02% and ALCA Engineering SA also with 8.02% participation, according to the Former Mayor López, the construction of the San Cristóbal cable will cost $341,000 million and its first station will be located in the 20 de Julio portal, the second in the La Victoria neighborhood and the third in Alta Mira.
With the construction of this aerial cable, new works will also come for the Fourth Town, such as 6 new parks, new roads, squares, platforms, cultural facilities and the Alta Mira neighborhood, a care block will be built. In total, the investment will be $600,000 million.
The San Cristóbal Sur aerial cable will have a length of 2.8 kilometers and 17,800 square meters of public space will be intervened. The cable will move 4,000 people every hour in each direction in 144 cabins. The travel time is estimated to be 10 minutes, reducing by more than 72% the travel time of the inhabitants of the town, which is approximately 35 minutes.
For its part, the Potosí aerial cable in the town of Ciudad Bolívar, its construction was awarded by the IDU to the temporary union Ciudad Aire, which is made up of Doppelmayr Colombia SAS with a 49.32% participation, CYG Engineering Constructions SA with 25.34% participation, Proyectos de Ingeniería SA with 7.60%, ALCA Ingeniería SA 7.60% and ANDCOL SAS with 10.14% of the participation.
The investment in this work will be $529,532 million, of which $41,267 million will be for the audit, which will be in charge of the same consortium, and for the purchase of properties there will be an investment of $155,060 million. The cable will be in operation in 2027 and will benefit about 600 thousand people from the town of Ciudad Bolívar.
Doppelmayr Group is a powerful multinational holding company that has Alejandro Zambrano as general manager in Colombia. He is a civil engineer with solid experience in building and infrastructure project management. Since February 2015, he has served as General Manager of Doppelmayr, Colombia, which is part of the group of Latin American countries where the Austrians have built cable cars as they have done. in Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile.
The great inventiveness of Konrad Doppelmayr at the end of the 19th century that gave rise to this global emporium
Konrad Doppelmayr was founded at the end of the 19th century, in 1893, in Austria. He had been an apprentice in the workshop of his friend and teacher Josef Anton Dur in 1893, without thinking then that he was laying the foundations of a large global company.
In addition to being a great engineer, Konrad Doppelmayr had great inventiveness and built, through rope transportation, a system for transporting materials in the Alps for agricultural purposes, for multiple farm tasks. Later it moved to the cable system with the elevator method, the company had an elevator division and then evolved into cable cars that for more than 90 years have been used as a tourist method on the Ski slopes that are developed throughout Europe in the Alps. Swiss and Pyrenees.
It all started with the need of a community to resolve their daily emergencies for field work and transporting inputs and goods from the market and with simple solutions the tools were developed for the construction of more complete transportation and later for human beings and they are now four generations of the Doppelmayr family that have sized the business
This is an exceptional case because difficult businesses survive over time and part of the key is that despite there being many Doppelmayrs in the business, the management positions are held by people outside the family.
In 1967 Artur Doppelmayr, grandson of the founder and son of businessman Emil, became the CEO of the company and as Alpine recreation expanded throughout the world, in the second half of the 20th century Artur managed and established the company of Vorarlberg cable cars as a world leader. In 1996 Doppelmayr acquired Von Roll, a Swiss manufacturer of gondolas, chairlifts and cable cars.
In 2002, the CWA company also bought a Swiss manufacturer of cabins for gondolas and cable cars, for this reason the entire structure for the construction of cable transport in other cities in the world where the company has a presence is brought from Austria and the cabins of cable cars from Switzerland where they are manufactured.
The main cable products of the Doppelmayr company are cable cars, funiculars, cable cars, removable chairlifts, fixed grip chairlifts and surface lifts. The company also developed the 3S tricable cable car, one of the latest developments of the Austrian company with a branch in Colombia. .
The global dimension with innovation in its transportation methods
With more than a century of uninterrupted work, the Doppelmayrs have built an empire that places them as the largest company in the world in cable transportation and has 63% of the market for all Cable Cars around the planet. It has a presence in more than 50 countries around the world and cable cars in 96 cities. Today it has a presence in Latin America in 10 countries, it has built more than 15,600 cable systems and in recent years it has built more than 100 per year, that is, approximately 2 cables per week.
Among the most famous cable cars in the world that this company has built, is the Bolivian cable car network with a length of 30 kilometers that connects the city of La Paz with the Alto, a city of 30,000 inhabitants and is the highest in the world with 4,150. meters above sea level, another very important cable car is the one in the city of Uruapan in Mexico with a length of 8 kilometers with the capacity to transport 1,500 people per hour in each direction and which had an investment of 155 million euros with associated infrastructure. To the system.
Other Colombian cities in urgent need of cable cars
The Doppelmayr group arrived in Colombia more than a decade ago, in 2010. The first contract it obtained was the construction of the second aerial cable of the café park in Montenegro Quindío, which had an investment of $7.5 billion with the capacity to transport 2,500 people. every hour, this cable has 2 stations and has 31 cabins each with the capacity to move 6 people. when in people’s imagination there was only the short and above all recreational cable car better known as the Monserrate funicular, whose construction was a real challenge and is marked by a tragedy.
Although cable cars are not projects that occur very frequently, two or more can result in a single year as has been the case in Bogotá, but the truth is that many other cities in Colombia urgently need this transportation solution, precisely because the topography of cities. And in fact they are being cooked in some cities where communities are demanding this transportation system and have the budget to do so.
Medellín is one of those cities where they have already expressed that they require the construction of more cable cars, also in the city of Manizales where they plan to build 5 cable lines in the coming years, they have also shown interest in Ibagué, Armenia, Pereira where They plan to connect the capital of Risaralda with the municipality of Dos Quebradas, while in Santa Marta they seek to connect the capital of Magdalena with the rodadero, Bucaramanga, Floridablanca and Cartagena, they are also interested in building cable or cable car systems.
The General Manager of Doppelmayr Colombia Alejandro Zambrano confirmed to us that they are interested in the construction of 4 cable lines that would be projected for Bogotá in various areas of the city, one in the town of Usaquén at street 153 with race 7 at north of the city, another on 26th Street that connects with the metro station and the other 2 in the center of Bogotá in the Town of La Candelaria.
Since it arrived in our country in 2010, this Austrian company has always been a strong competitor for another international company that also builds cable cars, such as Poma from France, which built the first Medellín cable in 2004. The two were even in the bidding for the tender for the Picacho cable in the city of Medellín and in the end Poma won the tender. In addition, there is another strong competitor in this market, the Italian company Leitner Ropeways, which built the Miocable de Cali in 2015 in the Siloé sector. This company manufactures and distributes products and equipment for cable cars.
These three large multinationals that have a subsidiary in Colombia associate with other Colombian construction companies and form consortia to participate in tenders for the construction of cable cars in cities that require it, such as Bogotá, Medellín and the other cities where this is required. type of passenger transportation system through overhead cables.
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