8 ms·

Why Nonstop Travel in Personal Pods Has yet to Take Off

62 points by larubbio 11y ago

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
Here in Ithaca, NY, we have three major communities that are relatively close, but just too far away from a combination of distance, elevation from hills, and miserably cold temperatures: downtown, Ithaca College, and (Cornell's) collegetown. A simple pod connection between collegetown and downtown, and then another route to IC, would do wonders for our transit system. See, the nice and terrible thing about Ithaca is that it's a small valley hemmed in by hills on three sites and a lake to the north, so most things tend to be bunched together, which can be almost walkable, depending on distance, temperature, and whether you're carrying groceries. The downside is that there are like 5 arterial roads to get anywhere meaningful in the area, and if just one of them is closed for construction, traffic slows to a halt. We don't need long or complex routes. I've been on the WVU pods, and while they're nice, they go FAR. I'm talking about a quarter or less of the distance they cover, and only in two directions (and maybe a third because you have a better chance of getting into Willy Wonka's chocolate factory than finding parking at the farmers market). So please, by all means, if you're looking to trial travel pods somewhere, start here.
- Animats 11y ago
  That's a good application for Intamin's Mountain People Mover.[1] Intamin builds both roller coasters and monorails, and for a ski resort, they combined the technologies. It's a personal rapid transit system which runs on roller coaster track. Steep hills are not a problem. Nor is snow. [1] http://www.intaminworldwide.com/transportation/MountainPeopleMover/tabid/119/language/de-DE/Default.aspx http://www.intaminworldwide.com/transportation/MountainPeopl...
dummy7953 11y ago
No worry, this is what cars will eventually become. We'll likely do away with taxis and public busses and light rail. And we'll just have some public cars that merge into the traffic that's used by private cars. And all those cars, including the private ones will have automated driving. The difference is, the private car owners will pay for private ownership and commodity fetishism (you thought that was going away?), and public car riders will likely have subsidized fares, police monitoring cameras, and stations (what bus stops used to be). Some glue-huffing kid wants to carve his name into the windshield? No worries, the doors will auto-lock and drive Mr. Punk to the nearest police station. Stuck in a car with a rapist, scream for help and again, you're headed to a police station or you'll stop and the police will come to you.
tkinom 11y ago
They might want to try these approach: 1. They should convince company with $$$ such as Google, FB, Apple to build this for building between their campus buildings. Those company has $ and regulation issues might be might a lot smaller compare to convincing a city like SF to do it. Might be easier to sell because of the "cool factor". Those companies can easily convince City of Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino to let them do it. 2. If #1 works, those companies can build routes between the public transit hub, large shopping malls to company. Help ease the parking/commute issues. 3. Convince Disney Land, World to do this for the "cool factor". 4. All Major convention centers, sport stadium to build routes to major shopping mall/large parking structures nearby.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  I think the only option with real value is #4. The WVU pods are really nice for ferrying students allll the way from their dorms and apartments to the enormous football stadium. A place like Morgantown, WV, is pretty much using every square foot of land it can, so parking is out of the question. But let's face it, getting to ANY stadium on game day sucks when you're sharing the experience with tens of thousands of people. Only problem is that it's a very specific use case and is likely only to have seasonal ridership. And any example that can be used to show why something can be built is one backfire away from being a reason not to do so.
- ericras 11y ago
  Disneyland had one and they ripped it out 20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeopleMover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeopleMover Of course, it was just a "ride" and only covered Tomorrowland. I've always thought they made a mistake not covering the whole park with one of these.
  - zyxley 11y ago
    > I've always thought they made a mistake not covering the whole park with one of these. Appropriately enough given the topic at hand, they have a train for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_Railroad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_Railroad
jerf 11y ago
It's just too far ahead of its time. You need to be able to do this without building special infrastructure for the pods, which is an enormous risky up-front investment for something that is, frankly, almost certain to fail. Times will change and the infrastructure can't change with it. And you can't roll the system out a little bit and get a little bit of the benefits; it's useless until you fully cover a significant set of use cases. By contrast, if the pods were self-driving cars on the roads that already exist, the economics change completely. No special infrastructure. Can easily roll out on a small scale for small benefits. Can easily ramp up. Massively smaller initial outlay. System can grow and pay for itself as it goes.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  The problem with self-driving cars as a cure-all is the Jevon's Paradox: if the costs of auto transport are knocked down, then everyone will use them at the slightest whim, especially when tired or drunk. People can live 2+ hours away from work and it won't be a problem when they can work or sleep in their car. I'm not saying this will happen but I do fear that mobile homes will make a comeback as people live permanently on the road in cars they don't have to drive or pay property taxes for, all while taking up 2-3x the space of a regular car.
  - anon4 11y ago
    Wouldn't gas costs kill this? You can't be driving all the time and there are scant few public places where you can park a mobile home. I mean, pretty much any technology can be imagined to bring about a dystopia, but I think it's quite a leap for self-driving cars.
    - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
      The RV idea assumes minuscule fuel costs and I doubt it would be anything more than a niche appeal, like bikers, but like bikers, it could be annoying and disruptive (god I hate how the tech industry made that word only mean good things) for the people around them. People could sleep in their RVs as they drive around at night. Again, assuming low fuel costs.
martythemaniak 11y ago
I've been thinking about this a lot and think there's a few things to think about. First, the reason we haven't seen these is because until very recently the tech needed to make them cheap wasn't there. Second, the technology seems to be caught a classic "worse is better" situation. The actual PRT tech is clearly superior to buses and LRTs, but those are well understood and there's a simple evolutionary path (car, bus, bus lane, lrt, lrt lane, subway). PRTs require a leap of thinking from people and governments don't have any incentives or mandate to take such risks. Third, PRTs tracks may be hard to connect to a true network where pods seamlessly switch between tracks. Finally, the self driving car could very well kill this in its tracks, but no form of transport can deliver speed or consistency without a dedicated right of way, be that suspended track, tunnel, marked lane etc.
- anon4 11y ago
  This is just rail with person-sized vehicles. Maybe you can dub it "modular rail" to make it easier for people to grok, but it's not that weird. Also, you could have them run on the existing subway system and just build off-line stations. Though before you do that, you should take into consideration designing the pods so I can take my bicycle on it, or my dog, etc.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  Self-driving cars will likely kill PRT ambitions by being a better band-aid for long enough to not have to think about the problem for a while, like how successive attempts at solar power were buried for more than 100 years by more efficient coal extraction, then oil, then nuclear, then oil, again.
  - eridius 11y ago
    Self-driving cars aren't a band-aid. In the long term, where every vehicle on the road is self-driving, then they're the best solution possible (for any travel distance that doesn't warrant something like Hyperloop / planes / trains). I say this because self-driving cars can go everywhere (that cars can go). Pods have a fixed track, they can only go where there's track to go. The only way for Pods to be better than self-driving cars is if we rip up all the roads and replace the entire road network with a pod track network, but that obviously will never happen (and even then it's not necessarily better, because a pod track network could only be used for pods, but roads can be used by a lot more than just cars).
rch 11y ago
I'm surprised ULTra wasn't mentioned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ULTra_(rapid_transit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ULTra_(rapid_transit)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
1024core 11y ago
Having taken MUNI (SF's light rail) underground in SF, I have some doubt about the efficiency of such a system. In my station (Church), in the morning, I can see trains coming in every 3-4 minutes or so; and about 40 people get on at once. With a PRT system, you'd have to first line up at the turnstile to punch in your destination. Assume 15 seconds each. Then, when a car comes in, you'd have line up to get in. A person gets in, swipes her card, punches in the destination, etc. Minimum time: 1 minute, if you're being fast. Suddenly, the bandwidth is just not there; the platform becomes the bottleneck. Same would happen at an elevated pathway too, I imagine. So, a system like this would be infeasible in a dense city like SF. Above ground is another story altogether: the NIMBYs would block all construction. What could work is a system of autonomous vehicles (taxis) the size of a Google self-driving car, running above ground, summoned via a smartphone app or a kiosk at every corner. So, instead of dedicated pathways and elevated tracks, use autonomous cars. Also: very importantly, each car must have odor detectors / biohazard detectors in case someone has an 'accident' in the car.
- zyxley 11y ago
  For getting an intuitive sense of the kind of throughput here, I think it'd be useful to picture a rollercoaster. If anything, rollercoasters are even faster boarding than one-person pods would be, since the whole rollercoaster train shows up at once. Now picture the line at Space Mountain in the afternoon, except in a subway station.
  - rch 11y ago
    To be successful, loading and unloading would probably need to occur outside the normal flow of traffic.
- ChrisLTD 11y ago
  All excellent points. This is why we should invest more heavily in proven mass transit systems rather than divert limited public funds into these inefficient pods or hyperloop systems. Corollary: Is it really that bad to have to ride a bus or train with other people on-board?
JDDunn9 11y ago
I don't think you can argue that self-driving cars killed PRT, when we are still building brand new subways and light rail. I think anything new/innovative loses in the sound byte war. I remember ~2 years ago, the election for mayor of Honolulu hinged on the candidates' stances on building a railroad vs. expanding the existing bus system (rail won). I think if either of them were arguing for PRT, you couldn't explain it to voters in the sound bytes summaries the news gives us.
jpollock 11y ago
This type of system would seem to have the same failure modes that complex baggage handling systems have. [1] They are both moving baggage (passengers) on demand between two points. I seem to remember seeing an article indicating that the failures Denver was having (all the empty pods end up at one spot) was visible in experiment, but I can't find it now. [1] http://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/DIABaggage.pdf http://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/DIABaggage.pdf [2] http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs-wm/630.pdf http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs-wm/630.pdf
- jpollock 11y ago
  Found the article discussing a simulation: http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/biblio/ddj/Website/articles/DDJ/1997/9701/9701h/9701h.htm#rf1 http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/biblio/ddj/Web...
fit2rule 11y ago
What I sometimes wonder about is whether or not we'll some day seen these kind of personal pods configured for use on existing railway stock. Many times while waiting for a train, I've sat there pondering - "what if I could build some sort of portable segway-like thing that I could just clamp onto one of those rails on the track, step onto it, and propel myself down the line" .. and I honestly can't think of any major reasons why this wouldn't be viable in this day and age. Pods could clamp onto the existing rail, shuttle individuals around, communicate with each other to avoid collisions, and so on .. maybe I'm just not thinking it through well enough, but couldn't we just build better rail-transport devices at the personal level which utilize the existing infrastructure, instead of having to rebuild it all from scratch with incompatible systems? Something like this, only better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YVVSzS3Fco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YVVSzS3Fco
- ChrisLTD 11y ago
  One big obstacle is that the existing trains with more passengers should & need to always have the right of way. For example, should the non-pod people be stuck at the platform if you have trouble clamping your device onto the track?
- jchoong 11y ago
  +1. Having something that can use the existing rail infrastructure in off periods would be great as a transitional adoption method. That way you have time to address the institutional jitters while still providing/proving real service. For example, during weekends / night when the load is much lower (or service doesn't run anyway).
  - fit2rule 11y ago
    There is a lot of 'dead rail' out there that might be repurposed for this ..
jchoong 11y ago
This has a great (and updated) set of links for all PRT efforts http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/prtquick.htm http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/prtquick.htm
listic 11y ago
London Heathrow Airport has Travel Pods like that: https://youtu.be/F5Knmgr2Ge8 https://youtu.be/F5Knmgr2Ge8 Wikipedia article lists five operational systems like this in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit#List_of_operational_ATN_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit#List_of...
- 7952 11y ago
  Wow that's really cool. Now if they can just remove the silly cars and let me ride my bike on it.
peter303 11y ago
I would think tracked PRTs would need less road space than driven cars. In medium density cities roads are a quarter of square footage. You could probably take out 1/2 or 2/3rds existing roads then and convert them to yards or parks.
- listic 11y ago
  I am afraid PRTs would have hard time competing with roads, and even more so with railways, in terms of passenger carrying capacity. Wikipedia says [1] high capacity road can carry 2,400 passengers per hour; light rail 20,000 - 25,000 passengers per hour per lane in each direction. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail#Comparison_with_high_capacity_roads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail#Comparison_with_hig...
joe_the_user 11y ago
This sort of thing was tried and apparent failed in the planned "ecotopia" of Masdar City. "The initial design banned automobiles, as travel will be accomplished via public mass transit and personal rapid transit (PRT) systems, with existing road and railways connecting to other locations outside the city..." But "Under a revised design, public transport within the city will rely on methods other than the PRTs." Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City#Transport_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City#Transport_system
beefman 11y ago
Didn't Aaron Patzer explain this, back when he concluded that Swift PRT wouldn't work? https://web.archive.org/web/20140723180502/http://swiftprt.com/blog/2011/12/the-future-of-ground-based-transportation-systems/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140723180502/http://swiftprt.c...

62 points by larubbio 11y ago

Here in Ithaca, NY, we have three major communities that are relatively close, but just too far away from a combination of distance, elevation from hills, and miserably cold temperatures: downtown, Ithaca College, and (Cornell's) collegetown. A simple pod connection between collegetown and downtown, and then another route to IC, would do wonders for our transit system. See, the nice and terrible thing about Ithaca is that it's a small valley hemmed in by hills on three sites and a lake to the north, so most things tend to be bunched together, which can be almost walkable, depending on distance, temperature, and whether you're carrying groceries. The downside is that there are like 5 arterial roads to get anywhere meaningful in the area, and if just one of them is closed for construction, traffic slows to a halt. We don't need long or complex routes. I've been on the WVU pods, and while they're nice, they go FAR. I'm talking about a quarter or less of the distance they cover, and only in two directions (and maybe a third because you have a better chance of getting into Willy Wonka's chocolate factory than finding parking at the farmers market). So please, by all means, if you're looking to trial travel pods somewhere, start here.

Animats 11y ago
That's a good application for Intamin's Mountain People Mover.[1] Intamin builds both roller coasters and monorails, and for a ski resort, they combined the technologies. It's a personal rapid transit system which runs on roller coaster track. Steep hills are not a problem. Nor is snow. [1] http://www.intaminworldwide.com/transportation/MountainPeopleMover/tabid/119/language/de-DE/Default.aspx http://www.intaminworldwide.com/transportation/MountainPeopl...

dummy7953 11y ago

No worry, this is what cars will eventually become. We'll likely do away with taxis and public busses and light rail. And we'll just have some public cars that merge into the traffic that's used by private cars. And all those cars, including the private ones will have automated driving. The difference is, the private car owners will pay for private ownership and commodity fetishism (you thought that was going away?), and public car riders will likely have subsidized fares, police monitoring cameras, and stations (what bus stops used to be). Some glue-huffing kid wants to carve his name into the windshield? No worries, the doors will auto-lock and drive Mr. Punk to the nearest police station. Stuck in a car with a rapist, scream for help and again, you're headed to a police station or you'll stop and the police will come to you.

tkinom 11y ago

They might want to try these approach: 1. They should convince company with $$$ such as Google, FB, Apple to build this for building between their campus buildings. Those company has $ and regulation issues might be might a lot smaller compare to convincing a city like SF to do it. Might be easier to sell because of the "cool factor". Those companies can easily convince City of Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino to let them do it. 2. If #1 works, those companies can build routes between the public transit hub, large shopping malls to company. Help ease the parking/commute issues. 3. Convince Disney Land, World to do this for the "cool factor". 4. All Major convention centers, sport stadium to build routes to major shopping mall/large parking structures nearby.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
I think the only option with real value is #4. The WVU pods are really nice for ferrying students allll the way from their dorms and apartments to the enormous football stadium. A place like Morgantown, WV, is pretty much using every square foot of land it can, so parking is out of the question. But let's face it, getting to ANY stadium on game day sucks when you're sharing the experience with tens of thousands of people. Only problem is that it's a very specific use case and is likely only to have seasonal ridership. And any example that can be used to show why something can be built is one backfire away from being a reason not to do so.
ericras 11y ago
Disneyland had one and they ripped it out 20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeopleMover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeopleMover Of course, it was just a "ride" and only covered Tomorrowland. I've always thought they made a mistake not covering the whole park with one of these.
- zyxley 11y ago
  > I've always thought they made a mistake not covering the whole park with one of these. Appropriately enough given the topic at hand, they have a train for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_Railroad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_Railroad

jerf 11y ago

It's just too far ahead of its time. You need to be able to do this without building special infrastructure for the pods, which is an enormous risky up-front investment for something that is, frankly, almost certain to fail. Times will change and the infrastructure can't change with it. And you can't roll the system out a little bit and get a little bit of the benefits; it's useless until you fully cover a significant set of use cases. By contrast, if the pods were self-driving cars on the roads that already exist, the economics change completely. No special infrastructure. Can easily roll out on a small scale for small benefits. Can easily ramp up. Massively smaller initial outlay. System can grow and pay for itself as it goes.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
The problem with self-driving cars as a cure-all is the Jevon's Paradox: if the costs of auto transport are knocked down, then everyone will use them at the slightest whim, especially when tired or drunk. People can live 2+ hours away from work and it won't be a problem when they can work or sleep in their car. I'm not saying this will happen but I do fear that mobile homes will make a comeback as people live permanently on the road in cars they don't have to drive or pay property taxes for, all while taking up 2-3x the space of a regular car.
- anon4 11y ago
  Wouldn't gas costs kill this? You can't be driving all the time and there are scant few public places where you can park a mobile home. I mean, pretty much any technology can be imagined to bring about a dystopia, but I think it's quite a leap for self-driving cars.
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    The RV idea assumes minuscule fuel costs and I doubt it would be anything more than a niche appeal, like bikers, but like bikers, it could be annoying and disruptive (god I hate how the tech industry made that word only mean good things) for the people around them. People could sleep in their RVs as they drive around at night. Again, assuming low fuel costs.

martythemaniak 11y ago

I've been thinking about this a lot and think there's a few things to think about. First, the reason we haven't seen these is because until very recently the tech needed to make them cheap wasn't there. Second, the technology seems to be caught a classic "worse is better" situation. The actual PRT tech is clearly superior to buses and LRTs, but those are well understood and there's a simple evolutionary path (car, bus, bus lane, lrt, lrt lane, subway). PRTs require a leap of thinking from people and governments don't have any incentives or mandate to take such risks. Third, PRTs tracks may be hard to connect to a true network where pods seamlessly switch between tracks. Finally, the self driving car could very well kill this in its tracks, but no form of transport can deliver speed or consistency without a dedicated right of way, be that suspended track, tunnel, marked lane etc.

anon4 11y ago
This is just rail with person-sized vehicles. Maybe you can dub it "modular rail" to make it easier for people to grok, but it's not that weird. Also, you could have them run on the existing subway system and just build off-line stations. Though before you do that, you should take into consideration designing the pods so I can take my bicycle on it, or my dog, etc.
rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
Self-driving cars will likely kill PRT ambitions by being a better band-aid for long enough to not have to think about the problem for a while, like how successive attempts at solar power were buried for more than 100 years by more efficient coal extraction, then oil, then nuclear, then oil, again.
- eridius 11y ago
  Self-driving cars aren't a band-aid. In the long term, where every vehicle on the road is self-driving, then they're the best solution possible (for any travel distance that doesn't warrant something like Hyperloop / planes / trains). I say this because self-driving cars can go everywhere (that cars can go). Pods have a fixed track, they can only go where there's track to go. The only way for Pods to be better than self-driving cars is if we rip up all the roads and replace the entire road network with a pod track network, but that obviously will never happen (and even then it's not necessarily better, because a pod track network could only be used for pods, but roads can be used by a lot more than just cars).

rch 11y ago

I'm surprised ULTra wasn't mentioned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ULTra_(rapid_transit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ULTra_(rapid_transit)

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

1024core 11y ago

Having taken MUNI (SF's light rail) underground in SF, I have some doubt about the efficiency of such a system. In my station (Church), in the morning, I can see trains coming in every 3-4 minutes or so; and about 40 people get on at once. With a PRT system, you'd have to first line up at the turnstile to punch in your destination. Assume 15 seconds each. Then, when a car comes in, you'd have line up to get in. A person gets in, swipes her card, punches in the destination, etc. Minimum time: 1 minute, if you're being fast. Suddenly, the bandwidth is just not there; the platform becomes the bottleneck. Same would happen at an elevated pathway too, I imagine. So, a system like this would be infeasible in a dense city like SF. Above ground is another story altogether: the NIMBYs would block all construction. What could work is a system of autonomous vehicles (taxis) the size of a Google self-driving car, running above ground, summoned via a smartphone app or a kiosk at every corner. So, instead of dedicated pathways and elevated tracks, use autonomous cars. Also: very importantly, each car must have odor detectors / biohazard detectors in case someone has an 'accident' in the car.

zyxley 11y ago
For getting an intuitive sense of the kind of throughput here, I think it'd be useful to picture a rollercoaster. If anything, rollercoasters are even faster boarding than one-person pods would be, since the whole rollercoaster train shows up at once. Now picture the line at Space Mountain in the afternoon, except in a subway station.
- rch 11y ago
  To be successful, loading and unloading would probably need to occur outside the normal flow of traffic.
ChrisLTD 11y ago
All excellent points. This is why we should invest more heavily in proven mass transit systems rather than divert limited public funds into these inefficient pods or hyperloop systems. Corollary: Is it really that bad to have to ride a bus or train with other people on-board?

JDDunn9 11y ago

I don't think you can argue that self-driving cars killed PRT, when we are still building brand new subways and light rail. I think anything new/innovative loses in the sound byte war. I remember ~2 years ago, the election for mayor of Honolulu hinged on the candidates' stances on building a railroad vs. expanding the existing bus system (rail won). I think if either of them were arguing for PRT, you couldn't explain it to voters in the sound bytes summaries the news gives us.

jpollock 11y ago

This type of system would seem to have the same failure modes that complex baggage handling systems have. [1] They are both moving baggage (passengers) on demand between two points. I seem to remember seeing an article indicating that the failures Denver was having (all the empty pods end up at one spot) was visible in experiment, but I can't find it now. [1] http://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/DIABaggage.pdf http://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/DIABaggage.pdf [2] http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs-wm/630.pdf http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs-wm/630.pdf

jpollock 11y ago
Found the article discussing a simulation: http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/biblio/ddj/Website/articles/DDJ/1997/9701/9701h/9701h.htm#rf1 http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/biblio/ddj/Web...

fit2rule 11y ago

What I sometimes wonder about is whether or not we'll some day seen these kind of personal pods configured for use on existing railway stock. Many times while waiting for a train, I've sat there pondering - "what if I could build some sort of portable segway-like thing that I could just clamp onto one of those rails on the track, step onto it, and propel myself down the line" .. and I honestly can't think of any major reasons why this wouldn't be viable in this day and age. Pods could clamp onto the existing rail, shuttle individuals around, communicate with each other to avoid collisions, and so on .. maybe I'm just not thinking it through well enough, but couldn't we just build better rail-transport devices at the personal level which utilize the existing infrastructure, instead of having to rebuild it all from scratch with incompatible systems? Something like this, only better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YVVSzS3Fco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YVVSzS3Fco

ChrisLTD 11y ago
One big obstacle is that the existing trains with more passengers should & need to always have the right of way. For example, should the non-pod people be stuck at the platform if you have trouble clamping your device onto the track?
jchoong 11y ago
+1. Having something that can use the existing rail infrastructure in off periods would be great as a transitional adoption method. That way you have time to address the institutional jitters while still providing/proving real service. For example, during weekends / night when the load is much lower (or service doesn't run anyway).
- fit2rule 11y ago
  There is a lot of 'dead rail' out there that might be repurposed for this ..

jchoong 11y ago

This has a great (and updated) set of links for all PRT efforts http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/prtquick.htm http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/prtquick.htm

listic 11y ago

London Heathrow Airport has Travel Pods like that: https://youtu.be/F5Knmgr2Ge8 https://youtu.be/F5Knmgr2Ge8 Wikipedia article lists five operational systems like this in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit#List_of_operational_ATN_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit#List_of...

7952 11y ago
Wow that's really cool. Now if they can just remove the silly cars and let me ride my bike on it.

peter303 11y ago

I would think tracked PRTs would need less road space than driven cars. In medium density cities roads are a quarter of square footage. You could probably take out 1/2 or 2/3rds existing roads then and convert them to yards or parks.

listic 11y ago
I am afraid PRTs would have hard time competing with roads, and even more so with railways, in terms of passenger carrying capacity. Wikipedia says [1] high capacity road can carry 2,400 passengers per hour; light rail 20,000 - 25,000 passengers per hour per lane in each direction. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail#Comparison_with_high_capacity_roads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail#Comparison_with_hig...

joe_the_user 11y ago

This sort of thing was tried and apparent failed in the planned "ecotopia" of Masdar City. "The initial design banned automobiles, as travel will be accomplished via public mass transit and personal rapid transit (PRT) systems, with existing road and railways connecting to other locations outside the city..." But "Under a revised design, public transport within the city will rely on methods other than the PRTs." Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City#Transport_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City#Transport_system

beefman 11y ago

Didn't Aaron Patzer explain this, back when he concluded that Swift PRT wouldn't work? https://web.archive.org/web/20140723180502/http://swiftprt.com/blog/2011/12/the-future-of-ground-based-transportation-systems/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140723180502/http://swiftprt.c...