6 ms·

The road not taken: How we found and lost the dream of Personal Rapid Transit

43 points by samsolomon 11y ago

xyzzy4 11y ago
Instead we pursued the dream of 140 character messages.
pjc50 11y ago
The book on 'Aramis' mentioned is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramis,_or_the_Love_of_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramis,_or_the_Love_of_Technol... ; I picked it up by chance in the room of an anthropology student many years ago and found it fascinating. It's a sociologist's view of an engineering project management failure, and therefore requires a bit of unfamiliar jargon to interpret. It concerns itself with the question "what is progress and modernity?" quite a bit, as projects like PRT are self-conscious attempts to build a futuristic technology rather than an incrementalist approach of meeting immediate demands.
jkot 11y ago
I think this would create problem with monopoly. If city would own and rent out cars, the price would inflate and technology would stagnate. Something like city licensed taxi services.
- floatrock 11y ago
  How else could you raise the vast amounts of financing needed for such a project? It's not unreasonable that if you put forward $100M on a risky venture, you get x years of exclusive usage to generate a return on investment. The article mentioned a failed kickstarter for a boston project -- the crowdfunding alternative has yet to be proven for large-scale infrastructure. But it would be interesting if you could raise a bond like that from private citizens. Literally have people invest in their city by purchasing shares of the municipal bond and have it paid back over 30 years of usage. Not sure why that can't be done... perhaps easier to mobilize $100M from a single private equity group than $1k from 100,000 individuals, perhaps rules about being an accredited investor before you're deemed ready to invest in projects of that scale, or perhaps the lawyers are terrified of dealing with a class-action suit involving a chunk of the populace instead of a small number of private equity firms in the lawsuit if things go wrong.
haxel 11y ago
What about variably-autonomous cars? Take a car with self-driving capability and then have it be manually operated while solitary but increasingly self-driving as the group of similarly automated cars it belongs to grows. There's a lot of benefits to group awareness: share sensors, coordinate behavior for efficiency, instant communication, and so on. This gives us the best of both worlds: safety in numbers, safety in automation and sensors, and it retains the personal autonomy we're used to. All while not requiring 100% perfect autonomous capability. If the cars were small and cheap enough, they could be made available via subscription (much like a lease) and treated like a municipal transportation network that's superior to light rail and bus networks.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  A herd of sufficiently smart enough self-driving cars should be able to use their network of sensors to allow "manual" drivers to move freely through, should it not? I would think that one should be able to drive even more freely; as the reaction time of the herd, and the individual cars, could accommodate situations that even highly trained human drivers would fail at.
  - haxel 11y ago
    Yeah, I would think that such a herd or swarm would be fully backward and forward compatible. Traditional cars could keep doing what they do - swarms would react intelligently to them as swarms tend to do - and there wouldn't be any need for specialized infrastructure to support pure automation.
- mpitt 11y ago
  Just as a reminder, ”instant“ communication is not really instant. There is latency, it increases with the number of cars involved and it’s not negligible for safety purposes (e.g. emergency braking).
- Animats 11y ago
  That's sort of what Google is doing with their little fully-autonomous 25MPH car. Senior communities will be full of those things in a few years. Would special roads or guideways for those help? Possibly. Parking garages dedicated to those things are likely. They can be parked several deep because the blocking cars can be asked to move. The future of self-driving cars has more to do with where they go when not in use than what they do while carrying passengers.
m0llusk 11y ago
The road not taken yet, perhaps? The proposed SkyTran PRT variant has levels of efficiency that are at least in theory way ahead of anything that surface roads and wheeled vehicles can offer. Just as the PRT system highlighted in the story is retained for its genuine value other experiments are likely to tried and retained.
- DennisP 11y ago
  Skytran is about to complete a pilot project in Tel Aviv, and has others in the works: http://fortune.com/2015/11/24/skytran-maglev-pod-system-tel-aviv/ http://fortune.com/2015/11/24/skytran-maglev-pod-system-tel-... http://www.fastcoexist.com/3052942/the-sci-fi-skytran-monorail-may-be-our-most-practical-replacement-for-cars http://www.fastcoexist.com/3052942/the-sci-fi-skytran-monora...
  - Animats 11y ago
    No, they're talking about building a small test loop Real Soon Now. Their site has a huge collection of renders and animations, but very little about real hardware.[1] Supposedly they had a 220 meter prototype for an amusement park in New Zealand, but there don't seem to be any pictures of that. The hype to hardware ratio is strong in this one. [1] http://www.skytran.com/ http://www.skytran.com/
josscrowcroft 11y ago
I'm excited about the Hyperloop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop http://news.nationalgeographic.com/energy/2016/02/160223-Elon-Musk-Hyperloop-for-Sonic-Tubular-Travel-Gets-Real/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/energy/2016/02/160223-Elo... http://www.wired.com/2014/12/jumpstartfund-hyperloop-elon-musk/ http://www.wired.com/2014/12/jumpstartfund-hyperloop-elon-mu...
Shivetya 11y ago
well self driving cars are being over engineered for the very fact that for very long time if not forever there will always be a manually controlled vehicle along their path. as for lane set asides, we already have HOV and Express lanes that would easily be adapted to self driving cars, if anything the express lanes would be even more efficient. Cars like buses always trump trains in metro ranges simply because both can adapt quickly to change of habits. trains might be one solution between cities but even in Europe air travel is supplanting it
- CalRobert 11y ago
  "if not forever there will always be a manually controlled vehicle along their path." I hope it is forever, because otherwise we apparently would have outlawed bicycles.
CalRobert 11y ago
Worth noting - a lot of the benefits of PRT are realized with short, one-way on demand car rentals. Obviously you still have to drive, but you get quick access to a vehicle, go where you want, hop out, and someone else gets to use it. At scale it's awesome, but it's been hard for sprawling US cities to get to that scale given entrenched habits. Here in San Diego I use Car2Go - http://car2go.com/ http://car2go.com/ . It's awesome for stuff like airport runs - I walk to the car (they're about a 5 minute walk from the airport), tap a card on the windshield, drive home (about six bucks and fifteen minutes; cheaper than the bus if my wife is with me), and then when I'm done with it the car is there for someone else to use. They're small, nimble, electric, and fun. Unfortunately they don't seem to be hugely popular since SD is very, very sprawling and their home range is fairly small.
- jessriedel 11y ago
  Is there a problem with cars piling up in certain locations? One-war on-demand bike rentals often need to be "re-balanced".
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - CalRobert 11y ago
    Well, there's no "stations" per se, they're just parked on the street, so it's not like a bike share where you can wind up unable to finish your trip. When you're done with your trip, you just park (assuming there's a spot, but since they're Smart Fortwo's that's usually pretty easy). What can happen is that all the cars wind up some ways from you, but in the last 9 or 10 months that's happened to me once or twice. Even then, it was only a ten minute or so walk.
curtis 11y ago
I wonder if it would be economically feasible to build a modern equivalent of the Morgantown PRT using a standard electric car model (Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt, etc.) as the "pods" using nothing but after-market modifications. Such an approach might make sense if new systems like this were dominated by R&D costs -- and, maybe as importantly, R&D schedules.
awjr 11y ago
A slightly different version of this called Bus Rapid Transit is really really successful in the UK and is being rolled out to other cities (Manchester and Bristol). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridgeshire_Guided_Busway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridgeshire_Guided_Busway Extremely painful to put in place but once in place hugely beneficial.
Animats 11y ago
A criticism of PRT systems: [1] Classic problems: - Capacity isn't high. One track equals about one freeway lane. - One broken vehicle stalls the whole track. - Real guideways are usually much bigger than pictures of proposed guideways. You need emergency walkways, rescue access, and earthquake resistance. This is also true of monorails. - Somebody has to clean all those vehicles. Light guideway systems do exist. Intamin, the roller coaster manufacturer, also makes monorails. Theirs are as narrow as roller coaster tracks.[2] Here's their towing and rescue vehicle in action.[3] But their systems are low-capacity and slow. Japan has many monorails with serious passenger capacity, but the guideways are big.[4] One design has a flat guideway that would work for a PRT. [1] http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_prt001.htm http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_prt001.htm [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HInUerMfWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HInUerMfWU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70q_CoLT3Eo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70q_CoLT3Eo [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUpIl25q1nk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUpIl25q1nk
13thLetter 11y ago
Here's an idea: what if we built lots of personal rapid transit vehicles, but made them operate on the ordinary cheap-to-build-and-maintain roads that already exist, and sold them outright to the end users so there was no need to maintain a massive centrally controlled network? That could be a game-changer.
jessaustin 11y ago
I can't help it; every time I read "PRT" I think "Parahuman Response Team".

43 points by samsolomon 11y ago

Instead we pursued the dream of 140 character messages.

pjc50 11y ago

The book on 'Aramis' mentioned is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramis,_or_the_Love_of_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramis,_or_the_Love_of_Technol... ; I picked it up by chance in the room of an anthropology student many years ago and found it fascinating. It's a sociologist's view of an engineering project management failure, and therefore requires a bit of unfamiliar jargon to interpret. It concerns itself with the question "what is progress and modernity?" quite a bit, as projects like PRT are self-conscious attempts to build a futuristic technology rather than an incrementalist approach of meeting immediate demands.

jkot 11y ago

I think this would create problem with monopoly. If city would own and rent out cars, the price would inflate and technology would stagnate. Something like city licensed taxi services.

floatrock 11y ago
How else could you raise the vast amounts of financing needed for such a project? It's not unreasonable that if you put forward $100M on a risky venture, you get x years of exclusive usage to generate a return on investment. The article mentioned a failed kickstarter for a boston project -- the crowdfunding alternative has yet to be proven for large-scale infrastructure. But it would be interesting if you could raise a bond like that from private citizens. Literally have people invest in their city by purchasing shares of the municipal bond and have it paid back over 30 years of usage. Not sure why that can't be done... perhaps easier to mobilize $100M from a single private equity group than $1k from 100,000 individuals, perhaps rules about being an accredited investor before you're deemed ready to invest in projects of that scale, or perhaps the lawyers are terrified of dealing with a class-action suit involving a chunk of the populace instead of a small number of private equity firms in the lawsuit if things go wrong.

haxel 11y ago

What about variably-autonomous cars? Take a car with self-driving capability and then have it be manually operated while solitary but increasingly self-driving as the group of similarly automated cars it belongs to grows. There's a lot of benefits to group awareness: share sensors, coordinate behavior for efficiency, instant communication, and so on. This gives us the best of both worlds: safety in numbers, safety in automation and sensors, and it retains the personal autonomy we're used to. All while not requiring 100% perfect autonomous capability. If the cars were small and cheap enough, they could be made available via subscription (much like a lease) and treated like a municipal transportation network that's superior to light rail and bus networks.

jsprogrammer 11y ago
A herd of sufficiently smart enough self-driving cars should be able to use their network of sensors to allow "manual" drivers to move freely through, should it not? I would think that one should be able to drive even more freely; as the reaction time of the herd, and the individual cars, could accommodate situations that even highly trained human drivers would fail at.
- haxel 11y ago
  Yeah, I would think that such a herd or swarm would be fully backward and forward compatible. Traditional cars could keep doing what they do - swarms would react intelligently to them as swarms tend to do - and there wouldn't be any need for specialized infrastructure to support pure automation.
mpitt 11y ago
Just as a reminder, ”instant“ communication is not really instant. There is latency, it increases with the number of cars involved and it’s not negligible for safety purposes (e.g. emergency braking).
Animats 11y ago
That's sort of what Google is doing with their little fully-autonomous 25MPH car. Senior communities will be full of those things in a few years. Would special roads or guideways for those help? Possibly. Parking garages dedicated to those things are likely. They can be parked several deep because the blocking cars can be asked to move. The future of self-driving cars has more to do with where they go when not in use than what they do while carrying passengers.

m0llusk 11y ago

The road not taken yet, perhaps? The proposed SkyTran PRT variant has levels of efficiency that are at least in theory way ahead of anything that surface roads and wheeled vehicles can offer. Just as the PRT system highlighted in the story is retained for its genuine value other experiments are likely to tried and retained.

DennisP 11y ago
Skytran is about to complete a pilot project in Tel Aviv, and has others in the works: http://fortune.com/2015/11/24/skytran-maglev-pod-system-tel-aviv/ http://fortune.com/2015/11/24/skytran-maglev-pod-system-tel-... http://www.fastcoexist.com/3052942/the-sci-fi-skytran-monorail-may-be-our-most-practical-replacement-for-cars http://www.fastcoexist.com/3052942/the-sci-fi-skytran-monora...
- Animats 11y ago
  No, they're talking about building a small test loop Real Soon Now. Their site has a huge collection of renders and animations, but very little about real hardware.[1] Supposedly they had a 220 meter prototype for an amusement park in New Zealand, but there don't seem to be any pictures of that. The hype to hardware ratio is strong in this one. [1] http://www.skytran.com/ http://www.skytran.com/

josscrowcroft 11y ago

I'm excited about the Hyperloop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop http://news.nationalgeographic.com/energy/2016/02/160223-Elon-Musk-Hyperloop-for-Sonic-Tubular-Travel-Gets-Real/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/energy/2016/02/160223-Elo... http://www.wired.com/2014/12/jumpstartfund-hyperloop-elon-musk/ http://www.wired.com/2014/12/jumpstartfund-hyperloop-elon-mu...

Shivetya 11y ago

well self driving cars are being over engineered for the very fact that for very long time if not forever there will always be a manually controlled vehicle along their path. as for lane set asides, we already have HOV and Express lanes that would easily be adapted to self driving cars, if anything the express lanes would be even more efficient. Cars like buses always trump trains in metro ranges simply because both can adapt quickly to change of habits. trains might be one solution between cities but even in Europe air travel is supplanting it

CalRobert 11y ago
"if not forever there will always be a manually controlled vehicle along their path." I hope it is forever, because otherwise we apparently would have outlawed bicycles.

CalRobert 11y ago

Worth noting - a lot of the benefits of PRT are realized with short, one-way on demand car rentals. Obviously you still have to drive, but you get quick access to a vehicle, go where you want, hop out, and someone else gets to use it. At scale it's awesome, but it's been hard for sprawling US cities to get to that scale given entrenched habits. Here in San Diego I use Car2Go - http://car2go.com/ http://car2go.com/ . It's awesome for stuff like airport runs - I walk to the car (they're about a 5 minute walk from the airport), tap a card on the windshield, drive home (about six bucks and fifteen minutes; cheaper than the bus if my wife is with me), and then when I'm done with it the car is there for someone else to use. They're small, nimble, electric, and fun. Unfortunately they don't seem to be hugely popular since SD is very, very sprawling and their home range is fairly small.

jessriedel 11y ago
Is there a problem with cars piling up in certain locations? One-war on-demand bike rentals often need to be "re-balanced".
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- CalRobert 11y ago
  Well, there's no "stations" per se, they're just parked on the street, so it's not like a bike share where you can wind up unable to finish your trip. When you're done with your trip, you just park (assuming there's a spot, but since they're Smart Fortwo's that's usually pretty easy). What can happen is that all the cars wind up some ways from you, but in the last 9 or 10 months that's happened to me once or twice. Even then, it was only a ten minute or so walk.

curtis 11y ago

I wonder if it would be economically feasible to build a modern equivalent of the Morgantown PRT using a standard electric car model (Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt, etc.) as the "pods" using nothing but after-market modifications. Such an approach might make sense if new systems like this were dominated by R&D costs -- and, maybe as importantly, R&D schedules.

awjr 11y ago

A slightly different version of this called Bus Rapid Transit is really really successful in the UK and is being rolled out to other cities (Manchester and Bristol). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridgeshire_Guided_Busway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridgeshire_Guided_Busway Extremely painful to put in place but once in place hugely beneficial.

Animats 11y ago

A criticism of PRT systems: [1] Classic problems: - Capacity isn't high. One track equals about one freeway lane. - One broken vehicle stalls the whole track. - Real guideways are usually much bigger than pictures of proposed guideways. You need emergency walkways, rescue access, and earthquake resistance. This is also true of monorails. - Somebody has to clean all those vehicles. Light guideway systems do exist. Intamin, the roller coaster manufacturer, also makes monorails. Theirs are as narrow as roller coaster tracks.[2] Here's their towing and rescue vehicle in action.[3] But their systems are low-capacity and slow. Japan has many monorails with serious passenger capacity, but the guideways are big.[4] One design has a flat guideway that would work for a PRT. [1] http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_prt001.htm http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_prt001.htm [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HInUerMfWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HInUerMfWU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70q_CoLT3Eo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70q_CoLT3Eo [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUpIl25q1nk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUpIl25q1nk

13thLetter 11y ago

Here's an idea: what if we built lots of personal rapid transit vehicles, but made them operate on the ordinary cheap-to-build-and-maintain roads that already exist, and sold them outright to the end users so there was no need to maintain a massive centrally controlled network? That could be a game-changer.

jessaustin 11y ago

I can't help it; every time I read "PRT" I think "Parahuman Response Team".