Cable cars use a massive safety factor of eight to one
To keep passengers safe while dangling thousands of feet in the air, engineers design support cables to hold eight times the weight they will ever actually carry.
While a standard elevator might use a safety factor of five, aerial gondolas like those in the Swiss Alps or the Taurus Mountains are built to a much higher 8:1 ratio. This means the steel haul ropes, which are often tensioned with up to 50 tons of force, could theoretically support an entire fleet of cabins even if seven out of eight internal wire strands failed simultaneously.
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