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Fiddler on the RUF
CNN has a story on an innovative transportation concept, a cross between a car and a train. It's an electric car which can also ride on elevated railways for long-distance, automated travel. The company website has some more information and pictures of their prototype.
Small, efficient, non-polluting cars
rails
It'll take America by storm!
This is a very smart idea, although it is not dissimilar to PRT (personal rapid transit), a sort of fringe and relatively unimplemented technology. As a public sector planner, I see three things to think about with this sort of 'personalized rail' approach:
(1) Capacity - These personal rail car concepts tend to fail when it comes to extremely dense corridors. As you can imagine, heavy rail can push many more people through a single rail corridor than this sort of technology. Right now you can push about 2K cars/lane/hour, compared to densities of nearly 10K for heavy rail systems. With this technology, you could decrease headways and maybe squeeze another few K through, but:
(2) Cost - these rail systems still cost on the order of $5M US/km to build, while each highway lane only costs about $200K to build. So, you are still getting less for your tax money with this stuff. Not that I am totally against this, though. Essen (Germany) has a clever system that does this, except the cars are busses that turn into light rail. I can see these applied intelligently for mid-range suburban corridors where other forms of transit are not applicable, but this brings us to the final issue:
(3) Consumer Adoption - when you are trying to get customers to change modes and you are asking them to make large capital outlays to do so, you are asking for trouble. This is the main issue with automated highways (like those prototyped at Berkeley). You can build the public infrastructure, but without private investment on a large scale, it does not fly.
For these reasons, I think that this might be a great transit technology, but will have a hard climb to become an accepted mode in urban areas. I guess that we will have to wait for the super-magical-mysterious panacea that is IT!
Let us be fair here. The concept is nice. Not particularly original, but nice. As far as practicality is concerned, it would be easier (and safer?) to land a man on the sun.
How on earth can one expect 10,000 vehicles (an exceedingly SMALL estimate for a major metropolitan area) to line up on tracks leading into a city?? The vehicles need to merge in order to be mounted the tracks in an orderly manner behind eachother in an interlocking fashion.
Merging in traffic is the slowest aspect of a commute, and this system makes it slower and more complicated. There's a reason cities like Los Angeles and New York have multiple 16 lane highways and double merge lanes. Expecting an increase in traffic flow from a decrease in merge efficiency is not just silly.
To quote the egg wave informerical man "it's flippin impossible".
Here's a picture of the working prototype. Pretty advanced stuff.
All of these "automated road" concepts share a similar difficulty: handing control back to the driver at the end of the automated portion of the journey.
You can beep and flash lights all you want, but if the driver is asleep, passed out from drink, or engaged in coitus, there's a good chance that you'll have to bring the vehicle to a full stop and wait a few moments for zir to resume control.
In fact, I would expect that safety concerns would very quickly result in a requirement that each vehicle must be brought to a complete stop before handing control back to the driver.
That in turn means that each off-ramp will need a landing zone capable of stacking up a few cars while their drivers get their acts together.
This would, perhaps, not be dissimilar to what happens with some downtown off-ramps today, which have traffic lights at the bottom, resulting in cars sitting idle on the ramp, waiting for the light to change. The difference is that every RUF off-ramp would have that sort of built-in delay.
Another problem, specific to RUF, is that there is no equivalent to the passing lane. So whenever there is a blockage -- for example, when an accident occurs or an off-ramp backs up -- it will block the entire flow of traffic, which could very quickly bring the whole system to a standstill.
These may not be insurmountable problems, but they would have to be addressed before implementing a system such as this.
-deane
Gooroos Software: plugging you in to Maya
-deane
Oo, a mass-transit proposal which requires 1) huge investments in infrastructure and 2) every user to buy a special car, seeking investors, and with no committed government support.
Where do I place my pre-order?
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The short summary. Yes, it is possible using various techniques (flexible/segmented sections of monorail beam, beam replacement, etc.).
The page also explains that the "monorails can't switch" myth was due to a particularly bad and bulky implementation at Wuppertal, and that the myth has since been perpetuated by various shady sources such as Microsoft Encarta.