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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!"
this isn't a new "concept", but I find it interesting that something that always seemed (to me) to be one of those sci-fi concepts that was, while not impossible, very very improbable due the the immense infrastructure required - to see this now actually being discussed as a possibility. it's actually quite interesting.
You see, without that little doohicky, the universe stops.
http://propheteer.org
If I ride a Sewgay, can I fit it onto one of these cars to that I don't run the battery down if I'm going across town?
I'm v.pleased to see from the photo that they will allow bikes to be taken aboard.
The combination of bike and public transport is perfect for me and many others.
Hogsback
on a side note, doesn't the picture of the ULTra on the elevated track remind you of the Monorail epsiode of the simpsons?
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Back in my freshman year in college, I proposed and worked on a very similar transportation system, called HSTS (High Speed Transit System). Other engineering students collaborated with it as well. We even had a student code a Java applet that simulated the whole thing. 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". :^)
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The only problem with this solution (robotic cars) is that it does absolutly nothing for the environment. I realize, this is a side goal of mass transit systems, but it is a valid goal none the less. So I hope the robotic cars idea doesn' t get popular before we have much more efficient automobiles.
I'm a programmer, I don't have to spell correctly; I just have to spell consistently
Instead of installing some corrider-constrained, incredibly expensive Mag-Lev system of dubious value which does nothing to address the nightmare of getting from neighborhood to neighborhood in this tangle of hills, gullies and twisty streets they call a City, they could use existing arterials (supplimented perhaps with a couple of new ones) to *greatly* expand the reach of public transportion and make it practical to ditch the now-mandatory two-car-per-family lifestyle.
Phew, feels good to get that off my chest...
There was an article in Scientific American about three years ago regarding the advances in public transportation made in Curitibo, Brazil. Their basic idea was to redesign all their roads from the standpoiont of getting people around. They placed seperate bus lanes on each road (seperate physically from the other lanes), and people paid to enter the bus stop instead of the bus. This meant people quickly entered the bus at each stop, without anyone digging around for change when entering the bus, etc. And the seperate lanes meant the buses went from place to place without much hinderance from car traffic. Also, their roads were all laid out with a great deal of thought, resembling a darts target with circular and radiating routes. The system worked remarkably well, and most people used public transit to get around.
Its amazing what can be accomplished when someone actually puts real thought into the system they're developing.
Some men spend their entire lives trying to kill themselves for having been born. --Ross MacDonald
Americans tend to take a very negative view of public transportation. Part of this is due to the fact that it's public, and the public includes people who are drunk, abusive, and smell bad. People you would never ride with by choice. Even though they make up a small minority of the bus- and subway-riding public, they're enough to spoil the experience and make one not want to ride public transportation.
These transport pods look like they'd eliminate most of that problem, as they're small enough one could travel alone or with a small group of one's own choosing.
The dedicated track part could still be a problem. Americans like to go where they want, when they want (doesn't everyone) and with the ready availability of (polluting, road-clogging) cars, I don't see them opting for any track-based transport system in the near future. Americans also take a kind of pride in their vehicles (witness the huge number of heavy, expensive, rollover-prone "off-road" vehicles that have never been off a road). Maybe this kind of thing will work in Cardiff, but to really make an impact on the environment, petroleum industry etc., one needs a system that will work in the U.S. Where the cars are.
Traffic congestion is still a problem at intersections, as parking them. I'd also like to see how it handles routing through the city.
You have the relatively cheap option of doing it in 3D. No intersection, no problem. Not sure about parking, but I guess that you just have sidings big enough for one car every twenty metres (in busy areas). You get out, it leaves to pick someone else up. Routing will be a very interesting programming problem.
Also, now we're talking about tracks. What happens when one jumps the tracks? It just sit there hold up everything else behind it?
Presumably. That'd be the same as trains and cars...
How are we going to accomodate for all these tracks in existing cities? It's grossly expensive and takes up space.
Hmm. Tear up some of the roads and stop subsidising drivers would be my knee-jerk response. Alternatively, since you won't need to accommodate any forty tonne trucks, just build them all as flyovers to existing roads. It is expensive, true, but so is purchasing new land for more roads, maintaining roads, and dealing with the adverse affects of motor vehicle over-use.
James
I find it interesting that we keep proposing (and implementing) systems that are really quite "space age" whatever that means, but the actual face of the world doesn't seem to change that much. This is such a fascinating idea, and one that I think has quite a bit of merrit. The only problem that I see is that of mixing this and regular traffic. I don't want to be trapped inside one of these little boxes toodling allong at a leisurly 25mph and have some jackass with his suv and cellphone run over me doing 50. I know the solution described in the article runs on a special track, but for a mass transit solution to work and gain wide use in anything but the largest cities, it has to share the infrastructure with regualr vehicles, otherwise it is often prohibitively expensive.
I know that mass transit works, but it works best in very dense population centers, because it is limited to specific routes. What if only one of your destination endpoints is near a mass transit station. Then you either have to walk or drive to the terminal. That works durring summer, or if you live in a warm dry climate, but right now I have to think twice about walking across the parkinglot to get my car it is so cold outside. I guess my point is that mass transportation needs to be nearly door to door or it will not gain wide acceptance.
When I want your opinion I will beat it out of you.
My favorite link for this sort of thing is this PRT page. (And on a side note, I think hanging the cars makes more sense than riding on top of the rails). It's a good idea but it will take some getting used to, and will require mass-production to become truly cheap.
A finite resource will always be completely consumed so long as there are no limitations on the consumption of that resource. A resource in short supply becomes expensive, while a resource in good supply becomes cheap, and a resource in oversupply is still snapped up by anyone who thinks they can use it.
This is true of transportation as well. No matter how much road you build, someone will always find a way to use it. The only limiting factor is that people don't like to travel for more than an hour. When highways are built suburbia springs up around them. When the Long Island Railroad was built, the areas around the stations w/in an hour's travel quickly became heavily developed. Building roads does not make travel easier - it just enables more of it. Thus the most important factor in a transportation system is not how much it can carry, but how well it performs at peak capacity. Railroads, and presumably PRT, may become crowded the traffic continues to flow. But auto roads perform miserably above a certain traffic level - some sort of breakdown always occurs and brings huge chunks of the system to a standstill.
The first key to making PRT a reality is to make it effective enough and cheap enough to allow near door-to-door travel as fast or faster than cars. If people have to take a car to get to the PRT station, they will figure that they might as well drive all the way to their destination. The second key is to make the system strong and flexible enough to allow changes in how it is used (like cargo transport, and automatic delivery).
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
So do a lot of places, like the Atlanta-Hartsfield Airport (ATL) and Tampa International Airport (TPA) terminal transportation systems. Hell, the entire U-Bahn in Germany is automatically controlled, with the "conductors" or "engineers" or "drivers" or whatever the hell they are only there for safety and in case of emergency.
Unfortunately, this system idea is a bit more complex: The dozens of paths and crossings on each line of the Munich U-Bahn system are still nothing compared with the complexity of a 20-square-block street area, much less the implementation for an entire town or even subdivision.
Nice idea, but reality says, "No dice." People want cars, even when they're expensive to own, operate and maintain. They're convenient (except for parking), can be personalised/customised, and they're private.
woof.
Screw this system --I want the flying cars they promised me when I was a kid!
I've considered the population density argument in the past, and still think it's a red herring--even you agree that public transport makes good sense in cities.
But how big does a city need to be to have an effective transportation system? Sure, Chicago and New York are (apparently) excellent. So is the Bay Area. LA's system isn't that great, though--certainly not for an urban area of its size and population. I lived in San Diego for two years, and their transit system would be an embarassment for a city 1/3 the size! Boulder, the 'pride and joy of alternate transportation,' has a decent system. Not great, but decent.
Note that all of these comparisons are based on the opinion of a Canadian--not of a European.
I think that the biggest reason public transit won't work in the US is that people don't _want_ it to work (and don't want to put money into it, and...); and the biggest reason that people don't want it to work is that they're put off by the current, dysfunctional systems.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Ah, PRT, the future of transportation. West Virginia University has had it's own PRT (Personal Rapid Transit, also known by the students as Pretty Retarded Train) system since the early 1970's. The PRT serves as the primary mode of transportation between the two main campuses for thousands of students every day.
In fact, this morning I was riding the PRT to my CS lab, when I experienced first hand one of the minor glitches in the computer system that controls the PRT.
The computer system is still the original one from the 70's, housed in a warehouse-like building, mainframes with magnetic tape reels and all, running programs written in Fortran by the engineering students that built the thing, with all the processing power of the average digital watch.
Anyways, the PRT car I was in was right in the middle of the long straight stretch, having reached it's top running speed of about 40 miles per hour, when the power went out. The little electric cars are designed so that when the power goes out, the wheels lock up.
So, our PRT car goes from 40 mph to a dead stop in under 1 second. I was immediately reminded of physics class; objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. I was standing up at the time. Fortunately, the outside force acting upon me was the soft and squishy back of the person in front of me. The people sitting in the front had the less pleasant experience of having their faces acted upon at 40 mph by the front plexiglass window.
So, yeah, PRT all the way!
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
The republican pesident, congress, state and
local legislatures will never allow this to happen,
being wholly owned subsidiaries of big oil, inc.
Just a thought .. made above what used to be
... lol
.. it all makes just too much sense..
street level..nice lil monorail
on a overhead track... you let
the grass grow once again where there was
nothing but concrete.this alone would make it
worth the expense.and id trust a computer more
than some drivers once they have their fill....
No more DUI
And yet
this will never pass through the political
bull. : )
Future versions may have dual control to allow people to drive the cars from the nearest station off the track to their homes.
Now that's something I could buy into. Public transport is great and all, but the problem has always been (at least in the US) that once you get to your stop, there's still quite a ways to go. Also, Americans in general just plain and simple don't want to give up the mobility of having a car.
Personally, I live near Atlanta, GA. We have the MARTA trains to move you through the city. The only problem is, the city is huge, and MARTA has maybe a couple of dozen stops thorughout the city, and it doesn't even span out to where I live. The result is if I were to take the MARTA anywhere, I'd still end up travelling 2-5 miles, sometimes more, to my final destination. That's just plain useless.
Being able to drive your car onto a public transportation grid that would take control and send you whisking off to whatever exit you chose would be great. I don't know how it would handle tremendous volumes, but if they can get the process down pat I would be one of it's biggest supporters.
~ now you know
The dual control aspect is the part I find most interesting.
One of the big wastes of the car industry is the amount of time all the capital (i.e. the cars) is being under-utilised. What percentage of time does a car sit on your driveway?
This system has the potential to turn into the ultimate shared car pool.... you can use them as public transport, but if you needed a car you could just switch it to manual and drive wherever you wanted, paying for use by the minute or whatever. When you'd finished, you'd just have to drop the car back onto any point in the network and it would wander off for someone else to use.
Would present some interesting technical challenges - the system would have to adapt to cars being dropped at any point in the network, and also dynamically move cars around so that there were enough units in the areas where demand is high. You might have to give it special warning in the case of major sports events or public gatherings, for example.
And as the article mentions, this kind of light weight guideway is less expensive to build than light rail (which itself, of course, is a lot less expensive than heavy rail/subway systems).
That means that you can build a big enough packet-switched transit network to compete with car use.
It also solves the problem of the stations not being nearby - just drive your car to the on ramp, sit back and enjoy the ride. Until the exit comes and you have to wake up, of course.
Was that out loud?
That is an incorrect assumption! The benefits of a well designed and implemented mass transit system are much more far reaching than solely to the individuals actually using the system.
And just where might this system be?
The only and best known cases of mass transit that work are the ones where there is absolutely no other choice that can be made. For example, access to downtown New York City is impractical in most motor vehicles. The transportation models for motor vehicles don't scale to that density. Everyone uses public transportation not because they want to but because nothing else works. But I live on a farm, not New York City. Their solutions don't scale to me either.
And also, before you continue on your anti-SUV line of rant, consider what vehicle options a family of five should use: No, I don't have enough room in an econo-box for my wife, an aging mother in law, and two small children in child safety seats. Our alternatives are 1) two cars, 2) a minivan, 3) a large sedan or station wagon, or 4) an SUV.
Options 2, and 3 have similar efficiencies. Option 4 is only slightly worse, Option 1 is simply impractical. Just so you know, my wife and I chose option 3.
Believe me, I'd drive a smaller vehicle in an instant if I thought it were feasible. But it ain't gonna happen for many years. Neither is it likely that I'll see any form of public transportation out where I live.
You talk about squandering natural resources. Ever study what it takes to run a city? Ever really wonder whether there truly is an economy of scale there? Well, I suspect you won't like the answer.
Before you go green with stupidity, think. Think about how mass transit works when you're carting around three or more dependents. Think about what a mass transit system is supposed to do during off-peak hours. Yes, cities may have economies of scale, but they also have the overhead of distribution systems. And if that's not enough, think about failure modes.
Clearly the guys who wrote the article believe in autopilots. That's nice. Do you trust your neighbor to maintain this autopilot so that it won't fail catastrophically? How about the instrumentation that feeds it? Clearly when even one such control system goes wrong the consequences are far greater than if just one idiot runs a red light.
Don't think you can coerce your neighbors to use what you use. Successful systems work because they appeal to everyone. SUVs appeal to many families because there really isn't anything with the safety and capacity that these things have. Yes, I'd like economy too. But which features do you think are more popular?
Enjoy your nice haven in the city. Just remember what supports it, and remember that yours isn't the one and only way of life.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Okay, here's the deal... the reason Americans can't live without their cars is that their cities are built around the idea of the car and can't operate efficient public transport systems because of their 'shape'.
There's an interesting intersection of transport, urban theory and economics going on here. I did my graduate architectural thesis on the design of transport systems and got heavily into the topic.
The structure of most major European cities was built before and during the 19th century, a period when the options were to walk to work, take slow (relative to today) horse-drawn public transport or, toward the end of the century, cycle. This had a major effect on the shape of European cities - it lead to high density urban settlement, since most people will try to minimise the time it takes them to get to work, particularly if you're working a 12 hour day plus a half day on Saturday, which wasn't uncommon 150 years ago.
From the end of the 19th through to the first half of the 20th century, as the technology of transportation improved, we got electric trams and various forms of railway and buses with internal combustion engines. These modes of transport changed city shapes somewhat, with ribbons of suburban settlement spreading out in spokes from the early and mid-century core. Commuterland was born.
What's important to note here is that commuter flows in this setup work like river systems draining to the city centre, with walking feeding to buses and trams, then to railways - each level an increasingly heavy capital cost, but since the volumes of traffic rise, they're still economic to put into service and maintain. Everyone's moving along the same routes from one easily defined location to another to planning mass transport is relatively simple.
Let's contrast this with the younger cities of the US, which have mostly flourished since the 1920s and in a period when low-cost personal transport has become available in the form of the automobile.
With a car, you aren't limited to moving along the routes defined by public transport systems. You can go from anywhere, to anywhere, at any time you choose. That's why the automobile has been so spectacularly successful in the 20th century. Using a car, you can live in one suburb and work in another making a daily journey which would be very awkward with a European-model public transport system. You'd have to go into the city centre and back out again.
Automobiles induce people's journeys patterns to flatten and begin to lose their geographical structure. Over time, this has an effect in the very structure of a city - shops and places of work can be almost randomly located miles away from homes and all three can intermingle and recombine in many permutations. The American romance with the block/grid system of urban planning embodies the neutral network of the car perfectly in contrast with European organic urban planning based on patterns of historic use, travel and topographical incident.
When a city is structured so that any given node practically has the same importance as any other, providing a public transport service to meet what is now nearly a random walk becomes impossible from an economic point of view. You'd have to run lots of very small buses criss-crossing the city at close intervals - the bus turns into a taxi service. Traffic congestion makes bus timetables a point of humour anyway.Railways are redundant since not enough people are making journeys along their high maintenance-cost fixed routes.
So, with the rise of American cities coinciding with the rise of the internal combustion engine, public transport had much less opportunity to help build the American city and make itself useful to citizens. The car has shoe-horned out any competition by shaping the city to its own patterns.
Of course, the car brings its own issues: it's a fiendishly inefficient use of finite energy resources (still mostly derived from carbon-rich fossil fuels or nuclear fission, even if the car is powered by electricity). Big retail parks (owned by national and international chains) have persuaded you that you should be spending your own money distributing goods you have purchased instead of having them delivered to a local shop, which has gone out of business. If you live in a modern suburb it's possible that a shop that's in walking distance never existed. People without access to personal mechanised transport find it increasingly difficult to perform their daily tasks. You have to devote a chunk of your income going to the gym regularly to make up for the exercise you're missing by not walking or cycling...
Anyhow, that's how I see "Why are most AMERICANS so hung up on their cars?"
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
"People will destroy and/or urinate in anything that is remotely "public" if they are not being watched (and sometimes even then). For you see, most of us are complete assholes, especially when drunk."
Man what is it with all these remarks. Does anyone here realize how good the security can be? Start to destroy one - alarm trips. Sray can / weapon is discharged - alarm trips. Ding - car takes you right to police station with a nice video recording of everything you did.
Yes, I know that for the typical cost of a mass transit system, you could have bought every regular rider at least one new luxury car. But:
1) How was the cost of building the roads factored in? Not fair to compare the cost of a new railbed to just stuffing more traffic into existing roads... I'm not sure about this, but it would seem like a mile of dual-track railbed built only heavy enough for car-like vehicles should cost less than a mile of four-lane road, and (with central control) would handle more traffic.
2) I'd think the cars for one of these systems would actually be a little simpler than an automobile built for independent operation. Electric motor instead of that horribly complex gasoline engine and transmission. Simpler suspension, because you can count on the rails meeting certain standards for smoothness, and no steering. Lots of electronics, but that's cheap nowadays. So if the cars were built in sufficient quantity, they'd cost the same or less as autos.
Of course, the trouble is that autos are built by the millions, but trams are custom-built. Could you design the trams to use an existing car body, just drop an electric motor under the hood, leave out the steering, and change the wheels?