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Two Big Tests For Personal Rapid Transportation
Al writes "A novel kind of transit system, in which cars are replaced by a network of automated electric vehicles, is about to get its first large-scale testing and deployment. Two of these Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) systems are being installed this year, one at Heathrow International Airport, near London, and one in the United Arab Emirates, where it will be the primary source of transportation in Masdar City, a development that will eventually accommodate 50,000 people and 1,500 businesses and is designed to emit no carbon dioxide. The article examines these two systems and includes video that includes an animation of the PRT system in action."
just like the Segway did!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
These pods look cute and all, but do they really do anything that trains and buses don't? The trains at SFO and SeaTac do a great job.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You want to talk about automatically-piloted vehicles. Shit. This morning I was driving through the downtown area and this Chevy Blazer comes flying around a corner, tires squealing and horn honking. I take a look and (obviously) it was a woman driving. Or should I say "sitting at the wheel", because her hands certainly weren't on the wheel.
Now, I'm the first one to argue that you don't need both hands on the wheel at the same time, but at least you need to have one hand on it to consider yourself driving! Jabba the Hutt in the Blazer was putting on makeup and eating a Ho Ho while careening around 2nd Ave at 30mph with no hands on the wheel. I can only assume she was navigating with her belly, because that's the only thing that could possibly have been touching the steering wheel at the moment.
You want to credit Heathrow and freaking Arabs with driver-less cars? How about the United fucking States of goddamned America? We've been pioneering this shit since London's been overrun by Asians.
I'm assuming the system is electric, but it could only meet the "no CO2" if the electric power is nuclear, hydro, solar, etc... If it's traditional electric power, it's just moving the source of the CO2 and perhaps the efficiency.
Oh the delicious irony of using "Heathrow" and "rapid transit" in the same sentence.
It appears people abandoning their cars to use this new system! http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/09/dubai-airport-clogge.html
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
It seems as if something like this would attract vagrants, significant vandalism and just plain disgustingness. Would be pretty cool though if major cities were only filled with people like the scientists and engineers would designed it.
So an entire community that emits no carbon dioxide. What are the inhabitants, vampires? Zombies? Undead "not otherwise specified"? This "green movement" is getting out of control when we turn to the dark powers.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I wonder in 20 years how these "networks" will compare to the Morgantown PRT.
Individual transport within an airport - an environment designed round mass transport?
The Heathrow video claims '50% lower carbon emissions than buses or trains' - is that per passenger though? In a busy airport like Heathrow regular trains would be more efficient than individual transporters surely.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Go to: http://www.masdaruae.com/en/Menu/index.aspx?MenuID=69&CatID=38&mnu=Cat It says that they are CONSIDERING using the PRT system. They are also considering Light Rail (LRT) or a combination of both. No matter what form of transportation is sounds like a leap inot the future!
I was under the impression these things never caught on was because they did the opposite of the above claim: they combine the environmental detriments of personal automobile use with the inconvenience and delay of mass transit.
The reason I say this is that if you have to build one car per person and maintain the cars and the system for the cars, that's a huge environmental impact. Even if the cars are "green" and run on lead-acid batteries, there's still a lot of resources that go into building them and you lose all the energy efficiency of moving large numbers of people at one time. For inconvenience of mass transit, having your own personal automobile is convenient, if wasteful. You can take it anywhere you like at any time you like and can maintain it as much as you wish, with a public transit system that you must give up, but in sharing your transit device, you are consuming less resources per capita.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
I propose we call them Super Hurried Individual Transports.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Because I did not RTFA I have to guess the power (at least in Saudi Arabia) is coming from burning oil...
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
I've been to the UAE. The problem there is that even though they hire the best engineers in the world, the laborers building these projects typically had never seen the business end of a hammer six months before being hired.
What could possibly go wrong?
Morgantown, WV, has had something similar for the past 30+ years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Transit
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
This looks like the old Disneyland PeopleMover to me just with the cars separated. Hopefully the PRT will be a bit more reliable...
I'm still a big fan of skytran. I don't know if the political and financial support is there but the economics seem reasonable and I think it's certainly an engineering possibility, not relying on unobtanium or anything wild.
The link to the website goes into far greater detail but the nickel synopsis is this:
1. Two passenger monorail cars using a computerized rail system to rapidly route passengers to destinations, avoiding the stop and start of traditional subway and light rail. (Monorail, yes monorail! Your simspon reference is weak, shut up.)
2. Cars, rails and towers are designed to be light so the footprint on the ground is about the same as a telephone pole.
3. With all the rails in the air, real estate on the ground can be used for pretty much anything, avoiding the disruptive problems and huge expense of running traditional light rail lines.
4. Because the lines are cheaper, a grid can be laid over a sprawling metropolitan area lacking the high population densities required to make traditional mass transit viable.
5. The goal is to have stops spread about everywhere so that where you want to go should be no more than a 15 minute walk after arrival. Current mass transit can leave you with miles to go to your destination.
6. Since the cars are electric and make no more than a whooshing line when going overhead, they would not be as disruptive as a conventional light rail train or a city bus.
The goal with skytran is not to replace cars but to take commuters off the road. Anyone as a single occupant in a car going places could be in one of these and free up the roads for people whose trips cannot be accomplished via skytran.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran
Of course, the real problem we're looking at here is that zero thought has been put into sustainable urban planning. We tend to ad hoc and half-ass everything together and end up with designs that are simply unworkable. But hey, that's the human way. Maybe the energy crunch can force a reevaluation of that.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It's called a sportbike.
The Heathrow thing might work. It's like the little tracked automated trams many airports have. The vehicles have some modest automated driving capability, so they don't have to have railroad switches, and they can do some passing at stations. They stay entirely on their own dedicated guideways, though; they never mix with other traffic.
It's not really "personal". It's more like an automated bus system. This works for airports because the number of destinations is so limited.
The Dubai effort is less likely to happen. Dubai is having a major recession. The extravagant construction projects that aren't well along are being scaled back.
Personal Mass Rapid transit is really cool. It just needs to be setup in a way that it is analagous to a computer driving your car. With our current technology I have no idea whay this isn't being supported and promoted everywhere. Sure you have a vandal/vagrant problem, but you have that with all Mass Transit. And with some good engineering and problem solving those problems can be kept to a minimum.
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
We almost bought one of these systems in Cardiff, Wales a few years back. Then the local press started speculating that the pods would be a great place for couples to indulge themselves on the way home from the pub. Thoughts of grafitti-covered pods full of condoms, used syringes and vomit killed the scheme dead in its tracks.
This might be OK in an airport. In an inner city it would be a disaster.
Well I, for one, welcome our new PRT Overlords!
I grow up in Morgantown, West Virginia home of WVU and it's Personal Rapid Transport system. The Morgantown PRT was the first ever built, and it sucked. Very few locals or students used it, it was often just empty cars moving down rusting rails.
PRTs don't work. They offer the inflexibility of trains, with capacity of cars. That's not a winnings solution.
Mod that up. I want this now.
This POD nonsense is just stupid, someones been watching Sleeper.
They should be perfecting the Orgasmotron instead!
What kills this everytime, the need for individuals to maintain control and comfort over their transportation arrangements i.e. car rentals
More space, power, privacy and range and mostly safety
The POD will end up at Eurodisney and Amerodisney and if you grew up in the 60's like me, you have seen this all before with a HAL as the dashboard voice which turned out to be a Johnny Cab in Total Recall
Someone has too much time and money qnd is obviously better at making a video presentation than coming up with something original
cue the monorail
This could fundamentally change cities. Taxi rides at bus prices. Reduce emissions, no more need for parking meters, reduce ramps, gas stations, garages and lots. In busy areas at busy times you can even automate carpooling reducing traffic. Cities could be much more liveable and efficient.
PRT's are not novel, they've been an engineering pipe dream for at least 60 years. There was a similar design effort in the 1970s in Paris that was the subject of an excellent book by Bruno Latour called Aramis. TFA says that PRT have been previous unworkable for "a variety of reasons, including the cost of the initial systems and the difficulty of integrating them into existing cities". The Paris project got all the way to physical prototypes, built sections of track, etc., and one of Latour's conclusions is that the PRT concept is itself unworkable. It lives in an inflexible no man's land between private vehicles and mass transit: passengers can't go where they want because the system has tracks and shared "pods", and engineers can't scale it how they want because the vehicles don't have flexible open space inside to cram in more passengers during busy times. Lose-lose, all around.
One big train or bus logically can only come by every so many minutes. You don't want to wait 15 minutes. Plus it can only follow a specific route.
For example, my office is 10 minutes away by car. Yet if I were to ride the bus that goes there it would take 1.5 HOURS because first I have to wait 15 minutes for it to show up, then I have to ride downtown to a central station, wait another 15 minutes for the bus going to where I want to go, and then ride that bus. All the way these buses are starting and stopping and go maybe overall 1/2 the speed of a car.
I don't have 1.5 hours of free time to spend commuting. Judging by the ridership, nobody else that is gainfully employed does either.
Now, if we had say smart electric taxis that would show up when I need my ride and go directly there at speed, it would be basically a no-brainer. I'd be on it in 5 seconds. Even if it DID go half as fast as a normal car, so what? I can live with 20 mins if it will save me money. I might even do it if it cost the same.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Why do videos like this always show people hang-gliding as if that's a sure sign of 'The World of Tomorrow'? Is there some key indicator of technological advancement that is based on unpowered flight? Or are they trying to appeal to the niche sportsman?
Also I'm glad to see all those women in the video were well covered up. Good to see that the envisaged middle east of the future still holds onto its core misogynistic values.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
You moron, the article mentions Morgantown quite explicitly and this has been mentioned by a hand full of articles already. Can you even read? Moderators, mod this retard accordingly.
Is it easy to get out of one of these things? I can imagine somebody getting in one, picking a destination, being told that they're 'suspicious' (or the thing just breaking down) and being trapped inside one. This is not going to help anybody who has nightmares about Johnny Cab from Total Recall.
You have to account for a lot of other inefficiencies in a mass transit system, for instance
http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html
This is certainly not the last word on the pluses and minuses of mass transit, but it certainly illustrates that mass transit systems are by NO MEANS de-facto more energy efficient than personal transportation.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
So, I understand that you have the main loop and then off ramps for loading/unloading passengers.
1. So I assume they drop people off in one area and then move along to the pick-up area. Hopefully there is a pool of pods waiting in the pickup area further along the off ramp section otherwise people will be waiting for their ride if there are none available.
If there are none available, will there be a 'pool' of pods at every loading/unloading location to call one from (if no travellers are currently due to arrive at this location) or will there be empty spares wasting time on the main loop, reducing throughput?
If there is a pool, and it fills up as not enough people are calling a pod, I guess the computer can just send some pods off without passengers to a different pool or a central storage depot if there is no space in any other pools. This would be needed to prevent a backlog which could prevent people from getting to the unloading area.
2. People unloading. Come on, we all know how hopeless the masses are, the scenario is Easter weekend or xmas or newyears or some other high throughput day at Heathrow. A gazillion numpties want to get to T5. Then the gobshites can't get out in time and start causing an 'unloading' backlog. This backlog backs up along the off ramp until it reaches the main loop. The main loop clogs.
Looplock.
Nice
Tom...
I think out of the whole video I saw about 10 sec of what might have been one of these things. I mean, It was some nifty graphics and all. But where was the demonstration? Maybe the idea was to see how much cleaner and less crowded the city will be with these?
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
but do they really do anything that trains and buses don't?
Yes they have much more utility than trains and buses. Any given train or bus carries a large number of people and there is NEVER a case where every rider on a given train or bus has the same pick-up or drop-off location. Thus, users must wait for a train/bus to arrive at their stop, and then when on-board have to wait at stops at regular intervals throughout their journey.
The "PRT" consists of autonomous "pods" that hods a small number of people, so they have the flexibility of a car. There can be a pod ready to go at a station at the exact time you need it and it can navigate itself to the "collector route", possibly joining up to a train of pods, then disengage from the train to a siding/turnout at the destination, and so the journey is non-stop without disrupting the journey of other commuters.
Part of this flexibility also means that public transit can be designed more efficiently, as right now bus and train routes have to be designed to handle "peak load". You cannot easily shrink or grow a train or a bus, so for a lot of the time you see big vehicles and trains carrying few or no passengers. If you had a PRT consisting of "pods" that could "connect" and/or operate as a train then you could have pods available for public service 24/7, even in relatively low-traffic areas, at a much lower expense and environmental impact.
Transit authorities tend to be closed-shops, so union guys don't like to hear this, but an automated PRT would save a lot of costs of hiring drivers, and eliminate human error factors. Vancouver, BC's "skytrain" is not a PRT but is automated (no drivers) and has the best on-time and reliability of all public transit systems on the whole continent. The skytrain is much safer than most LRTs not only because it is largely not at-grade, but because there are no drivers and the computer system is not able to bypass interlocks (ie. they are not able to speed or run through signals like human drivers have done at times to maintain schedule).
After seeing the video of the proposed Heathrow system's test-run in Cardiff there is another benefit--with today's technology you could modify existing road infrastructures much cheaper than building tracks or monorails. The Heathrow system looks like it operates on what is basically a narrow road with high kerbs. Extending trains can be complex, especially when you have to route tracks underground, above-ground or parallel to roads where existing buildings may need to be demolished.
Also, both at-grade trains and buses must contend with regular traffic. Buses are at the mercy of congestion and traffic lights, and at-grade trains must wait at intersections with the cars at times. Likewise, these systems disrupt regular road traffic.
The future of "PRT" systems might be in "transit lane upgrades". Many cities have transit-only lanes, and implementing an effective PRT might be simply a matter of upgrading physical barriers, over/underpasses at selected intersections and signal wiring/sensors/wireless comms to facilitate automated operation.
Holds a lot of promise if you ask me...
This PRT stuff won't fly, and besides I already have my PRT shown in the link above!
I don't mind hybrids, but pure electric would be fun, and also don't forget biobutanol, and biogasoline as drop in replacements for dino-juice.
Is this thing on? Check. Check.
I thought of a way to make these PRT vehicles both anonymous and to solve the vandalization problem.
While there would be multiple fare options, there would be the option of paying for a transit card using cash - but, you have to put down a $50 or so deposit.
Each car would have a camera that photographs the interior once the occupants exit it, but the camera would have an obvious motorized shutter that would be closed while the car is in route. So you would know you had privacy.
Obviously, if it turns out you vandalized or left some kind of mess, you lose the deposit.
A bus would use the same amount of energy to stop and let 10 people off, as it would to stop and let 1 off.
You refuted your own argument here. This is exactly why buses and trains are inefficient. During peak hours they are great--a full bus has dozens of people being carried by a single vehicle, but half the time buses are LESS than half full. Buses are very large and consume a lot of diesel, so if you can't run them full ALL the time they approach the efficiency of a car.
The "peak load" problem can be solved by either closing or merging routes during non-peak hours (at the expense of customer service/utility of the system), or by running smaller buses and vans when demand is lower (reducing efficiency, increasing capital costs and lowering equipment utilisation)
Also, public transit vehicles have to stop much more often than PRTs--there are a lot more energy savings in a non-stop route. There is no idling, no stopping and no acceleration to waste energy.
Keep in mind that these new PRTs would be automated, which means there is more opportunity to employ energy-saving ideas that cannot be safely done with personal cars driven by humans. For example, pods can follow very close or even join into trains on-the-fly, and can separate on-the-fly as well. If pods are joined into trains, some or most of them could reduce or even shut down power and coast as they cruise--then you get similar or equal efficiency to a bus or train and better flexibility.
All the more reason to never live in a city!
Cabintaxi had a novel approach. Pods on top of the track went in one direction, suspended cars hanging underneath went the other direction. From the linked article:
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Just before exiting the small car let a huge ripper for the next guy who steps in.
I lived in Morgantown WV (USA) for a year. Morgantown is a small city of about 50,000 people which has had a PRT system since the 1970s. It's the same exact thing, small electric vehicles with a max capacity of 12 people that don't have drivers but are controlled from a central station that monitors/controls all the vehicles on the system. They even call it the "PRT". It's a terrible form of transport, no different than any other public transit.
The problem with the US is suburbs and city planning around automobiles. Go on Google maps, look at Los Angeles. Next to every large building you'll see giant parking lots. Next to many homes you'll see driveways and/or roads wide enough for street parking.
Now go to a large city in Europe or Japan. You'll still see parking lots and roads. But you'll find that there are fewer parking lots and the roads are narrow. If you have street view you'll see the buildings are taller and less spread out.
All I'm pointing out is car culture leads to less density. This leads to poor public mass transit systems because they need a high level of ridership to be viable. But we may never get that because everyone is too convinced they need a car and a place to park it everywhere they go.
We've had to deal with this PRT nonsense in Minnesota for the last 30 years thanks to the fact that a former U of MN professor came up with the idea.
The truth is that PRT is often an excuse for anti-transit idealogues to delay any real investment in public transit. I've seen good projects delayed and killed due to some legislator bringing up the hairbrained idea of PRT.
Why technically competent people fall for this pipe-dream is beyond me. Here's just a short list of the technical issues I've not seen addressed by anyone:
If you read the PRT literature, the argument is not based on technical merit, it's based on fear. All sorts of propaganda about scary bus people and having to ride with strangers (oh no!) gets spewed by PRT supporters.
PRT supporters talk about "new technology" and how rail is "19th century technology." As computing professionals, we know that "old" does not equate to "outdated." In fact it's often just the opposite. "Old" means "proven in real-world situations."
No, PRT is just another way to continue our addiction to single-occupant vehicles and oil. It's another way to kill any real investment in public transit.
Why should I need a 1,000lb machine to move me from place to place? I have, right now, in my garage, five machines which weigh less than 25lbs each and will take me (with a lil effort) to within 5 feet of my destination ant the exact time I wish to depart, at any time of day. Of course, they require a small expenditure of energy, 1,000 calories per day usually does it, but that keeps the beer from gathering round my middle. What's more, I can ride two of 'em on trails for huge fun. Oh, and the skinny tired one can hit 60 on a straight stretch here in CO... PRTs my butt. Guess someone's gotta sell somthin somewhere, eh.
What's wrong with bikes? If you've got the cash to put up the infrastructure for these things, why not lay down some bike paths instead? Bikes are far safer than anything that weighs 500kg and moves (if you question the safety of bikes, look it up before making a fool of yourself), cheaper, simpler, have vastly fewer toxic nasties floating around in their power cells, can be parked without causing urban sprawl and massive parking infrastructure costs, and incidentally would eliminate about 85% of the health crisis within a year.
But I suppose nobody is interested in solutions that have been around for a century.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
well in dense urban environments. NYC would have to turn the entire island of Manhattan into a 10-story parking garage to accommodate the millions of people who commute in on subways and buses everyday. Also, the traffic would be a Dantean nightmare, as opposed to the nightmare it already is with a tiny minority of commuters *cough* Jerseyites *cough* driving in.
Mass transit is also much faster and vastly cheaper. Driving from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side would take about 90 minutes with traffic. Subway gets you there in 45 minutes or even 35 if you catch the transfers right. And an $84 monthly pass lets you ride as much as you want, whereas the same money are what it costs you to fuel a Hummer for a couple weeks. But then you also have to pay for parking, and insurance, and tolls, and maintenance....
Last but not least, my subway pass stays in my pocket and somebody else watches the trains. As opposed to leaving $100,000 worth of my personal property on the street where some jackass can mess with it or steal it.
So really, at the end of the day getting on your city's back to get them to build out a better transit system is a much better transportation solution than keeping running on the car and oil industries' hamster wheel.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Without reading TFA left me confused. Either these new transit things are personal gliders, some sort of space age street-cars, taxi-cabs out of Total Recall or massive egg shaped ships.
Personally, I'm hoping for the latter.
The Internet is generally stupid
I CAN and have, and do bike it, but that works only from May to September in Vermont. Right now today the roads are entirely impassible to bicycles.
In any case, the commute time argument still holds, 10 miles is a good 45 minute ride. Less than the bus, but it is requiring a certain degree of commitment of time.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Per passenger mile.
http://www.atsltd.co.uk/uploads/Documents/clean_air_paper.doc
other interesting docs:
http://www.atsltd.co.uk/uploads/Documents
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Where would you like to go?
=)
Yea, but it loses the efficiency of scale.
No. it doesn't.
It's electric. It doesn't have to stop till it reaches the destination. The bloody things are 2kW. That's like a hairdryer.
A bus has to stop at every bus stop and then accelerate a 30 tonne vehicle back up to 30mph. As does a train, except that's 45 tonne vehicle.
Now think about the nature of a 45 tonne train accelerating and decelerating.. You can only afford to run it at peak times. At other times you have to reduce the schedule, which means people waiting longer. Which means poorer performance.
Now think of the infrastructure required to support a 45 tonne (per carriage) vehicle . It has to be big. That means expensive, and both big and expensive mean that it can only be run to the areas of highest demand. The truth is that trains do not scale. Buses scale better but have even poorer performance characteristics.
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PRT is a beautiful device that combines the pathetic capacity of the Automobile with the high infrastructure costs and lacking agility of the Tram/Metro/Railroad train.
Combining PRT with other systems is a big no-no. You're better off trying to solder your cat to your PC's mainboard.
Your average metro service should be able to handle one train every three minutes. With a usual capacity of 1000 people each, a single metro station should technically be able to receive 20k people per hour and direction. I foresee that a PRT unit would be about as crowded as an automobile during rush hour, i.e. 1.1 people/unit. A metro to PRT exchange should therefore be designed to shift some 36K PRT units per hour, ten units per second. If we assume a speedy ten seconds for exchanging passengers and entering a destination, we would need 100 platforms to service this metro. (And of course whatever support tracks imaginable.) 100 PRT platforms actually take space.
Then there are simpler issues. What do you do with the drunkard who took a nap in the PRT unit of your choice? Or what if he decided to decorate the intricate fabric pattern of the seats with his half-digested kebab? PRT units will require constant surveilance by cameras and odor detectors.
Nah, off to the Gulags with the PRT and Automobile lobbies I say.
I find amusing how the women in the video are dressed in burqas.
In the flatlands, velomobiles are pretty sweet when it's cold and windy. I don't ride my bike when it's below -5C, personally, although I have friends who do (all I'd really need that I don't have is overboots). Ice is another barrel of monkeys entirely, although tricycles (velomobiles) with studded tires are probably about as agile as cars and of course safer due to lower speeds. But they're heavy, and so a pain if it's hilly; and they're big, so they're not as easy to park as bikes; and they're expensive. The alternative--warm clothing--is easy, cheap, versatile, and completely up to the job, if you don't feel threatened by the fashion police for biking in ski gear.
In these parts, they do maintain the bike paths almost as well as the car paths. I was assuming that if the subjects of the article had money for infrastructure for neosegways, putting some into path maintenance would be reasonable. And of course adding bike paths to the normal city snow removal budget shouldn't make much of a difference. In an ideal world...
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
I absolutely think personal transit should be door-to-door. And I think it would be cost-effective.
Around 1990, Mark A. Delucchi at UC Davis did studies on the social costs of automobiles . These include things like health costs from accidents and air pollution, taxes for highway maintenance, time lost in traffic jams, and so on. His calculations showed Americans were spending somewhere between $1.6 trillion and $3.2 trillion each year for highway transportation. (Even counting just the actual direct monetary costs, he counted between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion.)
Now I understand that there is a lot of profit too, like all the money doctors, insurers, etc. are making off this stuff, but nobody argues we should encourage smoking so doctors can get richer (and who makes money from a traffic jam?).
I think we can use those trillions much more effectively than having combustion vehicles careening all over the place.
I do not recognise that destination
Burlington VT. Much smaller than Nashville ;)
What really kills the bus system around here in a sense is that geographically it makes no sense to have routes that go from one edge of town around to the other, yet that is realistically the only way to efficiently get to a lot of places. So unless you're going directly DT any bus you take is at least 2x the distance of driving, and on slower interior roads + making stops. So the time difference is just drastic.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Your observation of public transport only proves that you observed said transport during the 'good' hours. You are probably a white privileged office worker, that catches the train or bus at 9 to 5.
Ever caught it outside those times?
Ever caught a train at 6AM on a Saturday morning? What about at 10PM on a Thursday night?
I doubt you have. You live in a safe little cocoon.
I could have sworn the heading read: "Two Big Breasts for Personal Rapid Transit"