3. Recent projects in France: many intentions, few actions

In the French context, teleporters were consistently associated with mountain tourism and a few niche links, so much so that manufacturers initially tried to offer them on the ground or suspended from guide beams to make them look as much like urban transport as possible, while also giving them an innovative character. This attempt at adaptation led to concepts such as the Poma 2000, the SK or mini-metros, but very few actual implementations. It wasn't until the end of the 1980s that manufacturers began to move away from the traditional model suspended from an overhead cable, proposing systems with greater capacity to compete with more traditional road and rail modes. A symbol of this breakthrough was Poma's spontaneous response in 1987 to a call for tenders from the Syndicat des Transports Parisiens to improve service to Orly airport. The bid, which featured 32-seat detachable cabins with...