New Thoughts in Public Transportation

Matthew Shaylor writes "The BBC has the following article about an ultramodern public transport system to be tested in Cardif. Unlike conventional public transport, this consists of small cars that running on tracks can automatically take themselves to the correct destination. This allows there to be a mesh of tracks and stations thoughout a city, as opposed to traditional transport which tends to run along corridor routes to a city center. An interesting paper is available. Future versions may have dual control to allow people to drive the cars from the nearest station off the track to their homes. A true replacement for the car!"

Comments

but what they didn't mention...

[PorcelainLabrador]

.. is that the people constructing these tracks don't have a large enough supply of "curved" sections of track, and always have plenty of "straight" sections of track. Thus, they keep having to go back to Toys R Us to buy more "curvy" tracks...

ah packet based travel

[gnurd]

beats circut switched traffic any day. now i see why this is on /.

Fail-safing

[Spamalamadingdong]

The biggest problem we found was what would happen if the cars were going really fast, and the power suddenly went off... We used the term "Mass Death". :^)

I don't suppose it occurred to your crew to have batteries on board the vehicles to take them to the next stop, or just use regenerative braking to power the vehicle systems while the de-powered part of the network came to a stop and shut down gracefully? (I really hate contrived disaster scenarios.)