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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.
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 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."
his username is like a car
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
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.)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The only real problem with bikes is weather. If it were up to me, I'd ride my bike every day. But when there's a few inches of snow on top of ice, it's nearly impossible (at least for me) to get anywhere without falling over ever 20 feet.
I guess they could start salting the bike lanes, but then you'd still have the problem if being very, very cold when you tried to get to work.
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