PRT's main obstacle is probably ignorance and misunderstanding.
The infrastructure costs for the guideways can be substantially cheaper than say a subway or light rail line. You can run them along sidewalks or media strips so you don't have to buy so much land for one thing.
Plus PRT systems can be built incrementally. You build a loop. Then add another loop. Then add another loop. As the system expands, it becomes far more useful as you create more origins and destinations. Your initial commitment only has to be in the tens of millions of dollars, compared to hundreds of millions for light rail projects. Value for money even compared to road building.
Maximum capacity depends on how many "pods" you squeeze through a given section of track. Taxi 2000 is aiming for half second gaps, which would give you 7000 cars an hour moving along the track. Even if you consider that some will be empty (moving around the network to fill demand elsewhere), that still gives a capacity of 5000-6000 people per hour, one direction. (And if car drivers can be trusted to drive with a two second gap between the car ahead, I don't think half second gaps are out of the question for a fully automatic system).
Here are the main advantages of PRT over conventional bus or train systems:
1) No waiting for a vehicle (except perhaps at peak times)
2) Non-stop trips
Plus the potential is for a system cheap enough that it could operate without public subsidy.
Engineering issues could always mean that the real life system fall shorts of the promise (as it has numerous times in the past), but I think PRT deserves an evaluation in the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
PRT's main obstacle is probably ignorance and misunderstanding.
The infrastructure costs for the guideways can be substantially cheaper than say a subway or light rail line. You can run them along sidewalks or media strips so you don't have to buy so much land for one thing.
Plus PRT systems can be built incrementally. You build a loop. Then add another loop. Then add another loop. As the system expands, it becomes far more useful as you create more origins and destinations. Your initial commitment only has to be in the tens of millions of dollars, compared to hundreds of millions for light rail projects. Value for money even compared to road building.
Maximum capacity depends on how many "pods" you squeeze through a given section of track. Taxi 2000 is aiming for half second gaps, which would give you 7000 cars an hour moving along the track. Even if you consider that some will be empty (moving around the network to fill demand elsewhere), that still gives a capacity of 5000-6000 people per hour, one direction. (And if car drivers can be trusted to drive with a two second gap between the car ahead, I don't think half second gaps are out of the question for a fully automatic system).
Here are the main advantages of PRT over conventional bus or train systems:
1) No waiting for a vehicle (except perhaps at peak times)
2) Non-stop trips
Plus the potential is for a system cheap enough that it could operate without public subsidy.
Engineering issues could always mean that the real life system fall shorts of the promise (as it has numerous times in the past), but I think PRT deserves an evaluation in the real world.
Chris