Lift safety regulators: who licenses and inspects the lifts.

This page is a list of regulators and standards, named with their dates. It describes no loading, riding or unloading procedure. NSAA's 2022 Responsibility Code asks skiers and riders to know how to load, ride and unload lifts and to ask the lift attendant for help; this page does not describe how.

The regulators side by side

United States

A search summary of a 2022 Colorado rulemaking notice, unconfirmed here because the document was not opened, describes the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board as licensing passenger tramways every year before they may operate, setting design and operating standards and requiring inspections, under Colorado Revised Statutes Title 25, Article 5, Part 7. The same summary describes ANSI B77.1 as the US national standard for passenger ropeways and says Colorado would adopt its 2022 edition (ANSI B77.1-2022) by reference from 2 May 2023.

A lift-industry blog summary, unconfirmed here, says that whether a US state licenses and inspects lifts is that state's decision. The research found no single federal ski-lift regulator. Other states' boards were not collected.

Canada: British Columbia

Technical Safety BC regulates passenger ropeways in British Columbia: tramways, gondolas, chairlifts, rope tows and passenger conveyors. It does so under the provincial Safety Standards Act and the Elevating Devices Safety Regulation.

The CSA edition differs between two of its pages. The regulator's technology page names CSA standard Z98-14. A search summary of its 2024 State of Safety report, unconfirmed here, says it adopted CSA Z98-24, published in December 2024. The newer edition is probably the current one, but that is not confirmed on the regulator's own page.

Switzerland

The Swiss Federal Office of Transport (FOT) examines new and modified cableways, grants concessions, construction permits and operating licences, and supervises the safety of the installations it licenses through audits and inspections (FOT page of 10 June 2025).

• How many. About 2,400 cableways operate in Switzerland, and the FOT is responsible for about 650 of them.
• The rest. The cantons are responsible for drag lifts, small cable cars carrying up to 8 passengers and non-commercial cable cars, which the inter-cantonal IKSS inspection office inspects.

European Union and France

A search summary of EUR-Lex, unconfirmed because the EUR-Lex pages returned no content, describes Regulation (EU) 2016/424 on cableway installations as covering new installations designed to carry people, including funiculars, cable cars, gondolas, chairlifts and drag lifts. The same summary says it replaced Directive 2000/9/EC from 21 April 2018 and that each Member State sets its own authorisation procedure.

In France, a search summary of a 2006 annual report, also unconfirmed, describes the STRMTG (Service technique des remontées mécaniques et des transports guidés) as a national technical service of the transport ministry and the competence centre for cableway safety.

What this page leaves out

A forum post quoting an NSAA summary counted falls from chairlifts among 2024-25 US ski-area deaths; a forum is not an authoritative source and the NSAA document was not read, so the figure is not used. No lift-accident statistics from a regulator were found, and lift regulators in Austria, Italy, Japan, Australia and New Zealand were not collected. Deaths at ski areas in general are on deaths at ski areas, and the responsibility codes on collisions and the codes.