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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."
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.
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.
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.
Speed. You can cover a lot of ground without expending energy over the course of your long shift in the huge terminal you're patrolling, and when you step off it you're not "tired out" from getting to where you're needed.
(assuming the cop in question actually does maintain a fitness regime commensurate with a job where being grossly unfit would be a severe hindrance - I know some cops who do, and some who don't - in the former case, the Segway is just a tool for the job, in the latter case, it is a crutch to overcome being breathless right before an arrest.)
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.
But in a shared-car system you don't need one car per person: you just need as many cars as are required at peak usage. For any given hour of the day, many cars are actually just sitting parked.
With fewer cars in total, it becomes more practical for those cars to be well-maintained, energy-efficient, and so on. (Convincing everyone to buy new energy-efficient cars is impossible. Migrating a communal fleet of vehicles to a new greener technology is more practical.) And if well-managed, there is no reason that such a fleet could not be just as convenient (in terms of getting a car as soon as you need one) as owning a car. (In fact there may be added conveniences like not having to worry about parking.)
In a sense it's not too different from mass-usage of taxis (as seems to happen quite a bit in New York City, for instance), of rental vehicles, or car-share services (e.g. zipcar).
(That's the theory, at least. I'm well-aware of the practical problems of any such system, such as people not keeping the communal vehicles clean, the dangers and inefficiencies of the added bureaucracy, being reliant on someone else's (mis)management, etc.)
You know, I've often wondered if Police depts around the country actually have minimum physical standards that all street cops have to pass. If they do, how freakin' low are these minimums?
I mean, I see a LOT of officers that could not run a block without heart failure, and with guts so large, they have a hard time fitting under a steering wheel of a car.
I think if anything, we might want more cops walking a beat again....to keep them in good physical condition.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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
The wiki article you linked has an article from the Daily Athenaeum in 2007 that says it moves 16,000 a day with 99% being students and 2.25 million a year. That seems like a lot more than "very few locas or students" using it.
Besides, the article for this story compares these new PRTs to the Morgantown and why they are better.
http://www.da.wvu.edu/show_article.php?&story_id=31053
My main beef with them is that you are no longer talking at eye level. They are raised up above you.
The height is an advantage. Its not a 'birds eye view', but it gets them up over the crowd a bit, which is enough to make a big difference.
And of course they can cross an airport quickly without expending energy which can come in handy in an actual emergency.
The talking down thing is sort of a bonus, because its a 'position of power', while its annoying if you are just chatting, in theory it the height advantage might be useful for directing crowds and issuing instructions in an emergency. The height would give them a bit more authority and make them more visible... both which would make them more effective.
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.