The future of Columbia Pike? (Courtesy of JPods.)

If streetcars are yesterday’s cupcake, gondolas are apparently today’s over-priced toast.

More than 50 years after the last streetcar rumbled off of D.C.’s roadways, the city began running them again in a testing phase known as “simulated service.” We are now approaching the one year mark of passenger-less trains trundling up and down H Street and Benning Road NE, and the grumbles continue to grow. Meanwhile, Arlingtonians disgruntled with the cost of a long-planned streetcar project on Columbia Pike made their voices loud enough that the pro-streetcar county board ditched the project, despite having already spent more than $160 million on it.

But lest we be without a shiny new transportation option to debate about for long: enter gondolas.

In May, the D.C. Council put $35,000 toward a feasibility study to determine if gondolas would be a viable transportation option to bridge Georgetown and Rosslyn. The proposal is one of several that the tony neighborhood is considering as it seeks to reclaim some of the cachet it has lost to younger, hipper areas (the area’s 15-year plan also includes proposals for Metro stations, parklets, and a pedestrian/bicycle bridge to Roosevelt Island).

And now, Arlington may be getting in on the game, too. The Columbia Heights Civic Association is hosting a meeting next month to discuss a hybrid gondola/monorail system called JPods as a possible replacement for the cancelled streetcar project, ARLnow reports.

There could be as many as 1,000 pods, which carry one to four people, running above the area. The solar-powered network would be privately funded, JPods’ owner Bill James said. The company has also proposed installing them in Boston.

To be sure, a community meeting is about as preliminary as a project can get. Department of Environmental Services spokesman Eric Balliet told ARLnow that it’s too soon to comment because they haven’t received detailed information about the project.

But the streetcar was once just a glimmer in some officials’ eyes, too.

JPod Flyer 1