Just over a month ago, the city of Irvine revealed a futuristic gondola-like system that could move people through the Great Park.
The emerging technology — it’s yet to be deployed anywhere in the world — could be integrated into the infrastructure of the park with minimal upheaval and help move all the visitors expected, officials said. Eventually, it could cost Irvine more than $75 million to build throughout the 1,300-acre park.
On April 22, the Great Park Board, comprised of the City Council, voted to enter negotiations with startup Swyft Cities to build the “autonomous elevated cable transit network” over the park called the Whoosh System.
By May 8, the city had unveiled a Whoosh gondola and a virtual reality flight path for residents to try at a State of the Great Park event.
Councilmember Kathleen Treseder, the lone board member to vote against entering into those contract negotiations, says she wondered how the city moved so quickly to have the gondola and virtual reality test ready in just two weeks. She asked the city to prepare a report on it.
The report, delivered to the Great Park Board on May 27, revealed the work was already done.
Irvine spent $715,000 on contracts related to the Whoosh System before the City Council approved negotiations with Swyft Cities in April and before anything related to the Whoosh System became public information.
Between May 2024 and March 2025, the city entered into four contracts with Swyft Cities related to the Whoosh System. It entered a fifth contract with HDR, an engineering firm, to provide third-party verification about the system’s feasibility. The contracts were signed by City Manager Oliver Chi, Assistant City Manager Sean Crumby or both men.
The city spent more than $300,000 to fabricate the model Gondola and accompanying virtual reality test for people to check out at the State of the Great Park event.
“I don’t see what much we have for $715,000,” Councilmember James Mai said upon reviewing the report at the May 27 Great Park Board meeting.
“We got a demo unit and some marketing slides,” Mai continued. “For $715,000, I would have spent it on something else. These slides are basically AI. It’s like somebody put a prompt in ChatGPT and generated some images here. It’s not realistic.”
The staff report to the councilmembers noted, “All procurements have been conducted in full compliance with city purchasing guidelines.”
Nevertheless, Treseder said that Chi’s team should have used its discretion and sent the Swyft Cities contracts to the council sooner.
“In my opinion, the staff, by moving forward with this without consulting the City Council, were stepping too much into making policy decisions that are important for the council to make,” she said in a phone interview.
During the meeting this week, Crumby defended the procurement process related to Great Park transportation. He compared its similarities to other major infrastructure projects Irvine has completed, with technical and design contracts in the range of values of the Swyft Cities contracts routinely approved by the city manager’s office’s authority without City Council direction.
But he also said that, in this case, the city manager’s office fell short of expectations for transparent communications.
“It’s a fair criticism that there wasn’t enough community outreach, or really any community outreach, before the item was brought on the April 22 Great Park Board agenda,” he told the board.
Crumby said that another engineering firm with which the city works, Kellenberg Studios, introduced the two parties.
He said that, moving forward, the city will have a “robust process” for community outreach related to Great Park transportation.
At the meeting, Treseder recognized that Swyft Cities provides a unique technology, but she urged staff to perform due diligence by considering bids from other gondola companies, too.
“I think it’s very important to have a request for proposal or request for information for this project,” she said. “I know the justification is that there’s no other gondola company that does exactly what Swyft Cities does. But there are other godola companies, and they do have competitors. I think it’s reasonable for us to ask for bids from them.”
Her preference, though, is for the city to eschew the idea of gondolas altogether in favor of more traditional public transit, such as buses, she said.
Crumby said his team thoroughly examined buses and other alternatives, such as autonomous vehicles, and believes them to be inferior to the Whoosh System for a variety of criteria related to cost and design.
Naysayers of the gondola system say that the city should not be in the business of speculative technology.
“Whoosh,” one public commenter said at Tuesday’s Great Park Board meeting. “That’s the sound of your money flushing down the drain.”
When Councilmember Melinda Liu asked Swyft Cities CEO Jeral Poskey, present at the meeting, about each gondola’s weight restrictions, Poskey replied that the company was still configuring the specifications of the cabins and evaluating different material choices that could affect his answer.
“Our job as a city shouldn’t be helping you invent the system,” Liu responded. “It should be that we are purchasing a system that’s safe.”
Councilmember Mike Carroll, the Great Park Board Chairman, added that if a vote on the final contract were to be taken now, he would vote no.
“We have a large amount of work to do to make this thing a reality,” he said. Still, he expressed optimism about the opportunity to build something “grand.”
“It’s a real honor and a privilege to be able to sit here and even talk about an idea that we could possibly install a system as breathtaking and interesting as this,” he said.
Swyft Cities hopes to install the first gondola line in the Great Park around 2028.
The line would connect the sports park behind what is now the temporary Great Park Live amphitheater to the Canopy, a forthcoming 770,000-square-foot retail center.
The company has agreed to pay for what Irvine has called the “first operating segment” of the system, valued at about $9.5 million. In return, Irvine would name the Whoosh System as “the transportation module for the Great Park.”
“It functions as a zero-risk proof of concept,” Chi’s staff report says.
After that, the city would have an option to build the rest of the system over the park at an estimated cost of $75 million.
At full build out, the Whoosh System could “theoretically” carry 10,000 people per hour around the park and to and from the nearby train station, where a stop is also planned.
“Theoretically,” Crumby said, because the system has never been built.
In the first phase of the project, the Whoosh System would provide the city with eight vehicles, each with a capacity to carry about four or five people at a time. The company would pay for the cable’s operation for three days a week and during special events.
To reach full buildout, the city would need to purchase $40 million worth of gondola vehicles and spend $35 million to build the infrastructure to support them, Crumby said.
He added that he cannot, at this time, estimate operational costs.
If the project expands beyond its first phase, the city would pay for the Whoosh System buildout through special taxes levied on Great Park neighborhood homeowners that are earmarked for the billion-dollar park’s development, Crumby said.
Alternatively, after the first leg is built, Irvine could abandon the project and pay back Swyft Cities the $9.5 million. If Swyft Cities fails to meet to-be-determined performance metrics, however, the company would eat the cost of its initial investment.
Crumby said that even taking a full year to finalize next steps will not affect the project’s timeline.
Considering that, Mayor Larry Agran urged his colleagues to be patient before arriving at a final decision about what to do.
“I think we’ve got to chill a little bit here,” he said. “Take our time, move ahead, reinforce a process that we can all believe in, and then bring the project back to this board and ultimately the City Council.”