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Rethinking Rail Travel: Boarding a Moving Train
PolygamousRanchKid tips this article about an idea for revolutionizing the rail system in the long-term:
"The idea is to have a city-wide network of trams that travel in a loop and connect with a high-speed rail service. But instead of passengers having to get off the tram at a rail station and wait for the next HSR service to arrive, the moving tram would 'dock' with a moving train, allowing passengers to cross between tram and train without either vehicle ever stopping. 'The trams speed up and the high-speed train slows down and they join, so they dock at high speed,' explains Priestman. 'They stay docked for the same amount of time that it would stop at a station,' he adds. While Priestman admits that it will be some time before his vision could be implemented, he says the time has come to rethink how we travel. 'This idea is a far-future thought but wouldn't it be brilliant to just re-evaluate and just re-think the whole process?' he says."
and perhaps to encase cities in caves of steel
rewriting history since 2109
Maybe the time has come to rethink _how much_ we travel...
So, when we have our city with flying cars, domestic robots and all of the other commensurate sci-fi amenities which will never happen, we will also have a train we board at speed.
I'm sure in some abstract, never-going-to-happen way this is a really cool idea.
But it's so far detached from anything which will ever happen as to basically be a meaningless suggestion. These fantastic cities of the future will never actually happen unless we suddenly have unlimited cheap energy or resources ... the cost of rebuilding any major city would be absolutely ridiculous.
Harumph ... I must be getting old. Time was I'd think this was something cool. Now it's just another pointless futurist thought experiment.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Have you ever been at the station when there was a really slow moving old lady at the front of the line, trying to get into the train, but moving at a snail's pace, holding up the whole line, and then still being in the doorway when it starts trying to close? Remember the loud buzzer that sounds to signal people to get out of the doors, that she's too deaf to hear, and ignores as she slowly continues toddling her way into the car, holding up the train, and still nobody else has managed to even get in?
I've been behind her several times. It's weird, almost every time I go to Toronto (the nearest place I've had to ride the subway), she's there in line in front of me. She's a really nice lady, but oh so very slow moving, and she won't accept help.
This proposed system would ensure that I would only ever be behind her once, because when the high-speed train and moving tram were not able to un-dock because she was still toddling along in the gap between them, they would either end up crashing and killing everyone, or they would separate anyways and either tear her in half, or drop her between the tracks and grind her into paste on the ground.
lets figure a way to bring the office, the work back home.
Home is home. Workplace is workplace.
The problem we have with all the smart phones and tablets and wifi and the internets is that we CANNOT shut ourselves of from our daily grind.
No thanks. I'm much happier knowing that when I leave my offices I'm done. There is no expectation that I am available to do work.
This is just moving back to 'cubes' where instead of being in a cube in an office space, your 'cube' is your room at home. That on so many levels is horrendous.
Why not instead of bring the work back home, all move in and live at work like.. oh I don't know.. those folks at Foxconn.
Yeah sounds great.
The inconvenient truth is that mass transit must be sized for peak loads, and therefore runs no where near capacity most of the time. A train, tram, or bus fully loaded is very energy efficient. A train, tram, or bus lightly loaded uses way more energy per passenger-mile than a car. No transit authority remakes trains between rush hour and mid-day, nor do they have two fleets of buses so that they can switch from long articulateds at rush hour to mini-vans during mid day. Mass transit wastes huge amounts of energy, and we can't afford it any more.
The answer is self-driving cars. We already have door-to-door infrastructure for cars. With self-driving cars road capacity increases because the cars can run closer together and at higher or at least more consistent speeds. A self-driving car is a self-valet-parking vehicle, so parking lots and structures can be moved further from office buildings.
People working on any kind of mass transit solution that involves large vehicles like trains are exactly the fools that are wasting our fossil fuels the fastest. Show me solutions that scale up/down with the daily load fluctuation, and you have my interest.