Slashdot Mirror
Mass Transit Meets The Incredibles
Chuckstar writes "Salon.com has an article about SkyWeb Express, a futuristic-looking mass transit system similar to the monorail in the evil villain's secret lair in The Incredibles. What is unique about this system is that individual 3-passenger cars travel independently between stations, which are located on side-tracks so cars only need to stop at the final destination. Apparently, the system is relatively cheap to install, cost efficient per passenger mile, and much more flexible than traditional mass transit. The New York Post covered the topic last month."
Mono-doh!
Apparently, the system is relatively cheap to install, cost efficient per passenger mile, and much more flexible than traditional mass transit.
Flexible it would be if Elastigirl helped to invent it!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Why in the heck is the word "Web" in SkyWeb?
"Ha ha! We will put the word 'web' in our product's name! It has a computer! From the future!"
this is old news. how do stories like this get through?
an eeeeevil monorail?
Regards, Ian
"travel independently between stations", "cheap to install "cost efficient per passenger mile" "much more flexible than traditional mass transit" Gauranteed to never be implemented anywhere
If you forget about the future, the future will forget about you.
Maybe Lenard Nimoy is available for the opening.
This is what the 'self driving car' should be.
I'm sure that I recall reading about this a couple of months ago, and the question that immediately came to my mind is: what do you do if you have more than three or four passengers? Families of five need not apply and so on.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Mono... D'oh!
PBS is forcing me to watch ads.
This train waits for ME.
Am I Soviet Russia?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
This is far better than both a "mass transit" train or a car.
For a better and simpler solution look to Curbita's bus system in Brazil. They just set aside roads for bus only, give them chrome boxes so they always get a green light, and make the bus stop the pay station so you can load and unload quickly. A system like Curbita requires nothing more than a better bus stop and large doors and moves more people than a subway at a fraction of the cost. Their system cost $.25 a ride and makes a profit.
Perhaps when all is said and done, the transit routes will be connected to each other, in the same sense of the "world-wide web" and computers.
The other is, never do a movie when Vicini is a manager over insurance agents!!! Hahahahahah!!! *gasp* /dead
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Sure, part of your vehicle would vaporize and you would probably be centrifuged into your constituent molecules on turns, but just think how fast you could get where you wanted to go?
P.S. I loved "The Incredibles". Thank you pixar for consistently violating the Hollywood tradition of making sucky movies.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
(I hate it when advertising works. I feel... dirty.).
Several (at least 5) years ago there was talk of a similar system to serve Bristol, a largish city in the UK. The idea was for small "pods" (as they were called) to carry around 5 passengers at a time to various destinations along a tram line. Aside from concerns about vandalism, I believe at the time it was thought impractical, and shoved away in favour of a normal tram (which was then denied funding...).
Rather than packing into a large carriage with a hundred smelly strangers, with PRT you get a private car.
Do they sterilize between uses?
For those of us who don't have a premium subscription and don't want to watch an ad:
Car ports
How those eerily beautiful bubble cars in "The Incredibles" may well appear in our not-too-distant future.
By Priya Jain
Nov. 19, 2004 | In "The Incredibles," the eponymous superhero family spends much of the movie trying to either escape or infiltrate the villain's high-tech island lair. Among the creepy sci-fi elements -- parrots with camera eyes, a destructive robot that can strategize -- is the beautifully eerie monorail that silently glides around the volcano, transporting the villain's henchmen in small round cars. The heroes occasionally hitch a ride on one of these moving pods while battling the forces of evil.
In real life, we may not have superheroes, but soon we will have those little monorail cars, zipping commuters and shoppers (and maybe an occasional henchman) from point A to point B. They're part of a system called Personal Rapid Transit, or PRT, which is poised to replace the more expensive, less environmentally friendly and frequently less convenient mass transit systems of old.
What really makes PRT different from mass transit is that it combines the convenience and luxury of a taxi with the efficiency of subway and bus travel: Rather than packing into a large carriage with a hundred smelly strangers, with PRT you get a private car. Instead of stopping at every station on the line, you zip straight to your final destination. And the visual impact -- replacing the bulky steel trains and buses with sleek bubbles that look like mid-century creations from the designer Arne Jacobsen -- appeals to any kid who dreamt of being a Jetson, or now, an Incredible.
Leading the way in the PRT revolution is the Minnesota-based Taxi 2000 Corporation, founded in 1983 by Dr. J. Edward Anderson, a former NASA engineer who turned his attention to transit in 1968. After studying the problems with conventional mass transit, he developed SkyWeb Express, which is poised to be the first commercial PRT system in the world.
Anderson claims SkyWeb Express beats mass transit in every way: It's greener, more convenient, safer and visually more acceptable, since the cars and rail are streamlined and small (observe this comparison between the New York subway and a SkyWeb system). The cars, unlike the round pods in "The Incredibles," are egg-shaped, and allow enough room for three to four people plus their shopping bags, luggage and wheelchair or bicycle. They run on synthetic rubber tires, which reduce noise pollution, along a monorail guideway that's 3 feet wide by 3 feet deep. And because the system is powered by 600-volt DC electricity, it produces no emissions.
As Taxi 2000 imagines the scenario, commuters would enter the station, purchase a fare card and head to the platform -- just as one does now with most rail systems. But instead of waiting for a train to come by, passengers would hop into one of the empty cars that are idling in the station, swipe their card and enter a destination code. Because stations are positioned "offline" -- that is, the rail runs next to the station, not through it -- cars can pull into stops without slowing down traffic.
SkyWeb Express may also be the answer to the seemingly impossible quandary that every environmental advocate faces: how to make green technologies cost-effective. Taxi 2000 estimates that installation of SkyWeb Express would cost $10 million per mile -- nearly five times less than the cost of light rail and 10 times less than heavy rail. And operating costs at 38 cents per passenger mile (compared to $3.43 for heavy rail and $1.42 for light rail) mean that SkyWeb Express could operate on a break-even basis -- and therefore without the government subsidies that mass transit, which operates at a loss, relies on. The guideway also weighs less and is easier to assemble than light or heavy rail, and in fact the guideway can be installed by an ordinary fork-lift truck, only minimally disrupting regular traffic and there
What is unique about this system is that individual 3-passenger cars travel independently between stations, which are located on side-tracks so cars only need to stop at the final destination.
Seems like it's out of Logans Run. Nice idea, bringing the convenience of personal transportation with the benefits of mass transit.
A Human Right
Efficient broadband (1+ gigbit/sec) to the home, with live 24/7 audio and video, voip multiline phone, and a $8000 desk, pc, printer+scanner+fax+im solution, and you avoid the commute altogether.
Of course, the companies hates that, because they can't crack the whip.
"Piter, too, is dead."
When will technology like this actually be put into production in a major American city?
2020? 2030? Never?
I'm really getting completely jaded by hearing of all of these wonderful things being developed, which will be put into production Real Soon Now(TM)...
What about those machines that make just about anything into oil? How many plants based on those things are currently operating in the US? One? Two? Maybe THREE? What percentage of our oil production does that account for? 0.01%? Maybe 0.02%? Maybe less?
Color me skeptical, but inertia has taken such a hold in human endeavors (at least, here in the US) that I get really upset whenever I read of all of these wonderful things which are supposedly coming up "just along the pike", as it were, but which I have to remind myself I will never see in operation in my life.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
It looks cool, but what happens if your car breaks down? There doesn't appear to be an emergency exit walkway.
But that may be moot: If your car breaks down or comes to an abrupt halt, do you get smashed by the car behind you?
Make no mistake; I think it's cool as hell. But I'd want to know how their system, "handles exceptions."
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
So, when a mass transit accident happens, it only affects one small car full of 3-5 people... less injuries = less healthcare costs for the city.
Of course, you increase the cost of maintenance with so many moving parts, and you increase the liklihood of mechanical failure due to so many little cars traveling...
Now, if they could only figure out how to mix current genetic research and The Incredibles... I sure would like to be elastic or invisible...
This is really cool. I hope it catches on. Maybe it can be built in the Seattle-Tacoma area instead of the monorail that nobody wants to pay for.
First, there is more than one car on the system. If you have more than three, take extra cars.
But why three, and not four, or five? The reason I've read in the past is this:
Three is the smallest number of occupants that guarantees that no members of a group need to ride alone.
If the cars held two, and your group of three arrived, then someone would have to ride by themselves. Not fun, and socially difficult.
It's true that if the cars held four, the same system would work (five people go in three and two). There is, however, significant expense to adding another passenger space. You'd either have to make them wider. This would increase the space between the railings, and the overall construction cost in addition to the car cost. You could add another row of seats, but that would increase the complexity and cost of the car.
Three is the right number.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
I can already see teenagers "renting" a pod, covering the windows and circling the city over and over and over . . .
After watching the video, are we sure this isn't a plugin for the Sims? Those people sure do look like Sims.
Seriously, this might be one of those things like monorails that are built simply because they look futuristic. But they've had a pretty bad record in actual operation, especially in the sort of constant intense daily service that is needed for public transportation. And their cost estimates tend to be somewhat off, though they may just be optimistic for lack of sufficient examples. But monorails, such as the Las Vegas monorail, tend to cost about as much as elevated light rail, if not more. The Las Vegas monorail also opened only after many months of delays, and has now out of service for 3 months after a wheel fell off a train. So I think PRT will stay "poised to replace subways" for a while yet. And if they really did work, then where are the examples?
And other than the technical problems, somehow nobody notices the obvious social one. If you have privacy in a public vehicle, what's to stop you from befouling it in some way? Also, it would be a handy terrorist tool. Just put the bomb in and set the car to go to the target.
..you happen to sit next to one of these guys?
sigs, as if you care.
Sounds much like an upgrade of Disney's old "people mover" system that they un-installed a few years back
It would be interesting to see how they design stations which have a large amount of congestion at various times of the day. I'm guess their graphic is a typical station, but the waiting traffic would easily overrun the main track in even the smallest city.
:)
Perhaps they can just get away with making the station rail longer? A by-passible loop or two that are introduced during rush hour? (Or when someone cracks into the control system
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Empty vehicles wait for you - not the other way around.
In Soviet Russia you wait for empty vehicles!
Ahh damn, it sounded funnier in my head.
The article states that because the cars are powered with electricity, there is no pollution. This really irks me. While there may be no local pollution or emissions, that doesn't mean that the source of the electricity isn't polluting. If the source is solar or wind power, that's great, but in many (most?) cases the source is more likely to be a coal or gas plant, which are definitely not non-polluting.
I'm not saying I don't think this is a great idea, because I think it's terrific. But to say that it is non-polluting probably isn't true.
More sugar!
Small cities (cities up to 150,000 people) -- generally are contained within a three or so mile radius, so it would make sense to connect malls, grocery stores, and civil services with the system. Some people could use it without having to use a car, some would be able to use it just for the daily commute.
Medium cities (cities up to 500,000 people) -- still a good option, but would probably be used differently. More reliance on cars to get to parking lots that would then use these things to shuttle passengers between the most often visited places (mass transit, some shopping centers, airports, city center). Good coverage of downtown areas would reduce traffic issues there.
Large cities (cities over 500,000 people) -- Too expensive to build and too many places to potentially have to get to. Light rail is a better option for transporting this many people. Other mass transit systems may overlap (water taxis, buses). System would probably only end up serving a small fraction of the city for a small fraction of destinations. Commercial centers are far too large (and distributed) to serve effectively.
Comments, questions, flames?
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
This sounds very much like the maze cars of Logan's Run fame.
"Stop whining!" - Arnold, as Mr. Kimble
Why don't people think these through?
What happens when a "car" breaks down on the line? Are there 2 lines? How do maintenance vehicles get there?
What happens when there is a ball game and everyone wants to get off at the same stop and the backup leaks into the main line?
What happens when too many cars are dropped off at one place and not enough at another? Who load balances?
What happens when someone has thrown up in the car at the front of the line and you don't want to get in it, and want to get in the one behind it? Is there a button that says "send this car off for cleaning?" If so, what happens when teenagers keep hitting that button?
Moving things around is a well modeled set of problems, all logistical, not technological.
Mass transit also suffers from another big problem: Because of decreased ridership, it is at times less efficient than cars.
:)
This brings up the most important (IMHO) hurdle to overcome with any mass transit system - getting the American public to give up their cars in favor of cleaner, cheaper, more efficient travel.
It would SEEM like a no-brainer on paper... but we have a long history with the automobile and its representation of freedom. I mean, regardless of which side you fall on, you must admit that nothing feels greater than riding on a highway in the summertime in a convertable with the top down.
Need proof? Look at how much Americans are continually willing to spend on cars, car insurance, and fuel - all of which are getting more expensive by the day. (Here in Chicago this morning, gas was almost $2.40 per gallon for the cheap stuff.)
Anyway, my point is that, while this is a great idea, there is going to have to be a revolutionary change in our feelings about the "freedom of the open road" before any mass transit ideas really take hold. (The exception, of course, being major metro areas, which have redefined said "freedom" to mean traffic jams resulting in 1.5 hour commutes.)
Bottom line - beware any mass transit system that claims it can "break even" - that's not including the marketing costs that will have to go with it. (Again, Chicago Transit Authority, for example, spends A LOT on advertising alone, while jacking up rates almost yearly.)
I hope the land around you yields, a crop like all the other fields, and then your waiting might make sense...
I remember doing a paper on Ultra-Light Rail Vehicles back in the early 90's, and that paper (I was an engineering student at the time) was itself based on a system that was being tested in Detroit or Chicago (I forget which.) This "SkyWeb" system is another implementation of that concept.
I honestly wish them luck. While it's a great concept, there's a lot of issues they don't go into (that I could see on the site) such as how a single breakdown can choke a chunk of the system. How they deal with getting cars out for maintenance. Etc., etc., etc.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
Because they will.
Carlin: "All destinations are final! That's what it means, destiny... final! If you haven't gotten where you're going... you aren't fucking there yet."
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
It's like the self driving car except it needs a massive infrastructure to make it work less efficiently.
Trains are cool, but why do people automatically see rails and assume they are looking at efficient transportation. When are people going to realize that wheels simply work better on tar roads than they do on metal rails.
That said, this could be a great alternative in smaller cities that typically make the mistake of dumping huge money into insolvent inefficient subway systems that do little to help any traffic congestion.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
My first thought about a weakness here is during rush hour. How will the system handle a very popula destination station where there are more vehicles waiting to unload their passengers than the station has spots at the terminal for, and room on the side-track? Seems this would back up the transit track. It just doesn't seem like the system could handle the sheer volume of a metropolitan rush hour (I'm using Wash., D.C. and the METRO system as my point-of-reference).
but which I have to remind myself I will never see in operation in my life.
...before you passed away.
WVU PRT
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
Erm -- If the stations are a mile apart -- that puts you a maximum of a HALF-Mile away from any given station. That is of course using linear measurement. If it's a 1 mile grid and you're in the exact center, then you've got a 0.707107 mile to any of four stations. So from the exact center of one to the exact center of another would be a 1.414214 mile walk. The theory is that there would always be cars in each station -- so while you would have to walk .7 (max) to your station, you would be able to get in a car and head for your destination immediately. The tracks are set up to be one way -- so you may need to do some looping around (longer trip) but it should be non-stop -- trip time should be much shorter than bus.
Is this workable? Maybe, it probably depends in large part upon location. To me it seems like a possible solution to road expansion in certain areas. Will the road construction lobby work hard to make sure it's stillborn? You bet.
(Check the funding for debt -- derail the bullet train group in florida)
There is a very simular system being trialed in Cardiff. http://www.atsltd.co.uk/ Some interesting analysis on waiting times and congestion on the site. More like a personal taxi without the back chat from the driver.
WVU PRT
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
Sadly, as this is a good concept, the designer(s) obviously did not grow up in a city. Chances are, that upon entering your first skyweb vehicle you would be greeted by the pleasant smell of urine or even a big ol' pile of poo. We don't live in a society where people can be trusted not to destroy these vehicles if they're not constantly policed. If any concept like this is ever going to be a success, there would need to be a very sofisticated mechanism to prevent people from destroying/vandalizing the vehicles, or at lease holding them accountable. I suspect that will require more r&d than the actual transportation design.
Only the pirates are crack addicts. And the Caribbean is North Philadelphia.
This is really interesting. I haven't dug into their number (beyond looking at the pretty graphs) to see what "cost effecient to operate", and "cheap to install" really means. But this system would appear to scale much better than traditional mass transit, perhaps making it economical for suburban mass transit.
That is the biggest problem with mass transit in the US - we are so spread out. Either you have a convienient transit schedule and end up running a whole bunch of buses/trains that would be empty most of the time, and thus unable to pay for themselves. Or you only run buses/trains every so often which makes the system inconvient/impractical enough that most people won't/can't use it.
Sweet, but the only way I'll use it is if they pimp my ride!
I mean, the RATP (main Paris Transit company) had prototypes of a very similar system up & running in 19*86*, for Pete's sake!
m l if you're too lazy to be lucky)
(Google up on "Aramis RATP", or even Babblefish http://www.metro-pole.net/reseau/lignes/aramis.ht
They torn it down, as they demonstrated it would be a user-interface nightmare more than anything. Lots of the tech they developed then (such as provably bug-free software development, or more exactly, proof-oriented software development) found its way into production systems, like the SAET which is the brains of the Line 14 (totally automated, now exported to Singapore and a couple other places).
Now, the day they can merge the various experiments (and early deployments) on "rubber/road tramways" (city of Nancy, France), Aramis, GPS/Galileo, the Citroen C4/C5's AFIL subsystem (Automated Lane Crossing Detector) which you can order TODAY, hydrogen power or fuel cells, and private property, THEN I can see a concept like this succeed.
re: your sig
:-)
Don't tell me the answer if that one's wrong, though
I see an excellent opportunity for public sex, sort of like the Mile High Club! I mean, 3 person glass bubbles speeding along congested public thorofares? Can't get any better than that!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Anyhow this is brand new to me, I'd love to see this all over my city rather than an extension to the incredibly expensive subway system here.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
The urine is detected automatically, the doors lock, and they get transported direct to the pokey...
Xenu loves you!
wow, what a timely story... I just watched Logan's Run last night for the first time. Behold the transportation system of the future...from the late 70's! Wooo..
Note to SkyWeb PR division: I downloaded and saw your video. Some notes:
Basically, it needs better production values.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
WVU has had a PRT for some time. News Blurb
I had a sig once, but someone stole it.
Yeah, it'd be nice to get on a car with two muggers.
the Denver International Airport baggage handling
system. While they worked the bugs out of that,
baggage got destroyed, dumped into strange places,
put on the wrong flights, and so on.
You too can experience this now, personally.
Maybe it can be built in the Seattle-Tacoma area instead of the monorail that nobody wants to pay for.
...Which is why on all four occasions ballot measures revolving around building the monorail have passed. 4 out of 4. Yeah, nobody wants it.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Curbita = Curitiba, right?
I don't have a sig.
I haven't read the article yet, but here are the thoughts I've had about it in the past:
- Run the cars in the street, just like old (wait for it) streetcars.
- Obviously, they'll need proximity sensors and some way to follow traffic signals, etc.
- Put stations at Elementary Schools. In my area, at least, these are plentiful, within walking distance of many homes, and generally fairly safe.
- Join cars up into longer trains as cars with similar destinations meet on the road. These trains can therefore run faster (and once they hit, say, the highway median, jump onto express tracks)
Of course, there are also problems of payment (flash passes, credit card swipers, etc.), car calling (it'd be good to have enough in the system that you never have more than a 5 minute wait), etc. But generally, those are technical / scalability problems, not issues with implementation in general. The hardest issue to crack would be right-of-way, but getting the cars to co-exist on current surface roads would nip that problem in the bud pretty quickly (and turns it from a land-acquisition problem back into a "simple" technical problem).Where is room for that wardrobe or bookcase or
heck even two weeks worth of groceries. This is
maybe useful for amusement parks and such but
for real world use you need a large storage
space on wheels. And even if these "cars" could be
enlarged about threefold to be useful, they'd
still need to allow loading stations where people
would load their stuff (like lumber) for an hour.
Face it, there is no streamlining what is naturally
a distributed system.
Except you drove your car up onto it and it interfaced.
God spoke to me.
This SkyWeb system is the application of packet-switched networks to material transport. Just as trains and telegraph/phone networks were circuit switched, and changed the world by globalizing the industrial revolution, so can these transport networks change the world again, just like ethernet/Internet changed the world of telecom.
The real changes will come once we've got new applications for these rails, not just adaptations that fix bugs in the old rail circuit apps. One real improvement could be in deliveries: the city could charge vendors bulk rates for off-peak delivery capacity. That could link rail/ship terminals to an intracity network of automated deliveries. You could schedule delivieries to your local station, and pick up the cargo after tracking its realtime delivery, from a locker with your onetime password. That kind of "bulk mail" fee could subsidize the entire system, just as bulk mail now subsidizes the postal system. Leveraging the efficiency of the municipal network to cut costs and increase reliability. And the people routing apps, like emailing an invite, with a prepaid routeplan attached, which is messaged to the car with the push of an embedded button, could get all attendees to and from your event without confusion, delay or complication. Let's get this 21st Century on!
--
make install -not war
In Morgantown, WV we have had a PRT system since 1979. Its an interesting idea and Im glad to see it finaly catching on in a larger scale. Just so you know Detroit Michigan, Irving Texas, Jacksonville Florida, Miami Florida, and Morgantown, WV where the first 5 locations to have PRTs and where all installed in the 70's.
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. - O'Toole's Corollary
I got a chuckle out of their animation's use of the Tara theme from Gone With the Wind!
Frankly my dear, I don't give a tram.
wrestler -- Atlanta, GA
Just like elevators, but worse. NO one thinks they should wait another 2 minutes for the next one.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
I'd rather get a cab ride from Corben Dallas.
And people could like buy their own "car" that is used on these tracks, they could be independently steerable, and instead of a track, we could use a simple paved surface (!!!). We could POWER them with gasoline until electric power becomes cheaper to support!! Truly transportation for the masses!! That means real FREEDOM, and then... oh wait.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
You fail it!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I can't wait to get onto one of these 3-passenger cars, followed right behind by two thugs who proceed to make me the first casualty of this futuristic transit system.
"SkyWeb Express", aka "Individual Mobile Homeless Shelter".
Seriously, given how I see people treat subway cars in public, I can only imagine what will happen if they're able to anonymously rent one in private...
Hi. I live in Oakland and commute by rail every day to San Francisco. I have used three major transit systems in the past month. Please -- allow me to translate this article for you!
...
... is the beautifully eerie monorail that silently glides around the volcano
In "The Incredibles"
I proposed an article about public transportation, and was turned down flat, even at Salon.com. So I turned it into an story about a Pixar movie! Neato!
Among the creepy sci-fi elements
I saw a monorail in the movie, and would like to have one in real life. I will spend the next couple of thousand words spinning out an advertisement for monorails, glossing over the serious design flaws and social problems with the scheme. As you might expect, Salon.com will compensate me handsomly for doing so!
transporting the villain's henchmen in small round cars.
Oh sh*t, I just made monorails sound evil.
The heroes occasionally hitch a ride on one of these moving pods
See! Monorails are heroic!!!
In real life, we may not have superheroes, but soon we will have those little monorail cars, zipping commuters and shoppers (and maybe an occasional henchman)
Ho ho ho! Heroin deals on mass transit are funny! Prostitution on monorails is gloriously hilarious! Har! Har!!!!!
They're part of a system called Personal Rapid Transit, or PRT, which is poised to replace the more expensive, less environmentally friendly and frequently less convenient mass transit systems of old.
Sort of like you yourself are POISED to win the lottery!
What really makes PRT different from mass transit is that it combines the convenience and luxury of a taxi with the efficiency of subway and bus travel:
I originally wrote that PRT combines sub-bus speeds with the cost of a subway and the inconvenience of trying to hail a taxi, but my editor made me say it this way. Same diff.
Rather than packing into a large carriage with a hundred smelly strangers, with PRT you get a private car.
Instead of getting on the next train, you will wait endlessly in a Disneyland-sized line for the next available "private" car. When one comes, you will be sealed alone in a mechanically unreliable capsule with three strangers. Hopefully, they will not be in cahoots to mug or rape you.
Of course, you can avoid this fate by living in a city that generously funds the purchase of new PRT cars and the maintenance of old ones. Bwahahahahahahahhaha! Had you there, didn't I?
Instead of stopping at every station on the line, you zip straight to your final destination.
You will slog at 20 mph (I put that WAY LOW in the article). You are likely crammed into a car with three strangers with their own destinations, so prepare for a lot of stopping and waiting. At each stop, you will pick up a new stranger with a new destination.
If you are lucky enough to get your own car, you will slog until you either smoothly exit at the appropriate station or until your little rubber wheels catch at the junction and you plunge in your little plastic car forty feet to the pavement below.
And the visual impact -- replacing the bulky steel trains and buses with sleek bubbles that look like mid-century creations from the designer Arne Jacobsen -- appeals to any kid who dreamt of being a Jetson, or now, an Incredible.
This will all look really, really wicked. WICKED!
Leading the way in the PRT revolution is the Minnesota-based Taxi 2000 Corporation, founded in 1983
I, the writer, do not find it odd this idea has not caught on for more than 20 years.
After studying the problems with conventional mass transit, he developed SkyWeb Express, which is poised to be the first commercial PRT system in the world.
I, the writer, am POISED to keep using POISED, even though it is meaningless.
Please, oh please hire someone who can write complete, well-ordered sentences. Pauses in sentences are not delineated by periods. Spend a little extra money to acquire an employee who knows the proper use of the comma. However solid your technology may be, your sales pitch is rendered less than convincing by your amateurish use of the English language.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Read Aramis
The book actually kind of stinks. It's got a typical French ooh-let's-look-at-everything-as-sociology angle, which totally obscures the valid political and engineering reasons that the project imploded.
So, maybe, don't read Aramis...but just be aware that this isn't new.
TJIC
Technical Video Rental - like Netflix for Geeks!
What if a thousand people wanted to get off at the same exit? Seems to me you'd end up with a heck of a lot of backed up "traffic."
I am just a little unclear how three person cars count as mass transportation. How are these tree person train cars better then three people in a Focus in the HOV lane. I guess it is more convient for passengers, as you don't need to fill up or drive, but not sure where the savings comes from.
#include <signature.h>
http://slashdot.org/~MickLinux/journal/67543
Essentially, this is not 3-person cars, but mass rail transit that is always nonstop.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
...and when one car breaks down, blocking the track, chaos ensues...
and when someone vandalises the one track that reaches your neighbourhood, chaos ensues...
There appears to be no redundancy in this system. It's not like a road, where you steer around a problem. It's not like a proper train, where there may be a 2nd track to use. That worries me - every little problem will lead to chaos, and maybe long waits in small chlostrophobic cabins[*].
[*] without the luxuries most cars contain.
There will be special homeless mobiles...homeless people can ride individually or in groups of three. These vehicals are equiped with cleaning mechanisms that can wash off the homeless person while they are riding and self clean once the homeless person leaves. Cities would have clean homeless people and once again smell good during hot summer days.
My theory of graffiti is that it's from people who have low self esteem and don't think that they can leave a mark on the world in any but the most literal sense.
Those things would be like mobile ovens here in the summer, and probably deep freezes in the winter in Minnesota.
Did anyone notice any climate control information?
That's a great question and one of the best qualities of the system (I've been following its development for a few years now as an interested observer). The tracks are all one way so there is only a merge-type intersection to worry about. Unlike a train, the track doesn't move to divert the cars. Instead, each car has a type of "arm" with a wheel on each and that keeps it holding to the left or to the right. A good image of the switch is here:
http://kinetic.seattle.wa.us/~prt-q.html#gsmall
Since the switch mechanism is in the car, there is no overhead involved in switching the track.
> Also its a one way system so trips could be quite convoluted and time consuming.
Since it is a system of one way loops, there are some indirect trips, but the advantages are that it is a non stop trip. Here is another good example of how a car trip would compare with a PRT trip:
http://kinetic.seattle.wa.us/nxtlevel/prt/speedcom p.html
Assuming most of the people that just read that article on Salon were not subscribers, does the massive influx of ad-viewers (ie ad $$?) cancel out the cost of /.-ing? A zero-sum game, or do they make/lose money?
Just curious, and sorry for the OT post.
What happens when there is a ball game and everyone wants to get off at the same stop and the backup leaks into the main line? You build extra capacity at stadiums.
What happens when too many cars are dropped off at one place and not enough at another? Who load balances? The system load-balances itself. Too many empty cars at one location - the empty cars get back on the track and go to an emptier station.
What happens when someone has thrown up in the car at the front of the line and you don't want to get in it, and want to get in the one behind it? Is there a button that says "send this car off for cleaning?" If so, what happens when teenagers keep hitting that button? So you put a button on the car (good idea, BTW). And the adults at the station tell the teenagers to stop hitting it (or call the transit police). Or the teenagers get bored.
I wonder how many rickshaw drivers+cabs you could import for that much money?
New Jersey lawmakers are debating whether to spend $75,000 to study the Long Branch project.
That seems like a piddly amount to invest in what could be a groundbreaking public transit system. Frankly I am amazed at how little this amount is, considering we are looking at tens of millions of dollars that would be spent on said public transport system in a state that spends billions per year on transportation in general.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
So, what happens in the morning when, say, a million or so commuters -- each taking a single car, since who says there will be two other people near you in the queue going to the same destination -- start their morning run into the city? ...and where will they stack a million or so monorail cars until 5:00pm, when it's time to to go home?
And, why will there never be a car left for me by the time I get to the station?
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
Although something like this system will probably be the future, I think they are greatly exaggerating the benefits... probably because they are selling the idea. At least they are honest enough to say that they came up with their own numbers to prove their own point.
For one, it's unlikely to be faster than taxis or busses. It would be dangerous for the lives and even belly contents of the passangers... Think of one of those wild-ride attractions in a theme park. And I simply wouldn't like to be merged by computer going 100km/h at a point where every track comes together... what if they run windows.
I don't believe having 75 people in 75/3 = 25 cars is more cost effective than having them in one bus or metro. It simply isn't more effective, ever, to have too small amounts of people considering the energy required to reach high speeds... pretty similar to car-pooling being a better solution to traffic problems, efficient use of resources and fuel, and having the least amount of waste and thus damage done to nature. And it's very unlikely that this system can handle more people per minute than a full metro car (think about having safe distances between cars).
I also can't believe that the installation cost would be so much lower than for "light rail"... as it is, effectively, some form of light rail. And it would have to be everywhere, since you can't go anywhere where there's no rail. It has, like all rail-based transport, a limited range for the traveler to move freely. One of the biggest problems with public transport, is that many people still have to walk a considerable distance before they reach their final destination. You simply can't have stations every couple of meters. I doubt this will be a great improvement in that regard... Unless you put it literally everywhere in the city, and have stations every couple of meters, in which case it definitely wouldn't be cheaper than ordinary public transport by rail.
No, it might be an idea for the future, but they need to be realistic about it. I live in the biggest city of the country with probably the most traffic and thus the worse traffic problems in the world. I'm highly critical of personalised public transport having the solution for the eternal traffic problem. There are just too many fuckin' people, and if they all want to have their own little car, it's not going make things better. It's just saturated. Perhaps this could work for smaller cities with less traffic problems, but I don't see this solving anything in the busiest areas.
Privacy surely would be a nice thing though.
Step 1: Look at the size of the stations shown in the article or the animation.
Step 2: Look at the size of the typical shopping center parking lot, or the size of a typical commuter rail parking garage.
At certain times of the day you are going to need a lot more cars leaving one of these stations than you have arriving. At other times of the day you are going to have a lot more cars arriving at a station. You either need very large stations at some locations, or you need empty cars moving around all the time, or you need one or more large storage/maintenance areas with an efficient dispatch system.
Well, I'll be looking for the future headline: SkyWeb vehicle OS replaced with Linux
That, and there will of course be someone who figures out how to tamper with the safety controls, adds a remote throttle, and has a high-performance SkyWeb vehicle. Then we'll see illegal SkyWeb races at night when there's no traffic in the ghetto parts of town, and of course the videos posted online showing just how fast someone got their SkyWeb to run.
I for one am looking forward to the future. By the way, has anyone done this with a Segway yet (that is, Segway races or a high-performance Segway)?
I'm five years removed from that point in my life and I'd STILL do exactly what you describe. Beats the hell out of driving, when you can, erm, focus your attention better on other things.
John Barnes' Mother of Storms, anyone? Anybody? Bueller?
The pain was excruciating and the scarring is likely permanent, but that just means it's working.
better, would be a larger display, and the system is knowledgable of your top destinations, and you could say, select one of them, (maybe 5-7) or key in a multidifit code for a one-shot destination..
I'm sure for most patrons, a fixed # of standard destinations are par for use
another thing I see needed (and not addressed) is a way to indicate the car is unacceptable due to prior ridership, and it take off empty- reports to maintenance depot for cleaning- with the previous user warned/banned.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Lookie, ya' mashuguna, wez don' need no one tellun us how ta do production. We been doin' it fer 150 years. Yer now tellin' us, US, how to make films? That was ma bruder Frankie. He's a good kid. Needs the work. Keeps him off the dope. Or you like some sort of dope lover? Cool don't make box office boffo. Now sid down and watch cher reruns WITH da commercials like God intended! Or do you not believe in God eider? What is you, a God hating Commie? Frankie, go rub him out... like we do in da' movies... WID a "Gone With The Wind" (royalties paid of course) soundtrack. Sincerely, The Hollywood Film Industry
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
As someone else already mentioned, a backup at the station of cars trying to unload could back onto the main rail, shutting the entire rail down, possibly for extended periods. Let's hope that the stations are easily expandable. I can imagine that this would be a nightmare at stations subject to flash crowds, such as event venues.
Second, one person struggling with the user interface would shut down the entire station until they figured it out and got their car out of the station.
I would change the interface as follows: Have terminals along the back wall where you buy your ticket and enter your destination. Then the terminal would program your destination into your ticket. Once your ticket is programmed properly by the terminal, *then* you go to the first available car, swipe your ticket at the turnstile and step in.
...cars travel independently between stations, which are located on side-tracks so cars only need to stop at the final destination.
As anyone who has ever ridden the New York subway will tell you, this is great and all until it starts to back up, e.g. at rush hour. What if more than one carload of people is trying to get to the same station at the same time?
The obvious answer is queueing up the cars at the station, so there's a wait, but you're off the main track. However:
* The station is of finitie size.
* A car is in the station for a finite time before it leaves.
* Therefore, there is a finite capacity of a given station for a given amount of time before cars start backing up on the main "express" track. And when that happens, EVERYTHING grinds to a halt.
In theory, the answer is to make every station so large that it can handle many, many cars. Great, but have you ever seen a city architect for the wrost case? i.e. the real case of rush hour? And plan for growth (reminder--your "oh, shit!" parameter is governed by the size of the station, which is probably fixed).
It's like many transportation ideas--it works great up to a certain capacity point, at which point it will gridlock. I would contend, with the large number of low capacity units, that this system would gridlock a lot harder than a system with a small number of large capacity carriers (e.g. a typical subway).
An unhandled exception of type 'System.CarPileUpException' occurred in SkyWebExpress.dll
Additional information: Windows ME
A system similar to this is in operation at WVU: Pictures and story This is a good system, but it's slow, and showing it's age. But as a prior student at WVU I can say it works much nicer than a bus or other option.
She's hot. Kind of a cross between Stewie's mom Lois and Gwen Stefani.
20 years ago they were going to build the first one in Indianapolis. That never got off the ground. Will it this time?
Really, this system is so old that it's been in Popular Science (the graveyard of new ideas) at least 3 times, going back to the mid 60's.
Haven't they been talking about this in Seattle for a while?
Sounds cool, except you need to install cameras in every car in order to prevent problems, and pair it with access cards that you can revoke, otherwise you'll find nothing but rubbers and needles in these cars.
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You slashdotted eviloverlord.com. Bastards!
I'm sure they will exact revenge for this... um... as soon as they sweep up the debris from their server.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
Take a good look at that, and you'll see what the trackwork for a real system looks like. It does take a bit more room than the optimistic drawings of this new scheme. You need dual tracks, sidings, and turnaround loops.
Commuter Rail can be more cost efficient depending on the situation. There is no magic pill for transit!
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They say its 10.5 Million Dollars per mile for PRT Capitol costs. Commuter Rail here will be, in 2008 dollars, about 5.815 Million Dollars per mile.
http://railworks.org/node/view/46
http://www.skywebexpress.com/130b_comparisons.s
http://www.ringworld.org/~dieman/photos/2004/N
-- dieman - Scott Dier
Okay, so someone finally decided to copy the transit system from Logan's Run.
It can't be long before someone wants to implant life clock crystals in our palms!
HAVING SEX....
That, my guess, would be problem #1 with these things.
Serious, how many people would be pulling-off in these things with their Archos Divx Players.
Harder.. Better.. Faster.. Stronger
"Rather than packing into a large carriage with a hundred smelly strangers, with PRT you get a private car."
Yes, you get a private car with a feces and vomit smeared interior or maybe even a dead hobo in it. Hell, this happens on commuter trains now, even with cameras and conductors. The only fix is a complete lack of privacy as to where you're going and when.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
Seattle, during one of its many, useless, traffic studies, discovered this solution over a year ago. It was one of the proposals that they talked about, and talk is all they did... They still don't have a viable plan to aleviate the traffic problem... --E
--E--
It's going to be obvious when one homeless person is sleeping in the car because you will call an 'empty' car, and a homeless person will be in it. In other words, it likely won't happen.
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
OK, what happens when a Hobo croaks in it, someone leaves a dead fetus, the local hooligans toss a few pitbulls inside and send it to the mall using a stolen car pass card.
Doh! Anyway, even 24 seconds isn't long. When the elderly or those encumbered with children/luggage use automobiles, they only slow down their own departure when they get back out of the car to check that they didn't leave their bag/keys/phone/shopping on the roof. With this lame transport system they will reduce the bandwidth of the whole station.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
A lot of current popular, busy, destinations already have huge parking lots. Ball stadiums, shopping malls, office buildings, etc. Mark off a section of the already existing parking lot and dedicate it to these things. Ramp the track down to the parking lot, multiple "Y's" off into separate rails, and you have as large a 'station' as you wish.
Apparently, the system is relatively cheap to install, cost efficient per passenger mile, and much more flexible than traditional mass transit.
You misspelled "skywebexpress.com claims". Here's the problem: driving is cheap, because we choose not to notice the trillions in debt we rack up fighting wars to make it cheap. Long as it's cheap, people will drive. Period.
For the probable sticky seats that will occur.
Perhaps a self-cleaning cycle after every use?
(from the website)
Questions of reliability, safety, evacuation and rescue are fundamental to the design of any elevated transit system including SkyWeb Express. Each vehicle has two motors and two controllers, modern failure-monitoring systems, fault-tolerance and fail-safe features. The system has alternative power sources so that a power failure will not leave passengers stranded.
There are over 70 elevated automated transit systems operating in the world today that prove that a vehicle stopping when not intended is a very rare event. If a vehicle does stop between stations, Central Control will talk with the passengers through an intercom system and guide the rescue operation. The vehicle behind will soft engage and push the disabled vehicle to the nearest station. In the very unlikely event that the vehicle can't be moved, a rescue team will come with a ladder and help the passengers out of the vehicle.
I'm not so sure about that--they may just have been really stupid people, a possibility which can never be discounted. However, a quick Google search on "mass transit social agenda" comes up with gems like this:
It isn't hard to find these sorts of problems, as anyone who has ever ridden a bus to work regularly knows.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
It's more of a... Shelbyville idea.
Show me one part of Chicago's El that doesn't look like complete crap. San Francisco is busy tearing down the last remnants of its blighted elevated freeway, and property values are shooting up for buildings now seeing the sun for the first time in decades.
Of course San Francisco also has public personal transporters that use these new-fangled "road" and "car" technologies too. Wonder if it'll catch on.
There is a PRT in Wales that is much closer
to realisation than any example given here.
It is called ULTra.
here is the web site: http://www.atsltd.co.uk/
If anyone is interested in helping promote this system, check out
Citizens for Personal Rapid Transit.
They're based in Minneapolis, MN, but they do have links to other groups trying to get the system started in their areas.
Brian
Has anybody watched the cheesy promotional video on the web site? Among the many problems, the theme to "Gone With The Wind" is questionable background music for an elevated transportation system. Maybe they are trying to sell to Atlanta. I won't even start on the sucky website design.
Every time I hear about a groovy new technology like this I get excited... until I remember the enormous societal baggage we are forced to lug around in the form of the immature and the criminal. Without a conductor or a sufficient quantity of people to maintain some sort of norm, how long until kids see if they can have a quick screw between stops? Used condoms, cigarettes, urine, etc. I don't imagine it would be long until all the cars are disgusting. Perhaps this would work in China.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
What this appears to be is a serial solution to a current parallel problem. Right now we have the equivilent of IDE on our highways. The idea is that some cars will go faster than others. The problem is that all cars end up going as slow as the slowest in heavy traffic. A monorail system that has side tracks for stops is like SATA. There is only one speed on the track and you don't get on until you speed up on your side track to that speed.
- I don't believe the cost estimates. These have a way of changing when things are put into production.
- Electricity is only as clean as electricity generation, and in the united states that's incredibly dirty (coal). If you don't fix that first, you're probably better off burning gasoline
in most places, even given energy efficiency advantages for this PRT.
- Be prepared for NIMBYism in (a) views being blocked by the monorail, (b) the noise of the cars going by the windows of second story apartments.
And finally, the point which you will all shrug off because you can't stick a number on it easily: one of the big disadvantages of private vehicles is one of the things people love about them: they're private. We all like to crawl off into our little boxes and complain about how boring our lives are because nothing new happens, because we've walled ourselves off from serendipity. Worse than that, Americans are losing a sense of themselves as a people, in part because they have no contact with masses of human beings... there's a lot of suburban paranoia about houses full of latino immigrants that might be soft peddled a bit if you saw the guys on the bus every day.Maybe they let you watch The Incredibles on the LCD screen while you ride.
Citizens for PRT is another site that may be of interest.
The had one set up at the MN state fair a few years back and where giving rides. (The track was only 30 feet but it was still cool) I asked them if anyone was seriously looking at the concept and they said that several Japanese groups had flew over just to see it. For Minnesota at least the design looked like it would need work. (Snow makes everything so much more interesting :) The car is actually just mounted on a car that travels inside the track. The design was open to allow things to fall through (again snow, morons, etc) but I had visions of little critters crawling in and becoming internal road kill. (yum)
The sad thing is that despite the fact that the company is local, Minnesotans tend to frown on public transit in general. So it's not likely to show up here first. It was funny to watch people that were against the light rail line flip over to loving the thing after the numbers came back on ridership. (Double the expected numbers I might add) And come Dec. 4 you'll be able to ride the rail from the airport to the Mall of America or downtown. If you look at it, it's really more useful to out of towners (coming for Viking games, conferences, etc than people that live in Minneapolis, but it gets used.
The SkyWeb system does have the advantage that it can be elevated which solves most of the right-of-way issues that we have now. (Minneapolis should have committed to a subway system years ago, too late now. At least in the cold we can scurry around our downtown habitat trail ) I for one, would be for it. It's just that people don't seem to have the public transit mindset around here.
Now Boston can start digging up the whole fucking city again. I can't wait.
True, the track maintainance crews and builders will not mind, but the train drivers and dispatchers, whose job is going to be obsoleted, will give the cities a major pain...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This one uses a suspended car instead of vehicle on a track.
http://skytran.net/
A good friend will help you move. A really good friend will help you move a body.
They have even done some studies with major cities and provided a complete system that integrates into the existing infrastructure.
Additionally the vehicles are capable of off-track operation via electric drive systems. I think that most americans, bred on the car culture we have created here would be more open to this type of system.
Personally I think this is a better system because it still allows users the freedom of having thier "own" vehicle, but also has the benefits of being an efficient mass transit system.
Say you're on your way to work, you get into a car with three other people, and as you pull out of your station you find that someone in your car has horrible gas? I take Bart into San Francisco every day. I get up and move away from smelly people semi-regularly. I just move to another car. It doesn't slow down my trip at all.
What if you're a woman and you get into a car with a guy who looks normal but turns out to be a rapist? Who stops the car? Who comes to help? Who's there to witness? The real answer is that she wouldn't get into the car if it was just going to be her and another person.
This leads me to believe that most people would simply want to travel in the car by themselves for safety reasons. At least in a Bart car, there are other people around, acting as a general deterrent against crime. With this system, you never know what kind of crazy you might end up in a little car with. Can the system handle one person per car?
Sure, with stations 1 or 2 miles apart, we can commute to work in SkyWeb, putter around in our offices on our Segways, and then weekend-warrior ourselves into early heart-disease deaths with our SUVs.
I can't recall where I saw the study, but the correlation between suburban living and heart-disease is very high. Less walking, more clogged arteries. How does SkyWeb help?
And on a funny note... when does SkyWeb become self-aware, so that we can try to unplug it in a panic?
I think Homer Simpson broke the first version of this in the second season didn't he?
There was something similar to this in the movie Minority Report, only the cars were oblong, turned sideways and moved along the sides of buildings as well. It seemed to work quite well for them, especially since it's fiction and all.
Citizens For Personal Rapid Transit
T /
Personal Rapid Transit (PRT)
Austin Citizens for Personal Rapid Transit (ACPRT)
Just to get you started....
(Slashdot wouldn't accept this one...)
Personal Rapid Transit Index Pag
http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/PR
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.
The advantages of SkyWeb over a system like Curitiba's (Bus Rapid Transit) are:
1) taking up much less space. BRT's require a dedicated bus lane.. an issue in a packed city with tightly packed buildings.
2) not requiring heavy usage. a BRT system only starts paying off the investment(roads and buses) with heavy ridership. Curitiba worked because so there are so many people who need transportation but don't have their own cars. But it's not affordable to send large buses around frequently if you can't fill them enough. Having individual cars means that you can scale this to much smaller ridership levels.
3) lower operating costs. Diesel is cheaper than gasoline, but it's more expensive than electricity and its only going to get worse. It's also heavily polluting, although there ways to clean it up a little, like biodiesel, CNG, etc.
BRTs are a good solution in SOME cases.. large, open cities, for example. But SkyWeb is an interesting solution for areas that would be totally impractical for BRTs.
I've thought for years about how to implement something similar for world travel. One or more large airships stay in low-earth orbit, and smaller craft ferry passengers to and from them as they pass overhead. There may even be a way to run a rail up a few miles to where passengers can transfer from the rail to the airship. It would be hairy, but I think the technical details could be worked out. Since a disproportionate amount of fuel is spent on takeoff and landing, this would save energy and cause less air pollution. Refueling and even some servicing could be done in-flight as well, so they might be able to stay up weeks or even months without landing. This isn't my area of expertise, so go ahead and clue me in if I'm too far "out there".
Seriously, though, not only would a http://www.ruf.dk/ system work better, it would be more likely to succeed.
Area of operation.
SkyWeb is a bit better at this than traditional mass transit, but RUF covers much more area. As mass transit (bus-rail), RUF can use existing roads and switch to rail when it makes sense. RUF can also be used by individually owned RUF-enabled cars, extending the range far beyond the range of current bus systems.
Hours of operation.
SkyWeb is no better at this than traditional mass transit, but RUF can be used at any time by individually owned RUF-enabled cars.
Having to share a car with other people.
SkyWeb is a bit better at this than traditional mass transit, but 3 person unattended cars that are not owned by the occupants are likely to be vandalized. You could solve that with security cams, but they're very offensive to many people. WIth RUF, you can ride in attended vehicles or a RUF-enabled car you own, giving people a privacy option.
Having to walk too far.
SkyWeb is a bit better at this than traditional mass transit, but RUF allows those of us who do not want to walk a half a mile (for reasons such as disabilities, infant/child companions, bad weather, the size and weight of shopping booty or laziness) the option of using our own RUF vehicle from garage to garage.
Time to get somewhere.
SkyWeb is probably a bit better than this than traditional mass transit and so is RUF as used by the bus-rail vehicles, but personal RUF vehicles can be much faster than traditional cars.
Reducing congestion and pollution.
RUF wins hands-down because it invites more people into the system.
Automobile company opposition.
RUF wins. The existing manufacturers can make RUF enabled vehicles with all of the personality, comfort and profit of existing models.
Getting people to use it.
If you were sitting in a traffic jam watching RUF vehicles go by at 100km/h and knew your next car could ride on the RUF and have all of the personality, comfort and range of operation you were used to, you'd buy RUF.
Why hasn't RUF caught on? Maybe because it is compromise between mass transit and personal vehicle ownership. If Mass transitites give up a bit of social control (stop thinking that all cars are bad) and personal vehiclites give up a bit of stearing wheel control (only when on the track), we can have less congestion, cleaner air, go places faster and be less dependant on fossil fuels and still have the freedom of movement and ownership we enjoy with cars.
You were right until you started thinking you knew the Chinese. The current only maglev implementation between Shanghai and Pudong airport was made by German company. The Chinese are also looking at using French TGVs and Japanease bullet trains for inter city connects.
Maybe the reason you think China is too socialist to use outside companies is that they absolutely will not buy American? I'm sure they're very impressed with Amtrak :-)
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Oh, what's it gonna do? Arrange the cars to spell a nasty word?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
This is good: http://www.roadkillbill.com/PRTSim.html Also: http://pulsetc.com/article.php?sid=1056 http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_prt001.htm http://www.roadkillbill.com/PRTisaJoke.html
the wvu prt is not a true personal rapid transit system since the cars are too big (some people call systems like this group rapid transit). it was supposed to be, but it had to be installed in a rush so nixon could get reelected.
a good book on a failed prt is bruno latour's "Aramis"
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.
The only way to stop this from happening is to be able to remotely monitor all activity in each car, and divert vandals to the local police station, and have attendants with the authority to fine people who leave litter behind.
Perhaps those convicted of vandalism could be sentenced to time cleaning out soiled cars. But then, the janitor's unions would probably prevent this from happening.
I didn't see this in the few pictures I looked at. It seems like such an obvious thing they must have thought of it. But in addition to the sidetrack, you need a merging algorithm for cars re-entering the main track. Not necessarily rocket science, but something they'll need to think about, and maybe think pretty hard if they are so fortunate as to get much volume.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Total rip-off of the pod cars that moved through those vacuum tubes in Logan's Run.
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.
But they're still talking about the stations being a mile apart. Which means an average of a one-mile hike and a max of a two mile hike if your starting location and destination are exactly between stations.
Dude, that's what your Segway is for!
some 30 years ago?
instead of standing/sitting next to a drunk wino in the same subway car, I can sit in someone's snail trails that ended up there because of the "privacy" of that thing. Or better yet, that little enclosed capsule+some guy who just ate chili=private fart chamber. Nice. I get to sit there and smell his colon.
Have they thought this through yet?
= Grow a brain...
The problem with conventional rail systems is that they don't have enough stations. They can serve lots of people if they're all in one place and they all want to go somewhere down the line, but most people want to go somewhere else, so they drive.
PRT guideways are cheaper, and the stations are cheaper and can be more closely spaced, so you can serve a much larger fraction of the trips people want to make.
For a longer explanation, see this link.
The reason they can charge a quarter and reap a profit is because they are stuffing hordes of poor people without other options into crowded busses. They also wait however long it takes for the busses to come.
There are some benefits to BRT that could be applied in the US or other non-3rd world countries (no offense to Brazillians), but to suggest that what works in Curitiba will work elsewhere is simplifying things a bit too much.
Transportation isn't really a technical problem in need of technology solutions; in practice, it's a political and social problem that more frequently than not gets too much money spent on the wrong things.
Generally, transit systems serving the working poor (who need transit the most) are sketchy and starved for resources, while systems that get the big cash spend it the way political contributors and politicians feel it would best suit their interests and careers.
In the Bay Area (SF CA), there is a futuristic wide gauge rail system called BART that has been sucking up all the regions' transit dollars since the late 60's. It plays a huge role in moving commuters around, but is more expensive than driving and fantasically expensive to operate. And politics dictate that, rather than spending money on upgrading standard commuter rail systems and feeder bus lines to augment the system, the BART heavy-rail odd-format subway is being charted out into far off suburbs where people don't even know how to take transit, at the highest cost per mile rate in the world. Even worse, BART stations are surrounded by enourmous free parking garages and little else.
Transportation isn't a solution in itself. It is a single factor in a complex web of engineering called land use planning. Transit is very difficult to add into existing development effectively. The scope and expense of rail systems has to match population density it serves. Outer reaches of suburban sprawl don't need subway systems better suited to dense urban corridors.
George Jetson style monorails are more expensive that driving, less flexible (can't carry trucks and busses as roads can) and don't solve any real problems that exist outside of intra-facility campus style areas (Universities, Airports, World Fairs, Disneyland, the Ghetty Center, etc).
Standard commuter rail (Heathrow Express) is cheap and effective for distant corridors of regular traffic. Light rail (Portland's TriMet MAX) makes sense as part of an integrated land use plan. Heavy rail subways (NYC) make sense in ultra dense urban areas. BRT makes sense as a low cost, entry level light rail substitute.
More than a technology to move people, we need plans to guide where people chose live and work so that the transportation infrastructure built for them makes sense and is sustainable and priced to work.
This very idea has been tried before.
Aramis, or the Love of Technology is a very strange book about the French government's attempt to creates just such a robotic system.
Over 18 years and 500 million Francs were spent trying to bring it to fruition.
It was for public transportation what Duke Nukem Forever has been for video games. Overlong, overfunded, changing identies from year to year, constantly promised, never arrived, and eventually the government gave up.
The fact that didn't work doesn't mean this won't; Aramis's failure is more about bad project management than it is about the difficulty of solving the problems stated here -- although this company has an uphill climb to prove that their system is better than automobiles or standard trains. I'm just surprised no one else has mentioned Aramis yet.
I've been seeing the inventor and his "Taxi 2000" (now SkyWeb) display at the Minnesota State Fair for years. I always wondered why this system wasn't adopted due to its obvious place as a transportation analogue to the internet (i.e., a packet switching-like transportation system).
Instead, the State of Minnesota built a single "circuit" transportation corridor in the form of light rail and to date has invested $715M for only 12 miles of track! (...and this corridor is one of the least congested and traveled corridors making such a huge, inefficient investment all the more curious).
If this Personal Rapid Transit website cost estimates are to be believed, then that same $715M in cost would have resulted in 47.6 miles of track (using their high estimate of $15M per mile) which would've provided significantly more transportation relief in Minneapolis/St. Paul than a singular corridor deployment of a light rail system.
Kind of reminds me of stories my Dad told me about when the City of Minneapolis & St. Paul allegedly dumped streetcars in favor of buses see Conspiracy on this page. Even as a young man he was puzzled by the fact that the "circuits" of the streetcars were already built so the perceived efficiency of the "packet switching" buses seemed like a waste. The reasons for tossing out streetcars had nothing to do with logic but rather economics for the motor companies.
When we go to the State Fair and see this SkyWeb display year-after-year, my 79 year old Dad is just as puzzled as he was back then when he thinks about why we're not investing in this obvious efficient transportation system vs. throwing away huge sums on light rail focused on singular corridors.
Mr Incredible calls her the perfect woman for perfectly good reasons! She's probably the only woman he can do it with, according to the arguments posited in "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" and other thoughtful diatribes.
I'd love to do it with Elastigirl; she could stretch out and wrap totally around you like a giant tongue. Or you could... oh, the geek reflex is still strong. Time to settle down..
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
It seems to me that the most likely problem with this system will be that the cost of operating it will exceed the cost of operating a car. They cite a cost of $0.38/passenger mile. My car costs:
Gas: $0.10/mile
Maintenance: $0.05/mile
Depreciation: $0.10/mile
Insurance: $0.05/mile
That's $0.08/mile less than their cost. And that leaves out the fact that my marginal cost to transport other people is zero, where this system will presumably charge extra for each person.
The other problem is it looks like the bandwidth (people/minute along a route) is low. The pictures show a single track. I doubt that their pods move faster than a car. So you are limited to the carrying capacity of a single lane. At peak times, there will be a substantial queuing delay as you either wait for a pod, or wait for the pod to enter the track.
If you want to replace cars, you have to either save the traveller time or money or provide more convenience. Except in very densely populated areas, it is hard to beat the car in any one of those categories. For that reason, mass transit (in the US) rarely succeeds unless it is supported by government subsidies, so that the system can compete on cost.
I can't wait to be upclose and intimate with
such scrawlings as "WS XVIII", MS 13 and other
gang grafitti all over the interior of these pods..
Seriously though, they say that this will
have cameras inside the car, security, etc,
but it's only as good as the people running it.
Come on, guys! Nerds duking it out with their slide rules and calculators? Who gives a shit!? The stations would be a -short- distance apart, lazy fat americans might have to actually walk a bit, and outdoors at that. Hell, hang ropes on each rail support and let people Tarzan their way for the difference. (How to you spell the Tarzan yell?)
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
The car-mania of america is catching up with us. We'll HAVE to switch to a more european model before long, and then everybody but the very wealthy will ride public transport, and busses too, will use a grid system instead of "ride downtown and xfer". Then it's "take the nearest eastbound bus a mile, then northbound 'til you're there."
The problem is one thing won't cause another. No city is going to triple the number of bus routes in order to encourage ridership and nobody will start riding 'til it's convenient and cheaper than driving. However, it WILL evolve as cars, congestion and gas prices keep going up, and the nation's current policies of moving the wealth from the poor and middle classes to the richest people makes driving/owning a car out of the question.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
You're spouting opinions based on looking at the pictures? Sounds like our foreign policy. They wouldn't line up to disgorge passengers, they'd loop. Duh. And how long does it take to empty a car holding 3-4 people as opposed to a busful or traincar full? Way faster.
So shut up, chicken little. These things are easy to fix. Add more parallel offload stations in downtown areas for example.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
Reading in car isn't bad once you're used to it. Not that people would, they'd watch the idiot box. I for one think that'd be bad, too much tv in people's heads now. Nobody knows what's going on around them since they're so seldom 'here' they're always off in tv or cellphone land. Or even books.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
And this is different from this:/ /www.wvu.edu/~facserv/PRTinterpage.htmw .wvu.edu/~facserv/PRT_system_description _manual.pdf
http://www.wvu.edu/~facserv/prt.htm
http:
http://ww
In what way? Other than looking fancy and using the latest technology, I don't see it being all that different, in fact same concept. Except it's even been proven to work.
It all depends where you would want to drive to. When I took BART, I was saving a huge amount of money and time. Time because traffic going through SF is often terrible, and money because bridge tolls and parking fees often add up to three times the amount of a round-trip BART fare.
And just about NOTHING in transportation sucks more than taking one form of public transportation only to transfer to another. That's a big reason why no one takes AC Transit to BART (AC Transit does visit the bart stations in the East Bay like feeder bus lines). Then again, around where I live, I avoid AC Transit due to the number of.. crazies who pack the buses around here (I stopped taking the bus after hearing one too many times the obnoxious woman loudly arguing with no one about how the Jews were stealing all her money and how she had the legal right to kill anyone who messes with her kids)
the BART heavy-rail odd-format subway is being charted out into far off suburbs where people don't even know how to take transit
What would you rather have those people do? Drive on the freeways and clog 580 or 880 even more?
Outer reaches of suburban sprawl don't need subway systems better suited to dense urban corridors.
In BART's case, the tracks outside inner city areas are above ground except a few exceptions in places like Berkeley, where the residents agreed to pay extra for the cost of keeping it underground.
I'm usually not a fan of public transportation. It's usually very slow and doesn't take me where I need to go. But BART is one of the solutions that has worked great for myself and many other people in the area. I will admit one thing though: The population of the Bay Area will continue to grow, and BART has reached its physical capacity. You can't have a chain longer than 10 cars, and at commute time the trains are as close together as is safe.
I'm planning to visit the Metreon tomorrow. I think I'll bike to the nearby BART station.
More than a technology to move people, we need plans to guide where people chose live and work so that the transportation infrastructure built for them makes sense and is sustainable and priced to work.
Now this requires a little more elaboration. I'm relatively suspicious of such statements because many of them turn into anti-suburban screeds about how people should live in high-density housing in the city like rats.
I lived in a 'carfree' village for a little while and I saw a big social advantage in that teenagers were able to meet up or go to school without having to depend on their parents for transport. I felt that kids there were generally more independent minded, and it also relieved parents of the burden of ferrying their children all over the place.
Another problem with mass transit systems is that they often stop working after say 11.00 PM. This is no good if you're working late - as a nurse this is often a problem for me.
Monorail is probably the most cost effective form of mass transit available. It's implementation cost is low, it takes up hardly any ground space (just the pylons, which is much less than light rail), it's efficient and so on and so forth. If it could get over it's association with the Simpsons episode, people might start recognizing it's good points.
Now this requires a little more elaboration. I'm relatively suspicious of such statements because many of them turn into anti-suburban screeds about how people should live in high-density housing in the city like rats.
Wow, you managed to fit your anti-urban screed into one sentence!
We live, as we dream -- alone....
What happens when babies accompanied by their mothers urinate?
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Erm, any kind of parent, really. Not just mothers.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.