Robocabs Coming to Europe

Roland Piquepaille writes "Almost all of us can recall both good and poor memories of taxi rides when we arrived in a city we didn't know. This is why a short article from Spiegel Online, 'Bringing Robot Transportation to Europe,' caught my eye this morning. It briefly describes the European 'CityMobil' project which involves 28 partners in 10 countries at a cost of €40 million. This project plans to eliminate city drivers and three trial sites have already been selected. For example, in 2008, Terminal 5 in London's Heathrow airport will be connected to the car park by driverless electric cars along a 4-kilometer track. Read more for additional pictures and references about this project to make the roads in Europe's cities more efficient."

Comments

A more insightful article..

[rufusdufus]

I found a more insightful article that explains the advantage of this system over existing airport shuttle systems:
The difference for passengers will be not so much the journey time - which will be about four minutes - but how long they have to wait. Instead of huddling under a shelter for as long as 20 minutes as they currently do waiting for a bus, the pod will be at most a minute away.

Rapid Urban Flexible (RUF) is better

[Russ Nelson]

The RUF is a better system than this. First, because it's dual-mode: you can drive (compatible) cars up onto the guideway. Second, because cars are privately owned (in addition to cars owned by the system operator and run as taxis within the system), the system operator will not have to come up with all the capital needed to run the line .... just the guideway and whatever number of taxis they want to run.

Re:Rapid Urban Flexible (RUF) is better

[Ian Bicking]

From an engineering perspective RUF takes on all the engineering burdens of each form, and combines them. The rail system has to carry cars that are engineered for the road, and typically much larger. Or, even worse, rails engineered for buses which are much larger than anything PRT would carry. A RUF rail system has to take into account a larger variance in vehicles and maintenance; while you can require regular inspections, with private vehicles it's not possible to get anywhere near the quality control that you can get with a controlled system with strict and automated maintenance schedules.

Cars, in turn, have to have all the same complexity they already have, and add the control systems for the tracks as well as seperate track wheels. Each car must still have a licensed and insured driver. Each car is going to have to park somewhere, which is not free. Capital costs of the RUF system are carried in part by private users, but only one of the smallest portions -- the largest portion of capital cost goes into creating the rail infrastructure.

PRT's advantages have to do with its scope. The rail required for PRT vehicles is substantially easier to build, install, and maintain than typical rail, because the load is so much less. Elevated rails carrying tens of tons of weight must be large and bulky, and are very expensive to construct. But because the vehicles on a PRT are required in numbers relative to the number of riders, and wear out relative to how many passenger-miles they go, the cost is directly related to the fare income, so that cost is one of the smallest hurdles for the system compared to the rail infrastructure. PRT is optimized for decreasing the cost of that infrastructure.

It's Called PRT

[dreadlord76]

Personal Rapid Transit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transi t