When you drape a big city over a group of mountains, you end up with a lot of stairs, hairpin streets, and workarounds. Wellington, New Zealand, is such a city. Public transport is offered by cable cars, which lift people uphill and then downhill like in San Francisco. But there are also around 100 private cable cars that people install just to reach their house! While that may seem extravagant, it will come in handy when you buy a new table, or break your leg, or come home drunk, or want to invite Grandma to visit, or when you're just too tired to climb many flights of stairs to get home. And if you want to stay in your Wellington hillside home through your advanced years, a private cable car, or "inclinator," makes a lot of sense. Tom Scott shows us how these private cable cars work in Wellington.
Where I live, there are a lot of houses that cling to the sides of mountains, too, but they are spread out enough that we can build access roads and bridges to reach them. I can tell you from experience that some of those roads out in the middle of nowhere are terrifying.
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First time I saw them was a kid, visiting somewhere in Michigan where a steep hill met the lake. From what I gather they aren't that uncommon. I was able to find several US providers pretty easily.
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