Slashdot Mirror
By Road and Rail?
CygnusXII writes "Now this is a novel approach to Dual Mode Transportation. This is an interesting and refreshing approach, that could revolutionize the transportation industry. BladeRunner Dual Mode Transport, or see the main web page. The innovative vehicle will run on road as well as rail. It is as applicable to freight as to passenger transport. Branch-line infrastructure costs could be at least halved because signalling and points could be largely, if not totally, made redundant."
...looking through their website, everything is cartoons and toy models. The colour scheme doesn't help make this look anything more than playtime-fantasy-imagination-happy-fun-hour either.
Get on a train, and then switch to a bus. Its simpler, cheaper, and the system is already in place. The practical applications of this idea seem rather flimsy.
Innovation is A Good Thing, but this project has all the complexities and drawbacks of both systems. The more components something has, the more likely it is to break.
Plus the main benefit of rail is that you know exactly where everything is supposed to be. The signalmen are not going to want this thing wrecking their entire schedule because it's stuck on a minor road doing 15mph behind Granny Betty.
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By being able to change from rail to road transit, the dualmode vehicle can go off rail and steer past another vehicle or obstruction on a tramway.
Wwwaaait a second... You can't be serious! You're telling me this bus-train will leave the tracks, get past another train, and the get back on the railroad?
I don't know how railroads are built over there, but where I come from you don't have roads going immediatly on the side of tracks. I mean, most times the tracks were built in the countryside, and have grass and trees all around them..
Blade Runner the movie: field of entertainment.
BladeRunner the bizarre-looking semi: field of transportation.
Absolutely no conflict whatsoever, according to American patent and trademark laws.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
According to TFA, fuel costs are reduced by 45% by riding on rail, due to steel-on-steel rolling resistance being less than rubber-on-asphalt.
So this may be cost-effective for medium-distance passenger/freight hauling, even if a driver is present at all times.
(Short-distance may suffer from the problems that you mentioned; for long-distance you may as well use a normal train.)
What utter nonsense.
Blade Runner is a trademark of...
The Gates Corporation" in the context of "G & S: POWER TRANSMISSION BELTS FOR MACHINES, MOTORS AND ENGINES USED IN INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS; TIMING BELTS FOR MACHINES, MOTORS AND ENGINES USED IN INDUSTRIAL"
Kobelco American Inc. in the context of "Construction machines, namely, excavators and bulldozers"
ROLLERBLADE, INC in the context of rollerblade helmets.
some other guy for fishing lures
and zillions of others in other contexts.
In the context of the movie (irrelevant for this conversation), you're thinking of The Blade Runner Partnership and/or "The Ladd Company" (the company of the fmr president of FOx) who owns the rights to the trademark in this case.
The construction machines guys are probably the most likely to have a problem.
So your professor fed you a line of dogma which happened to agree nicely with your existing prejudices, and you swallowed it. Congratulations on exposing your lack of original thought for all the world to see.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
this isn't intended to be a city bus, silly- nobody's gonna be pulling any tabs to get off at the next corner. what this is intended to do is be a bridge between long-distance passenger bus service (greyhound) -where it has the drawback of being able to get stuck in traffic- and long-distance passenger rail service (amtrak) -where it has the drawback of only being able to go where the rail goes, and only being able to stop at rail stations.
this is intended to be the best of both worlds- pick people up where they are, and then get onto the rail and away from traffic.
not that this would ever happen in reality...
That's something I'm having trouble to get enthused about. The articles go on about the fuel efficiency benefits of rail operation, due to reduced rolling drag.
By far the biggest contributor to fuel consumption on a truck or bus at 100km/h is aerodynamic drag.
The most effective way for trucks and busses to reduce their fuel consumption is to slipstream. Other than a token futuristic streamlining job, this Bladerunner system does nothing to reduce aerodynamic drag - so total fuel consumption wouldn't be significantly reduced compared with on-road operation.
If we could get a whole fleet of blade-runner trucks and busses, rolling on rails, closely coupled to reduce aerodynamic drag...
...it would look just like a conventional train, with the efficiencies and limitations of a conventional train.