3 ms·
This has always seemed a bit obvious to me: the problem you are trying to solve is to take something which weighs several hundred pounds (passengers) and put th
by andreyf 17y ago
This has always seemed a bit obvious to me: the problem you are trying to solve is to take something which weighs several hundred pounds (passengers) and put them on something which is traveling at 100mph and weighs several hundred tons (a train). From an energy efficiency perspective, stopping the train is just silly.
Similarly, when you drive from A to B, most of the energy expended is used on the side-effect of moving their car, not on moving them.
- hga 17y agoHowever there's the problem of accelerating and decelerating your fragile body to and from 100 mph. This gets pretty nasty with trains that run off of overhead wire (which is more likely the higher the density of stops), you'd have to get the shuttle in motion and then move it sideways once the engine cars are out of the way (to get on top once the connections to the wires are past you). There's also the problem of "what if more people want to get on or off this stop than the shuttle has capacity?". Somehow I'm reminded of (mostly) bad combining giant robot anime....