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Would somebody please tell Mr. Musk about http://skytran.net/

Hyperloop is an interesting concept but it doesn't come anywhere near what we really need right now or even in the near future.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is obviously one way to help reduce climate change. But that doesn't answer how giving Obama $1B is going to help achieve that goal.

If we really wanted to reduce GHGs, we'd be making some serious changes, such as investing in SkyTran to try to get more people out of gas-powered cars and into a fast, highly efficient public transit system that doesn't use tons of energy like our 19th-century-style systems we currently use (buses and trains) and doesn't take forever to get people to their destination. Or we'd create better incentives for deploying solar technology, such as getting big-box stores and other large (and typically sprawling) buildings to cover their roofs and parking lots with them. Or we'd find ways to stop burning so much fossil fuel, such as by massively downsizing our military, which burns enormous amounts of diesel fuel so we can air-condition tents in the Afghanistan desert, not to mention all the other fuel burned by horrifically-inefficient military vehicles in our imperialistic pursuits around the world.

I've never seen much action from Obama towards actually improving things as far as energy consumption (or anything else for that matter, except maybe for marijuana enforcement which he's finally, after so many years of his strict DEA enforcement, relented on now that it's become such a popular issue with CO and WA legalizing it), so I really don't see how handing him $1B is going to make a damn bit of difference.

Its time to break our addiction to the car and get serious about transportation:

http://www.skytran.net/

Cars and trucks are incredibly wasteful when you consider all the weight which has to be moved from point A to point B along with your fat ass. Increasing MPG does very little to solve the real problem of too many cars/people and not enough geography.

How many lanes can really fit into an area? I've driven on 5 lane highways which did little or nothing to increase traffic flow and forget about rush hour...its still a parking lot.

Imagine a 'network' of Skytran pods being able to haul people within 1/2 mile of any destination. The business advantages are immense when you consider a manufacturing company which builds their own hub and has pods deliver their materials. FedEx and UPS would no longer be the only game in town.

Look at the advances which the public road system does for humanity and then increase that exponentially with a SkyTran system...:)

The problem is, you can't expect the top 1% of programmers to do all the programming the world needs, just like you can't expect the top 1% of drivers to do all the driving needed. There just aren't enough such experts to go around. So, the tools need to be made so that average users (whether drivers or programmers) can get good results from that. That may very well mean that the tools need to be made by the cream of the crop, so that the overall result is optimal. (I'm not going to say "average people" here, because at least in the case of programmers, they're a small subset of the population, not just random members of the general public.)

In the case of programming, this means we need languages that average programmers can use to good effect and which will maximize their productivity (such as by making it difficult to create difficult-to-debug bugs). In the case of cars, this means we need cars that idiots can drive, until our society finally shapes up and builds SkyTran so that average poorly-skilled people don't need to drive themselves in the more populated areas.

Go read about the "Broken Window Fallacy". Our country is failing because of wars for oil, having to import oil, etc. Not to mention all the good citizens it loses to auto accidents. You want people to be killed and maimed just so that the medical industries can do better? This country needs to do anything it can to reduce oil usage; telecommuting is a good first step. Personal rapid transit like SkyTran is a good second step.

"I" don't want people sacrificed on the Eisenhower Interstate altar of profits, but I have worked for many companies whose leaders gleefully rub their hands together at the thought of more customers for their products, even when their products are medical devices addressing terrible conditions, and I imagine the energy companies don't even bat an eyelash at the true cost of their non-renewable raw materials - something about being thankful for God's bounty which He hath provided them, I'm sure...

SkyTran is cute, but I prefer to live where the dust in my air is pollen from the trees instead of the dust kicked up by millions of neighbors, and public transit systems of any quality won't reach my neighborhood with any kind of efficiency as long as we're still maintaining a system of privately owned vehicles, I think this applies to well over 50% of the U.S. population - good luck getting the American public to vote yes on giving up their private cars.

I'd love to telecommute, and I have done it for about 6 months (aggregate) of the past 4 years, what I haven't been able to get is any feeling of job security while I'm telecommuting - the job that I have now permits roughly 10% telecommute "as necessary" and pays a reasonably reliable salary. My previous job was 90% telecommute, paid just as well, but was hourly and worked from one $10K pool of money to the next, in the middle of the 2nd pool - with no 3rd pool clearly in sight, I jumped back to the salary situation. Most telecommute opportunities I have had are similar, good money but in unreliable splashes instead of a steady rain that you can pay a 15 year mortgage with.

Go read about the "Broken Window Fallacy". Our country is failing because of wars for oil, having to import oil, etc. Not to mention all the good citizens it loses to auto accidents. You want people to be killed and maimed just so that the medical industries can do better? This country needs to do anything it can to reduce oil usage; telecommuting is a good first step. Personal rapid transit like SkyTran is a good second step.

Yep, that's why they need to start building SkyTran or some similar personal rapid transit system. Cars are obviously a failure in high-density situations, and trains are so 19th Century and don't work in these environments.

CNG has some real problems compared to gasoline in private vehicles, namely the fuel tank. I've been in a couple of these vehicles, and the main problem is that there's little or no storage space. Consumers aren't going to be too happy about that. In pickup trucks, the tank takes up about 1/3 of the cargo bed. So you can forget about carrying sheets of plywood and many other large objects. In small cars, the tank takes up the entire trunk, so you can forget about putting any luggage or groceries or anything else back there.

Basically, CNG has extremely poor energy density compared to gasoline, when you compare the size of a fuel tank versus the driving range that fuel tank gives you. The fuel is a compressed gas, which obviously isn't nearly as dense as a liquid, and because it's compressed it requires a tank with very thick, heavy-duty walls. So you end up with a giant tank consuming your whole trunk just so you can have a measly 100-mile range on CNG, when a simple 12-gallon gasoline tank gives you a 3-400 mile range. The only people here who have these vehicles are people who participated in Arizona's program back around 2000 where the state government gave them a giant discount on the cost of a car, plus a free conversion to CNG (dual-fuel; you can switch between the two). So people were buying these giant, expensive SUVs for 1/2 the normal cost, which had the spare tire replaced with a 5-gallon CNG (good for a 20-mile drive maybe) tank to qualify for this giant rebate. Other vehicles with more serious conversions of course were made too like the ones I mentioned above, but still the range wasn't that great and the tanks took up most of the useful cargo space in these vehicles.

The only way to make these vehicles practical would be to completely redesign the chasses for these giant tanks, but now you're talking about an enormous expense for the automakers, and a totally separate product line, for something that might do about as well as diesel cars have done in the USA (which is very, very bad for those who don't know). You just can't take a regular gas car and convert it to CNG with great results. At least with diesel, you can use the exact same chassis quite easily; you just need to drop in a different engine. Making CNG cars is going to be more like making electric cars (or also hybrid electric cars with very good all-electric range, a la Chevy Volt): for really good results, you'll have to make purpose-built vehicles, just like GM did with the Volt and Tesla did with their cars. Conversions using gasoline chasses just don't work out too well; you either end up with crap range because you're limited to how many batteries you can stuff into various voids in the chassis or engine compartment (which wasn't designed with these batteries in mind), or you end up with no cargo room because you've filled it with batteries (like the electric pickup trucks I've seen pictures of: they fill the cargo bed with batteries, which totally defeats the purpose of a pickup truck).

So if you're an automaker, and you'll have to spend a huge pile of cash to engineer an all-new chassis, would you rather spend that on a car that only runs on CNG (maybe with a tiny gas tank just in case the customer can't find a handy CNG station), or would you rather spend that on making a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle like the Volt that runs ~40 miles on electricity, enough for most commutes, and then has an efficient gas engine for driving cross-country, letting customers use the already-existing gasoline infrastructure?

This whole thing is just a bad idea. Electric is the way to go, hybrid at first, with some dedicated commuter cars like the Leaf, and full electric later when battery capacities are better and fast recharging options are better. The other thing our dumb government should be pushing for cities is a personal rapid transit system like SkyTran, which is all-electric, uses very little power, and would be perfect for shuttling commuters between suburbs and their workplaces. If they want to find something, they should be funding that instead.

What is needed is a system to have cars drive themselves and be able to automatically be driven on dense interstates without driver interference

This is what SkyTran is for. However, good luck ever getting the American government to fund it, instead of just bailing out domestic automakers.

As for Paris, Paris is a planned city. From Wikipedia: "The city's largest transformation came with the 1852 Second Empire under Napoleon III; his préfet, Baron Haussmann, levelled entire districts of the Paris' narrow, winding medieval streets to create the network of wide avenues and neo-classical façades that still make much of modern Paris; the reason for this transformation was twofold, as not only did the creation of wide boulevards beautify and sanitize the capital, it also facilitated the effectiveness of troops and artillery against any further uprisings and barricades that Paris was so famous for."

If the US wants its cities to be like Paris, it needs to level them and start over. I don't think they're willing to do that.

But I felt obliged to note that it IS possible to make an apartment building which gives its tenants privacy, even if only so that people would know to look for one if they're stuck in the city.

It's also possible to install SkyTran personal rapid transit systems everywhere to eliminate traffic congestion and 95% of auto fatalities while increasing transit speeds dramatically and lowering costs; to install solar panels on the roofs of all larger buildings to massively reduce the amount of coal burned for providing power; to build a space elevator to greatly reduce the cost of moving cargo to orbit; etc.

Just because something is possible doesn't mean it's ever done. Building an apartment well costs more money than building it cheaply and poorly with no sound insulation, so no one ever does it. Tenants don't notice until they've moved in and lived there a few days, and by then it's too late to change.

How exactly do you compare the noisiness of apartments when you're apartment-hunting? It's not like they're going to let you live there for a week to try it out for free. There's no such thing as a test-drive with housing; if you don't see the problem during the 5-10 minutes you walk through the place on a tour with the apartment manager/real estate agent, then you're screwed. Many noises (like noisy neighbors, barking dogs, etc.) only happen periodically, not continuously, so you probably won't hear them when you visit.

Yes, I agree that the crazy tube idea is no replacement for trains hauling coal, oil, steel, ores, etc. The existing trains already do this quite well, and in much larger shipping units than the 6-foot-long containers proposed here.

However, I do think there's room to replace things like cargo trucks with something more automated. This idea isn't new either: SkyTran has already been proposed as a way of removing most commuting traffic from roads and replacing it with small, automated, 2-person cars on elevated maglev rails. Face it: roads are dangerous. Upwards of 50,000 Americans die in traffic accidents every year. Taking vehicles (whether passenger cars, delivery trucks, or tractor-trailers) off the roads and moving either cargo and/or passengers to automated transit systems would certainly decrease this number greatly.

On top of that, road-going vehicles are ridiculously inefficient. There's a reason trains use steel wheels on steel tracks, instead of inflated rubber wheels on asphalt. We only use this because cornering and braking require friction, which is the enemy of fuel efficiency.

Replacing fleets of delivery trucks, which have to contend with heavy traffic and each need a dedicated driver, with a fully automated system would surely be far more efficient, once the capital costs are made up for. That's the main obstacle, but road-going vehicles have a bit of an unfair advantage there in that roads are already in place and paid for with taxpayer dollars, and don't charge for usage.

Of course, replacing FedEx and UPS delivery trucks to residences probably won't happen, since it's unlikely to ever be economical to build crazy-tube terminals to every home and apartment (maybe one per apartment complex however, but that still doesn't help the hundreds of millions living in houses). But many, many deliveries are to businesses, rather than residences, and it'd be economical to install crazy-tube terminals at many businesses, whether ones large enough to have their own (big-box stores), or ones clustered together which can share a terminal (shopping malls, strip malls, etc.). Just imagine how much shipping companies could save on driver wages by not having to pay people to drive stuff to half their destinations. In the USA, with the high wages drivers get, that amounts to quite a lot. (Obviously, in 3rd-world countries, this isn't so much of a factor since labor is cheap.)

The only answer for inner-city public transit, for cities that aren't as dense as Manhattan (which is most American cities), is SkyTran.

Time for boarding during rush hours? Assume even only 10 secs/passenger for boarding and see if you can beat a train/bus coming every 10 minutes?

Buses suck; they spew out tons of pollution, travel at inconvenient times, and are much too slow because they stop too much. It also sucks having to deal with the other people on them.

The only answer for inner-city public transit, for cities that aren't as dense as Manhattan (which is most American cities), is SkyTran.

> which killed fewer people than die on US highways every month

This snippet has been said since 2001. What is the implication here?

To me, it means we need to stop wasting money on stupid wars in backwards countries and other "War on Terrorism" crap, and spend the money instead to develop and deploy SkyTran, so that most passenger travel (both intracity and intercity) can be done in safe, automated maglev cars, eliminating most highway fatalities in this country.

Better technology can save lots of lives, eliminate most of the problems of commuting and gridlock in traffic, and boost our economy through improved efficiency. But instead of spending money on better technology, we're wasting it on blowing things up in some shithole of a country so that we can support one corrupt, screwed-up government there over a different screwed-up government.

And understand this, Americans are good drivers compared to the rest of the world. (I'm not american). But I live in the capital city of my country and I see a lot of accidents all the time, from minor fender-benders to cars wrapping around concrete poles.

WTF?

I am American, and I've never thought of my countrymen as "good drivers". Not as bad as Italians perhaps, but not great either. Are you Italian, by chance?

You surely can't be German. Everything I've heard about them is that they're excellent drivers, and take it far more seriously than we do: no yakking on cellphones, texting while driving, etc.

BTW, I live in Phoenix, Arizona, and we recently got a light-rail system here. There's accidents with that thing every week or so with some dumb driver hitting it, getting hit by it (by turning in front of it), getting squashed between the train and a pole, etc. IMO, having any kind of mass-transit system that shares space with cars is a disaster. They should be on totally separate grades, either subway, elevated monorail, or best of all, SkyTran.

This whole idea sounds very, very expensive. Much more expensive than regular cars and roads (which are already expensive when you account for the total costs).

If you want an efficient system for moving people around, install the SkyTran system. Since the cars aren't privately-owned, you don't have to deal with the problem of parking, so a trip of .5 - 1 mile would be perfectly feasible. Plus, you can also use them for longer trips, potentially across a continent if it's built out that far, and certainly for regular commuting to work.

Yes, of course there's other sources of fossil fuels. But if they were economical, they would have been exploited by now. They only become economical to exploit as the cost of oil rises, so we do need to take into account this rise of prices on the cost of an airline ticket.

I do think, however, that these prices for high speed rail lines are too high (just like the price of roadbuilding is much too high), but there's probably nothing that can be done about it at this point since a lot of that cost is due to inefficient government, cronyism, kickbacks, and other forms of corruption.

What would be ideal is if we built a SkyTran system between cities instead (and within them too). The per-mile cost would be a tiny fraction of other options, and you could go door-to-door.

There's nothing forcing anyone to live 60km from their workplace. If you can't find a close job, you can move to an apartment near your job. There are also buses and taxis available in every metro area (yes they suck and taxis are expensive, but too bad). There is NO right to drive in the US, even though most people act like there is.

You can also move someplace where rapid transit is better and more common, like NYC. Lots of people there don't have a car. You don't have a "right" to the job of your choice in the location of your choice.

That said, we could really use some better public transit in this country, especially with the sprawled way our cities are laid out. Here's the solution: http://www.skytran.net/

The USA is too spread out for traditional mass-transit systems to work very well here, except in a very few exceptional places with high density, like NYC, SanFran, etc.

The best solution to mass-transit in the USA is "PRT", personal rapid transit, like SkyTran. With modern computer technology, we don't need an obsolete mass-transit system that takes lots of people from point A to point B; we can now make a system that takes individuals anywhere they want to go in a grid.

The original question was "What will produce 1 million jobs in the next three years"? I don't know.

Actually, I can think of something: SkyTran. Not only would in produce lots of domestic jobs building new infrastructure, it would greatly reduce oil consumption (eliminating imports, most likely) and greenhouse gas emissions, and would improve productivity by reducing the amount of time wasted by citizens in transit and especially in traffic snarls. It'd also greatly reduce the huge number of automobile-related deaths in this country.

If China is massively building their road system based on the US interstate system, then why wouldn't there be many car companies left? That makes no sense. I do think you'll see a lot of changes in which car companies are still around, and what new ones exist: a lot of dominant ones will probably be Chinese, and a lot of current manufacturers will probably disappear or be absorbed.

There's plenty of oil left. What's left is more and more costly to extract, however. And yes, climate change is a big problem, but it doesn't look like much is being done there so I guess we can look forward to more climate problems and rising sea levels. However, cars don't need oil to run; electric cars are making huge strides already, and hybrids are too. So the cars of the future at the least won't require as much oil to run, and at best will be powered directly from the grid, using whatever energy sources that uses (oil, gas, coal, nuclear, wind, hydro, solar, etc.).

You want a better idea? Stop building giant highways, and instead build this: SkyTran. For most commuter transportation, it would be far more economical, for more environmental, and best of all, much faster and less aggravating than driving your own car (no traffic lights, 100mph in the city point-to-point). No, you couldn't carry a month's worth of groceries home from Costco, but you can keep your regular car for those trips, and use SkyTran the rest of the time, and pay much lower fuel, maintenance, and insurance costs for your regular car.

Unless its a city without traffic, pollution, gangs, poverty and the homeless its going to look pretty much the same to me.

Traffic and pollution can be solved by technical means, but the rest I don't think are solvable without resorting to some kind of draconian measures, like taking homeless people to concentration camps. You could solve those problems in some places by having a relatively affluent population (like some small countries do now), but this usually means that poor people and mentally imbalanced people (that's the homeless; they're not homeless just because they have no money) end up located somewhere else, much like we currently have "developed" countries and "underdeveloped" countries that always seem to stay "underdeveloped" no matter how much aid people throw at them.

Getting rid of cars, trucks, and sirens would be the biggest step to a Utopian city I can think of assuming you replace it with effective transit, kinder gentler taxis, an effective logistics mechanism to replace trucks and effective emergency services without sirens.

A lot of this can be done by moving to a proper rapid transit system. Such a thing doesn't exist yet; it's been tried with trains and such for years, but that only works in a few places. The answer is something like this; small, autonomous cars which go where you want, under automatic control along mag-lev tracks. This would eliminate most commuter traffic, though door-to-door service (like ambulances need) would still need a ground vehicle. I'm not sure how you'd get away from sirens though, because even without many private vehicles, ambulances would still have to contend with pedestrians, who need to hear such vehicles approaching.

I recall reading recently there is a 2 mile square suburb in Germany which was designed to ban cars. They have communal garages on the edge for your cars. Rail service to commute to jobs in the city. Stores are designed to be walked to. Its bikes and pedestrians only in the interior. That is pretty close to Utopia for me.

Sounds great, until you need to get some groceries. I don't know about you, but when I go shopping, I'm not capable of carrying a couple hundred pounds of goods home with me in two arms. Of course, the anti-car people usually tell me that I should simply go shopping at the corner market every day, or even better, just eat out all the time. The latter only works for people with a lot of money, and the former only works for people with too much time on their hands, and is really quite inefficient. I guess we could have groceries delivered, but that's not exactly cheap either.

If people in businesses like IT, finance, etc and can telecommute effectively that would also be a huge step. Commuting alone make urban/suburban design an unavoidable living hell.

Programming lends itself well to telecommuting, but many other jobs don't. While computer workers like us would frequently rather be alone, most other people like to be around other people. They're extroverts. They're not going to want to stay home in front of a computer all day, and videoconferencing isn't a replacement for the face-to-face interaction these people want. Personally, I have little interest in face-to-face interaction with my coworkers, but the people who write my paycheck aren't like that; they're extroverts, and that's why telecommuting hasn't really taken off that much.

But the commuting problem can be easily solved with SkyTran as I pointed out before.

Solving the homeless problem a lot harder. You can't just cage them, can't just ship them somewhere else, and you can't just wave a wand and solve the drug abuse, mental illness, criminal records, hatred for the man and hatred for 40 hour work weeks in factories and offices that made them the way they are.

Actually, you can cage them. That's what we used to do, decades ago. Homeless people aren't homeless because they can't stand 40-hour work weeks; they're homeles

While I think we definitely need to do something as far as our transportation infrastructure, these solar-powered cars seem about as useful to me as radio-control cars (the kind that are 1-2 feet long) which can go 60mph. 60mph is not a great achievement, since it's easy to do that with a small R/C car running on a battery. Of course, someone will probably say a 40-pound R/C car can't carry a human passenger, and that's true, but that R/C car really has about the same utility as one of these solar-powered cars, which are little more than motor-powered bicycles. The whole thing is just a big waste of time, as these cars will never be able to serve as useful vehicles; there simply isn't enough power in the sunlight hitting the rooftop of any small vehicle, no matter how efficient your solar cells are.

There's two things that can really improve transportation:
1) More solar power, combined with electric vehicles. While the rooftop of a small car doesn't have much area, the rooftop of an office building, shopping center, parking garage, or even a typical house has tons of area. There's a lot of real estate in our cities that can be covered with solar panels and used to provide cheap electricity to the grid. If we simply had better battery technology, so we could store perhaps 10x the energy of today's batteries, we'd easily be able to build practical electric vehicles to replace our current fossil-fuel powered ones, and we could power them with the clean, cheap electricity generated by all these rooftop solar panels.

2) Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), such as SkyTran, where small, electric-powered cars travel on suspended rails and are fully automated. We already have all the technology needed to build this, we just need the capital to implement it. Not only would this use far less energy than our current fossil-fuel infrastructure, it would alleviate traffic congestion entirely, cost far less than personal vehicles and roads and highways, and take us where we need to go much faster as these cars can go 100+mph and don't have to stop for stop lights.

As a society, we need to be dedicated funding and effort towards useful, practical projects and technologies such as these, not useless technologies such as these solar-powered bicycles which will never be a practical alternative to modern transportation.

This is a perfectly good reason for NOT riding the bus. Why spend 30 minutes sitting next to some smelly freak if you don't have to? Obviously, millions of people are willing to spend their hard-earned money so they can have a personal car and avoid that experience every day.

The solution is here. Public transit will never work that well unless it becomes personal, and isolates people from each other.

There is a form of public transportation under development which could be used for 90+% of the American population, including everyone in the suburbs. It would be just as nice as a personal car, and much better in many ways: no stop lights, 100-150 mph speeds, and automated driving. To allay the fears of people (including myself) who avoid buses because of the other people on them, you would never have to sit next to some smelly freak you don't know. However, this public transit would not involve trains, subways, or buses.

Go here.

Railroads are 8 times more energy-efficient than heavy trucks. The US used 19.8 million barrels/day in 2002 with two-thirds for transportation. (Today, roughly 20.7 million barrels/day.) Railroads carried 27.8% of the ton-miles with 220,000 b/day whilst trucks carried 32.1% of the ton-miles with 2,070,000 b/day (2002 data).

SkyTran is non-stop, 100 mph personal transit that can totally eliminate commuter congestion in any city, for the same costs of one linear line of light rail.

Intercity SkyTran 150 mph, non-stop travel between major cities will beat Commercial Jet travel times for distances of 600 miles or less. (Over 50% of all jet travel in the USA is for distances of less than 500 miles. Over $25 billion currently planned for USA airport expansions can be saved).

Railroads are 8 times more energy-efficient than heavy trucks. The US used 19.8 million barrels/day in 2002 with two-thirds for transportation. (Today, roughly 20.7 million barrels/day.) Railroads carried 27.8% of the ton-miles with 220,000 b/day whilst trucks carried 32.1% of the ton-miles with 2,070,000 b/day (2002 data).

SkyTran is non-stop, 100 mph personal transit that can totally eliminate commuter congestion in any city, for the same costs of one linear line of light rail.

Intercity SkyTran 150 mph, non-stop travel between major cities will beat Commercial Jet travel times for distances of 600 miles or less. (Over 50% of all jet travel in the USA is for distances of less than 500 miles. Over $25 billion currently planned for USA airport expansions can be saved).

I have what I think is an even better solution.

Close down all the coal plants and replace them with modern efficient nuclear reactors. Use breeder style reactors by preference. I won't object to wind or solar or anything else if it's competative.

Then, to replace vehicles, build a PRT system.

That should make us pretty carbon neutral.

You'd have to have a vehicle a bit like a trailer/caravan with a bed, toilet, shower, TV etc.

The weight of the vehicle would be a couple of tonnes which means the infrastructure would have to be able to cope, which means it'd be expensive to build the infrastructure so you're back to the train/sleeper services.

You should check this out then http://www.skytran.net/

How about a solution that gives us the advantages of trains and cars at the same time?

With trains, every person is at the mercy of the schedule. With cars, every person is at the mercy of the smog and the expense. Is there a way around the trade offs?

Check out skytrans at http://www.skytran.net./

I, for one, would love to see this solution(?) get a chance to put up or shut up, but they need to build a test track and noone will give them the money. After reading all the info, they have a convincing case. Is there something missing? I don't see it.

Check out http://skytran.net/ for another idea along these lines ("identical" is not too strong a word). The same off-line stations, low-passenger-count pods, grid-system, induction track, etc.

I believe this automated load-balancing "packet-routing" approach to mass transit is inevitable. An efficient individual car system can really move people; just ask Disneyland.

I won't contest that SkyWeb beats conventional mass transit in every way -- in most ways even rickshaws would -- but I wonder if it's the best of the competing ideas out there.

SkyWeb appears clunky compared to SkyTran (interview with the inventor Part 1 and Part 2.). The SkyTran system looks like it could be lighter, faster (they have a target of 100 mph), slightly easier to use, more convenient wrt station placement, quicker to install and more flexible in terms of installation (can attach to existing buildings, very small ground-level footprint), more tolerant of inclement weather, and up to ten times cheaper meaning up to ten times the rail length/station nodes of SkyWeb for the same money.

But SkyWeb may be further along in their development cycle.

SkyTran's website leaves something to be desired, but it's entertaining.

I believe this automated load-balancing "packet-routing" approach to mass transit is inevitable. An efficient individual car system can really move people; just ask Disneyland.

I won't contest that SkyWeb beats conventional mass transit in every way -- in most ways even rickshaws would -- but I wonder if it's the best of the competing ideas out there.

SkyWeb appears clunky compared to SkyTran (interview with the inventor Part 1 and Part 2.). The SkyTran system looks like it could be lighter, faster (they have a target of 100 mph), slightly easier to use, more convenient wrt station placement, quicker to install and more flexible in terms of installation (can attach to existing buildings, very small ground-level footprint), more tolerant of inclement weather, and up to ten times cheaper meaning up to ten times the rail length/station nodes of SkyWeb for the same money.

But SkyWeb may be further along in their development cycle.

SkyTran's website leaves something to be desired, but it's entertaining.

I believe this automated load-balancing "packet-routing" approach to mass transit is inevitable. An efficient individual car system can really move people; just ask Disneyland.

I won't contest that SkyWeb beats conventional mass transit in every way -- in most ways even rickshaws would -- but I wonder if it's the best of the competing ideas out there.

SkyWeb appears clunky compared to SkyTran (interview with the inventor Part 1 and Part 2.). The SkyTran system looks like it could be lighter, faster (they have a target of 100 mph), slightly easier to use, more convenient wrt station placement, quicker to install and more flexible in terms of installation (can attach to existing buildings, very small ground-level footprint), more tolerant of inclement weather, and up to ten times cheaper meaning up to ten times the rail length/station nodes of SkyWeb for the same money.

But SkyWeb may be further along in their development cycle.

SkyTran's website leaves something to be desired, but it's entertaining.

This one uses a suspended car instead of vehicle on a track.

http://skytran.net/

Once you have proven the concept, the tracks would take space on existing roads. If the system is working, the traffic on paved roads will be reduced significantly so that you won't need 6 lane highways in the cities anymore.

I think SkyTran is a better system than the one linked in the article though. They also seem to explain a lot of the stuff better.

http://www.skywebexpress.com/ and

http://www.skytran.net/

Doug Malewicki's SkyTran...

In other words, what you are looking for is something like this?

You've obviously never been in an accident where you had zero reaction time. It happens.. often. And it happens more and more the faster and faster you go.

Reaction times vary, but at 120 mph, it is a very small window. At 120 mph, you are moving nearly 180 feet per second. That's a lot. If you come around a mild corner and there is an obstruction 50 feet in front of you, that's not a long time to react. It's less than a 1/3 of a second. Reaction times recognized by various government agencies (link) is about 3/4 of a second. Which at 120 mph you don't have. But even if you are better than the rest of the world by 50%, you still don't have enough time to spot an obstruction 50 feet in front of you and react. At 100 mph, the reaction distance is 366.66 feet. So any type of obstruction needs to be, say, 500 feet away before you have any type of chance of avoiding it or changing course or slowing down.

Basically, at 120 mph, you have very little margin for error. ANd if something is less than 500 feet away and happens suddenly, you have zero time to react.

Better cars are not the answer, computer-controlled transportation is the answer: no accidents, ability to go faster, more efficient.

You might be interested in http://www.skytran.net/. It still doesn't come to you, but it is automated and (in theory) 120MPH with inches between cars...

I find this walkthrough extremely thought-provoking. A lot of interesting reading elsewhere on their site too.

workplaces are so scattered and decentralized that buses take too long to get anyone anywhere useful, and extensive commuter and light rail would have to be practically everywhere, with lots of parallel east-west and north-south lines and express tracks in order to work.

The big downside being that it's not even reached prototype. But if it panned out like they think it will, it would be cheaper than one big train line even with R&D included. More conventional PRT designs could address the last-mile issue, but probably wouldn't be appropriate for the long-haul, and a maglev-like fat pipe might be necessary. (Though there might be enough rooms on the highway if shorter trips were redirected)

A waste - an utterly complete waste.

Think about it - it is a train that only goes 40 mph, only travels a small distance (as one poster here said, he could walk it in 5 minutes), and sucks electricity like a pig. Where are the advantages?

Sure, it looks and sounds cool, but until electricity if free (or near free), it is a near worthless application of the technology (that of magnetic levitation and propulsion - I realise that there ARE some practical uses of the tech, but not "people mover" - yet). What are the advantages of this train over, say, a standard small light-rail train? Or something smaller like a BART system?

If smoothness of ride is wanted, why not use "sprung" linear ball bearing tracks, and a smooth bottom train, coupled with propelling "booster" wheels (like that used to get roller coasters away from the stations) along the track every so often, activated as the train approached, deactivated after it had gone by (heck, make it cheaper - drop the ball bearing track and use good sprung bogeys, with a bottom friction plate on the train).

What further galls me is the idea that this is planned to be extended, for larger area use. The cost for this (and light rail) is very high, but there are other alternatives. Phoenix, AZ recently passed its own "light rail initiative", called Transit 2000 - the original website is gone, but "they" chose to go with a standard light rail system. There was a competing system, which was passed over (more on that in a bit). Funny thing about the Phoenix system - I haven't heard much of anything on it since the initiative passed the voters (ie, the tax got passed) - likely it is being funneled and used to line pockets. Plus, I haven't got the slightest idea how they plan to put it in the area proposed - if you live in Phoenix, and look at the map of the route, you know that there is NO WAY IT WILL FIT, at least not without serious restructuring of a major freeway.

Anyhow, as far as the other system is concerned? The other system was Doug Malewicki's SkyTran. The concept seems sound, he has presented his plan in a clear fashion on his website. I still hope one day he will get the funding to make this invention a reality (hell, if he could just sell his Robosaurus he could probably get a prototype going)...

Though the site is cheesy in parts, the idea is sound.

Simple, fast, cheap transportation. I am a big fan, and think it would be better than a $650 million 7 mile monorail. Capacity would be a little lower per line, but lines are WAY cheaper to build.

Just a thought.

Look at what we could have had, had our politicians not had their heads up their arses:

Douglas J. Malewicki's SkyTran System

That's right! That was the competitor to what we got, which is a normal, everyday, light rail system (which is somehow supposed to sit adjacent in some fashion to I-17 in some manner, as well as along 19th Avenue - where they plan to find the space, is anybody's guess) - the dollar value of one car (of light rail) could have funded a lot of work on SkyTran - think about that come tax time.

Another thing to think about: Supposedly construction is supposed to start in 2003 - but I have yet to hear anything more on this boondoggle, which I think merely went to line corrupt politician pockets...

There are other related systems that perform at much higher speed. My personal favourite is SkyTran, which is a MagLev system that operates at up to 150MPH, doesn't suffer from congestion, and because it doesn't have to stop at intersections, or to pick up and set down other passengers, it's actually much quicker and more convenient than any other form of transportation, including private cars.

And instead of running on inconvenient roads, you just need to build a special 1.5 meter track to your destination. My, this IS cheaper and easier than driving!

The track for these systems costs heaps less than the same distance worth of road, and has less wear-and-tear (especially in the case of SkyTran). A city implementing this instead of just blindly building more roads will actually turn a profit on it within a decade.

What's more, the absence of drivers means no speeding, running red lights, no pedestrians getting knocked down, no drunk drivers.

These systems could quite easily replace the automobile, and they bring so many benefits there's no reason why cities shouldn't be planning things this way now.