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James Greyson

Sep 1, 2011
12:58

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Hi Christopher, thanks for adding this great project. Fun to bump into you again here. Wondering if you may need to go higher than 20' guideway since this might mean pods scooting along 10ish' above the ground? Getting clearance above everything else already at ground level could mean base of pods at minimum 30' high (above existing power cables and posts) so guideways at 40' high? Could set stations lower to save effort climbing? Do you think pods could be connectable? Thinking about groups of people travelling together especially with kids, where you couldn't always split up to get an adult in each pod. Tricky for disabled folk I guess unless the stations are not quite so simple and can include lifts? Lifts might include regenerative 'braking' to store energy from people going down? Would the 'composite' material of pods be recyclable? Would love to see these grids springing up and replacing dominance of cars. James

Dennis Peterson

Sep 1, 2011
03:05

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Seems pretty nifty. What would the total cost be to replace, say, half the cars on the road? What about right-of-way? Could it be suspended above existing roads?

Christopher Fry

Sep 1, 2011
04:36

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Hi James, I started reading your proposal and realized I'd seen it before! Thanks for editing the title of my proposal, I can't figure out how to do that. Re height of only 20 feet: The two biggest constaints are: trucks are 13.5 ft high people don't like to climb more stairs than necessary. With a pod height of 5 to 6 feet, that puts 20 feet high for the guideway. We *might* need to go higher in some situations but not for cables. Its possible to have the off and on ramps to the station dip to make the station height lower than the main guideway but I like to optimize for energy efficiency and that would use a bit more (though only a bit due to efficient regen). changing elevation is also more complex and simplicity helps cost & reliability. Power and communication cables can be put INSIDE the guideway so that the "utility poles" now carry not just wires but the transportation too for just a bit thicker pole. This also reduces visual clutter. Having the guideway may well produce a more pleasing look than the wires. Rich communities pay to put their wires underground but I don't like that since it increases maintenance costs. Re connecting pods: Having a mechanical link is probably doable but less safe and more cost. The video link, once people get use to it, is probably good enough. The key here is to keep pod seat down to 2 since more is more aerodynamic drag and more weight. The more weight requires the guideways to be thicker driving up cost. If people can't get use to it, the mechanical link is possible, but people can get use to CARS for gosh sakes and PRT is about 10 times less overhead to deal with. Re Disabled: The stations do have lifts. They add about $15K to a station and with a seatless pod, we can squeeze in a wheelchair. It takes some engineering but the plan is for a person to be able to get that wheelchair into the pod by themselves. Handicapped isw mostly a political problem. In the US, full parking lots always have a whole bunco of empty slots reserved for handicapped. My measurement of Boston Subway riders that use the lift is way less than 1%. We can probably provide free taxis service for handicapped cheaper than make the entire system accomodate them. Regen for the lifts is a great idea. I think this is called "ballast" in its simplest form. Re recycling pods I don't know about that but I like your idea of precycling. But the real underlying abstraction here is paying for what you use. If you buy gas, it should really cost $10 to $20 per gallon to cover the externalities but it doesn't so hidden taxes, the enviroment and our kids take the hit. Even if we had gas prices fairly, a lot of people would still buy the SUV becasue they can't think about medium term costs. One solution is to build in the cost of the gas externalities into the car purchase price. For an SUV that would be tens of thousands of dollars which would get buyers' attention in the show room but Detroit would kill people to prevent it. Now let's examine precycle for PRT. Consumers don't have an initial purchase so that's not an issue. We can just build in precycle to the cost per mile, say it goes from 10 cents to 11 cents. Nice and incremental pay for what you use. If you decide to save the environment a bit by getting off a stop early and joggiong home, you save 11 cents and overlap your exercise time with your commute time. You can skip rainy days without penalty, and no need to decide all this up front as you must with buying a car or gym membership. It is this kind of idea synergy that is perhaps the highest "value add" for the colab. As I implied in my proposal, if this is a contest, its not really a contest between the proposers as much as it is a contest between humanity and the environment or perhaps the few individuals who's decisions indicate that they don't care if they take the rest of humanity down with them. Its the best combination of ideas that will save the planet, not the best single idea. Fry

Christopher Fry

Sep 1, 2011
05:43

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Dennis, thanks for your comments. Re: Costs Zeroth, I'm rounding numbers to make it simpler. First, let me help clarify, I would be replacing half the cars on the road, and half THE ROAD. The pods themselves cost about $15K, but note that at one tenth the weight and simpler than a regular car, that cost may well come down in volume production. The main expense is the guideway but we wrap up guideway, stations and pods into one number, $10M per mile. (note this is 1 way track and we only run one-way track. cheaper and you can get to everywhere when you have a grid of 1 way track without many extra vehicle miles traveled.) Here's how I did the calculation: There's 3006 counties in the US. The most dense 189 of them account for half the population ~150M. the land area of them is 106 sq miles and we need 2 miles of track per sq mile so that's 212K miles of track @ $10M each mile for a total of only $2.1T. We throw in an extra 26K miles to connect these intercity grids with 2 way track at $15M per mile which costs an extra $400B so our grand total is $2.5T. Cost per person, ie per the population served (150M) is $16K. Now you could say that's about the cost of a cheap car and you're right. We tend to buy cars in the low 20K's these days but we're close, However, that's just the purchace price and doesn't account for a ton of other costs. Repair over 10 years doubles the cost. Then there's the operating expenses, insurance, etc much of which we DON'T directly pay for (such as the oil wars, health, etc) The car only lasts 10 years wheraas we're expecting the Skytran grid to last several times longer. Plus, the Skytran is the WHOLE system, whereas buying the car doesn't buy the road. It ends up being lots cheaper, we guess $7.5K per year for the car and $1.5K per year for Skytran per person traveling 15K miles per year. Note in that $10M per guideway mile I edid not include operating costs, but those costs are WAY lower than a car. At 100wh per vehicle mile, if you take avg cost of a KWH in the US at 10 cents, that's one penny for fuel per mile. Then lots fewer moving parts, oil, tires, potholes, signs, paint, accidents, cops etc. Re: right of way. I'm expecting most guideways to be over sidewalks or at least side of the road. We could have 2 poles on either side and a cross-piece and suspend it over the middle of the road as I suspect you were asking. That adds expense, though it some tight situations may be the right thing. I suppose some divided roads could take one row of poles down the center. Legally, it would mostly be public property. Companies might pay for a private guideway into their store/office/factory or some rich guy could bring a guideway into his living room (err, with controlled access!) Fry

Howard Goodell

Sep 1, 2011
10:59

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Hi Chris -- I'm a big fan of this system. This Nov. 2009 IEEE Spectrum article by the inventor Doug Malewicki has a number of technical details if people are interested: http://www.canosoarus.com/Index%20Images/IEEE%20Nov-09%20Silicon%20is%20About%20to%20Change%20the%20World%20-%20Again.pdf A few points: 1. While transportation isn't the largest consumer of energy and producer of CO2, it is the primary reason for needing liquid fuel, which has a disproportionate environmental impact (e.g. wanting to convert Alberta tar sands to very dirty oil). 2. I don't see why vehicles would be limited to 30 MPH in cities. At 100 MPH, they are still an order of magnitude more energy-efficient than cars, and fuel consumption doesn't drop that fast with speed. Even for the planned 200 pound vehicle, at 30 MPH the energy of producing magnetic lift (like aerodynamic lift) would be significant; since it takes 3.3.. x longer to travel the distance. 3. Your proposal concentrates on half the population in densely-populated areas. However, practically you wouldn't end the grid; just increase the spacing. At the other end of the density scale, a grid with a line every 200 miles (4 x 10^2 linear miles required per 4 * 10^4 sq. miles) could cover the US (4 * 10^6 sq. miles area) with less than 40,000 miles of track. I think the $15M/mile price could drop to maybe $5M/mile with such a massive boost down the learning curve -- parts can all be mass produced (unlike mass transit that's often one-of-a-kind), and I think much of the current cost is electronics that would drop especially fast. That's a mere $200B, and it would utterly transform the rest of the country. How? 3.1 Every point in the country would be 100 miles max; 50 miles avg away from a 150 MPH automated transport network. Forget Boston to LA -- air travel is better. The grid shines where people and packages travel cheaply in less than a day from ANYWHERE to ANYWHERE in the country. An hour in your 12 MPG pickup (or the FedEx truck for a package); 150 MPH to a big airport where long-distance planes leave regularly (much more efficient with such a feeder network); then the mirror image. Less than a day; far cheaper and more convenient. Real death of distance. 3.2 Electric cars are practical EVERYWHERE. 3.3 Democratize distribution. Individual fishing boats or farms interact online with individual restaurants hundreds of miles away; they buy exactly what they want and serve it hours later. Lots more; just have to build one and see the network effects kick in.

Rob Laubacher

Sep 2, 2011
04:18

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Really interesting--first time I'd seen this concept articulated in this amount of detail. I recently saw an article on a personal transport system now operating at Heathrow airport: http://news.discovery.com/autos/personal-pod-cars-rolling-heathrow-110822.html Is this like the system you describe in your proposal?

Christopher Fry

Sep 2, 2011
07:51

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Yes, Ultra is a PRT. I recommend everyone watch the video at the above URL as it described the basic architecture pretty well: driverless cars, stations "off line", electric, guideways 20 feet above the city. Plus I like the music! The key differences between Ultra and SkyTran are: - Ultra is wheeled, SkyTran is mag-lev. Using wheels restricts their speed due to switching, usually to around 40MPH. (Wikipedia says their current speed is 25MPH) SkyTran in some places may operate that slow but can go up to 150MPH,. primarily limited by the more power needed to push air out of the way thus decreasing efficiency. The wheels cause much more rolling resistance than mag-lev so it used more power. The wheels wear out causing air pollution, more maintence, more operational cost and less reliability. They are also just more moving parts to reduce reliability. - Ultra is electic but is battery driven. That means the batteries have to be charged, and also means that the vehicle must carry the heavy batteries, plus you have to pay for expensive batteries. SkyTran gets its power from the guideway so no batteries and thus no charging inefficiecies, no battery charge down time, no wearing out of the batteries, no toxic disposal, no initial cost. - Ultra is big enough for 4 pasengers. This is appealing if you are in the "car" frame of mind, ie "bigger is better". But that means for most trips you have 3 empty seats and you have much more air to push out of the way, and there's more useless mass to accelerate meaning that it will use much more energy per passenger mile. Skytran is just 2 passengers with the back seat big enough to contain a standard bike with the front wheel removed. - Ultra rides above the guideway. This is inherently less stable esp in turns so its less safe, which is one of the reasons Ultra is necessarily slower than SkyTran. Also riding above on wheels means essentially you're building a raised concrete road. It is MUCH heavier than SkyTran's guideway, and construction will be conventional. Skytran's poles and 30 foot guideway sections (both about a foot in cross section) can be made "pre-fab" in a controlled factory, trucked to the site where you dig a hope for the pole, pour in concrete footing, eerct the pole and bolt the guideway sections to the tops of the poles. We thus expect installation to be much fsater and cheaper. As many on this website probably know, producing concrete causes a lot of greenhouse gas production so minimizing concrete is good. - The track width of Ultra is several times that of SkyTran, and the poles must be thicker. This means the visual "pollution" from the track, even when no cars are on it, is much more than Skytran. We hear people complaining about blocking the sky so this may limit Ultra's adoption. SkyTran has this problem only much less so. Wikipedia says Ultra is $5M to $8M per kilometer which puts it at about SkyTran cost of $10M per mile. But operating costs are signficantly more for Ultra and because it moves slower, it can't handle as many passengers per hour as SkyTran which boosts its cost per passenger mile. Ultra helps make PRT more visible to the world. Getting any system operational is difficult so we applaud their efforts. Ultra's greatest strength over SkyTran is political (they got the Heathrow contract), not energy efficiecy, pollution, economical, speed, or safey. Its a sub-optimal contender in a good fight, as are the other non-SkyTran PRT systems now emerging.

James Greyson

Sep 3, 2011
06:26

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Great discussion here thanks everyone. Others please join in. On externalities, there are a couple of obstacles to meaningful internalisation (even for just carbon/climate). First is that the damage being internalised hasn't happened yet. So tough to get a consensus on the price and how/where to allocate it in the present. Second is that proposals for piecemeal internalisation sound arbitrary, like an attack by anti-business lobbies on the livelihood of the economy. We know who wins in this kind of battle. Precycling insurance internalises a price from the risk of tangible products becoming tangible waste, so no need to predict future damage costs. Internalisation is done for the whole economy, so providing a replacement vision for how the economy relates to nature. Although this is more ambitious it also makes more sense, especially at a time when the old vision is bankrupt. The premiums on fossil fuel would make fossil fuel more expensive, not SUVs, though it would make SUVs less desirable. Premiums on projects that haven't happened yet such as yours would have interesting effects on prices, not necessarily raising them. It may be that design work will cut the waste risk of the project in ways that also cut costs (for example by reducing fossil fuel dependence or simplification - I know you're doing that already!) It may be that premiums collected elsewhere get spent exploring and supporting projects like yours! " Its the best combination of ideas that will save the planet, not the best single idea." Great point - I agree!

Dennis Peterson

Sep 4, 2011
07:07

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The link and some of its content from comment #5 should go into the proposal. I like some of Howie's ideas too. Like blindspotter, in my proposal I tend to rely on economic incentives to drive this sort of thing. However in this case, it seems to me it's reasonable for governments to get involved directly, just as they do for roads. Since in dense areas it would be built on sidewalks and so on, I don't know how else you could do it. Hopefully the linear motors can be made without rare earths, otherwise it could be hard to scale up due to lack of mineral resources. http://seekingalpha.com/article/289828-it-s-time-to-kill-the-electric-car-drive-a-stake-through-its-heart-and-burn-the-corpse My guess is it can...I read somewhere that Japan is developing a motor for electric cars that doesn't need rare earths. Not needing batteries helps a lot too. (Then again, I'm wondering what's required for the high-powered transistors mentioned in Howie's link, and whether permanent magnets would be needed for levitation.) Still need roads for family trips and freight, but with less traffic they'll require less maintenance, and eventually fewer lanes. If Skytran were used a lot for long distance, that would help with biodiversity. Large roads divide animal populations into smaller, less sustainable groups.

Christopher Fry

Sep 6, 2011
12:49

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First, I want to make sure that readers of this proposal are aware of a couple of important "meta" points in Dennis' proposal on Cycling Carbon. His exectutive summary has some good ideas that cut accross just about all proposals. One of them is particularly relevant here, the 2nd paragraph of "change is not easy". He is right of course. My view is that we are going to change no matter what. If we continue on our current trajectory, that change will be very painful. I fear that the beginning of a rather long decline started a couple years ago. In general, the proposals in this forum are trying to arrest that decline if not take it in an entirely new direction. In my proposal's case, convincing people that there's something better than cars and mass transit for transportation isn't easy, but I try to soften the blow by providing rather overwhelming benefits on many fronts, economic, time, safety, environment, etc. The other important meta-point in Cycling Carbon is that there's really SEVEN ideas in there, not one. When I try to rationalize the behavior of our political leaders, I tell myself they just don't have enough good options on the table. They're playing with old cards, not creating new ones. This is what Obama did when he backed high-speed rail, an expensive, limited, inconvenient "solution" that will do for transportation what Accela did ... nothing. So thanks Dennis for contributing meaningful goals AND getting some face cards on the table! As I've stated elsewhere, the real contest is not what proposal here gets a few more votes than another. Its whether we (collectively) avoid what is shaping up to be a rather dismal future. That's what I think Prof. Malone had in mind when naming his new center "Collective Intelligence", needed now more than ever. Now on to the specifics of Dennis' comments: Re "comments ... should go into the proposal". My hope is that the judges will read these comments. If I were a judge, I'd want to see exactly what concerns people had and how they were addressed. Consider the comments section to be a FAQ for each proposal. Re Economic Incentives. Both James' and Dennis' proposals on getting economic incentives right is necessary but probably not sufficient. I bet they understand, but most economists do not, that: - Consumers do not have extensive knowledge of the alteratives of the products they buy, nor their long-term effects. Thus they often buy (as well as vote) against their own self interests. - Economic incentives alone do not invent great solutions. They enable deployment to be sure, but the seed of the idea is rarely the invisible hand or some other abstract economic theory. - Individual actors, even if they act rationally, pretty much CAN'T cause many kinds of complex, interdiciplanary solutions into being. For SkyTran, you can't just hold up a dime and say "I want to ride a PRT for a mile". (Go ahead, get downtown, hold up a dime and see if it comes true :-). We are going to need the kind of cooperation that just doesn't happen normally in our society. I've tried many ways to get SkyTran adopted including visting D.O.T. in D.C. and making the case as strong as I could. I'm at this forum because it's something new whereas traditional mechanisms (economic and otherwise) have failed. Re: mineral resources. The web page refered to makes the case that electric cars won't take off because battery technolgy isn't there. Skytran avoids the worst of the electic car's dependence on batteries in that the pod's get their power from the grid and don't have to carry all that weight of hard to get rare-earth. But SkyTran isn't totally out of the woods on this issue. It is an OPTION to power SkyTran via solar cells on its guideway because the vehicles are SO efficient. Travel is often during the day, but as the web page points out, sometimes it rains, sometimes its night, etc. so a pure solar play needs energy storage. Maybe SkyTran shouldn't be a pure solar play or maybe new "thermal mass" storage technolgies can be brought to bear. Also SkyTran uses some materials that may cause shortages if needed in volume. Howie has done some research on that issue so I'll let him respond. However we change, there will be some bumps in the (lack of) road. Let's plan as carefully as we can but if that means no change because 'there's a problem', well, there's a pretty much gaurenteed BIG problem if we don't change. Re: Still need roads for family trips. Not if they're inside the grid. If you're concerned about separating the family into taking 2 or 3 video-linked pods, consider the alernative: separating the family because your son just got blown up by an IED in an oil war. Re: Still need roads for freight. Again, not so much inside the grid. Retail stores that carry inventory from a variety of sources (think office supply stores or supermarkets) can get small packages shipped direct from the manufacturer in a pod in small quantities. That reduces the need for inventory capital, storage space, and middle men taking a cut. Cities have office buildings. Once they're built, you just don't need trucks so much. Same thing for residences. Yes on moving day it helps to have a truck. That's once every SEVEN YEARS for the average house. A one lane clearing with 2 dirt tracks will do. For heavy industry we can build it outside the grid (its often out of dense popuation areas now) or have direct roads for them. I'm not advocating eliminating roads. In fact, the grided area I propose that houses 50% of the population only takes up 3.6% of the land so roads still dominate the land area, just not the population. Re: SkyTran on biodiversity. Congrats Dennis, you've come up with something I haven't heard anyone in the PRT community address. Let's take a 2 lane blacktop at 24 feet wide. Over a mile that's 24 * 5280 = 128,720 sq ft of water drainage issues, oil runnoff, and a lot of squashed possums. SkyTran's footprint over that same mile (1 sq ft pole every 30 feet) is 176 sq ft and that's very distributed. Possums and deer and poison ivy can live just fine under the guideway. They may be a bit scared when a pod comes along but its a lot quieter than a car and it won't hit them. This benefits people too. During Hurricane Irene, my street was closed to cars for a couple of days. It sure was peaceful.

James Greyson

Sep 6, 2011
08:56

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Hi Christopher, did you mean that economic incentives are not enough to make your scheme work or to make a whole sustainable transition? Reckon a well-designed economic tool could easily change the game and make your scheme happen but for the whole transition we do need more (http://bit.ly/7switches ). Fun thing about the invisible hand is how it looks much less abstract when we see how it could unite individual initiatives (such as yours) with collective activity (loads of people spending money that creates flows of sustainable funding whether or not they understand alternatives or long-term effects).

Dennis Peterson

Sep 6, 2011
12:49

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The more I read about this idea the more I like it. As I think about it more, my main concern on resources is the permanent magnets for passive levitation. However I haven't tried to work out how much (and what) would be required compared to how much exists in known deposits, so maybe it would work out fine. The lack of a battery requirement is a big plus. I agree completely that we need technologies that will bring their own benefits, and that we need to look at real engineering, not just economic incentives. We need some conception of how we can physically accomplish our goals, so we have some idea what a given incentive can accomplish...and we need the incentive so people can actually profit by implementing that nifty engineering. I think the main reason incentives might not be enough in this case is that, for transportation infrastructure, there's generally no getting around government involvement. A private entity can't just start building stuff on road medians on their own. (My proposal has another issue: nothing happens in nuclear energy without the government's approval.) I'm wondering how much roads deteriorate because of traffic, and how much by weather...perhaps we'd have significantly less to do. Also of course we could get by with narrower roads.

Christopher Fry

Sep 6, 2011
01:41

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About James' question to me on economic incentives in comment #11. As little kids we were taught that "if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door." As we got older the message was reformatted into: "If you make a better product than the competion and you can sell it for less money, you'll be rich". Both of these are false. Yes it HELPS to have a better product for less money but by no means does that gaurentee market adoption. When you go to a venture capitalist and explain how great your new invention is, he may agree with you but decline to fund it because in order to sell your product, you have to "educate the market". This phrase from a VC means "attracting buyers too expensive and that causes risk so I'm not going to fund it." The operative phrase in your post is "WELL DESIGNED economic tool. " where well designed needs to encorporate "educating the market". The last line of your post *I think* indicates that you realize, if we can get away from having to do this expensive education and still get the herd moving in the right direction, that's a win. By proposing the creative incentive structures that you and Dennis do, I suspect you're considering all of the above to find ways around these problems with conventional economic tactics that have failed us in the past. Alas real solutions to our big problems are likely to be complex (as is PRT). After all, the simple ones have mostly been tried in some fashion or another and if they worked, we would no longer have the problem it solved. Getting clever about education and motivation becomes necessary to sell the idea.

Howard Goodell

Sep 6, 2011
03:04

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Like Denis, I was worried about rare earth element availability. Here is what I worked out a couple years ago: at the highest price seen to date, the raw neodymium required for a SkyTran vehicle's magnetic levitation and propulsion would cost just $112. (The key is vehicle weights an order of magnitude less than conventional automobiles.) Resource Details: Magnets: Neodymium-iron-boron (Nd2Fe14B) magnets in a Halbach array can support 50x their weight levitating against a passive-coil track; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductrack ). So a 700-lb vehicle will need at least 14 pounds of these magnets, the most powerful permanent magnet material created to date. The neodymium-iron-boron material Nd2Fe14B is 26% neodymium by weight (atomic weights 144 Nd; 56 Fe and 10 for B). So 14 pounds of magnet require just 3.5 pounds (1.6 kg) of Nd. At the peak of the 2007 supply crunch, neodymium oxide Nd2O3 (85% Nd by weight) cost $60/kilo according to http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/hybrid-cars-minerals . So we're unlikely to ever need to spend more than $60 * 1.6 / .85 = $112 for the most critical raw material needed for a basic SkyTran car, though the finished magnets may cost several times that much. The 2009 _Atlantic Monthly_ article above describes the rare-earth mine in Mountain Pass, CA that is probably being reopened due to rising prices -- a colleague calculated that it alone could provide enough neodymium to build all the SkyTran systems the United States could conceivably need. No batteries (except a small one to power vehicles to the nearest station in a complete power failure); so those resource issues are sidestepped. Wires: All the passive levitation coils and active drive coils can be made of coated aluminum not copper. The guideway shell supports the wires; so tensile strength isn't an issue. Since it has just a slot on the bottom for the vehicle frames to connect to a "bogey" inside, the wires are protected from sunlight etc. -- the greater reactivity of aluminum shouldn't be a problem. Re. solar energy, etc. This system has very modest energy requirements (just a 6% increase in electricity demand if it replaces 50% of all cars -- amazing!). You could pave the far broader right of way of high-speed rail with solar cells and not come near meeting its far greater power requirements per passenger mile. Also, maglev PRT is directly grid-powered; so it skips the long learning curve, resource issues etc. that today's electric cars face. Putting solar panels above the maglev PRT track IS a natural -- the PRT grid is one continuous object with one owner that just happens to be a natural market for their power. However, that's just one of many renewable energy sources available. It's FAR more important that this PRT grid is an integral part of the power grid (perhaps a large part; since the guideway shroud can shield thick conductors replacing lots of unsightly wires). Forget batteries for solar: ALL the power plants, energy storage and switchable demand within hundreds of miles can cooperate to level loads between PRT and other demands in a "smart grid". Examples: solar is daytime, but wind power peaks at night. Hydro plants can pump water back up to store power. Electric car charging can stop or even reverse to supply the grid briefly while e.g. cheap extra natural gas generating capacity kicks in. The PRT morning commute comes at a low-demand time anyway. Evening commute has competition, but people who are commuting haven't started using power at home yet, while industrial loads are switching off and other loads can be managed. For example, there are economical designs for big air conditioners that make large amounts of ice at night when power is cheap; then go off the grid at peak demand hours. (_Addicted to Energy_ by venture capitalist Elton Sherwin http://www.energyhousepublishing.com/ and the Rocky Mountain Institute's http://rmi.org are two wide-ranging sources of such ideas; also the 2009 SkyTran paper I cited before had a lot on smart grid.)

Dennis Peterson

Sep 6, 2011
06:10

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That really is excellent news. Another advantage of this system is it doesn't require action at the national level, where politics has pretty well paralyzed us. If we can get it working in one small city, it could spread pretty rapidly. Getting to that first deployment will probably be the hardest part. Cities probably won't part with $20 million for a technology demonstration. The federal government might, but it's also easily within range of venture capital. Some speculative nuclear fusion projects have been privately funded for more than twice that. Most cities are pretty short on funds these days...if a private entity fronted the entire cost of deployment, I wonder what they would need to charge for rides to get a reasonable payback.

Daniel Cookson

Sep 7, 2011
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I love the technical discussion, and I think the system speaks for itself, technically. Human factors are another matter. First point: This is too new and different for most people to understand it; only the innovators and others at the fringe (like me) will take the time to understand it. When there is a system installed that people can actually ride the concept will sell itself and the political will may follow. Until then only substantial private investment will get the first system up. Personally, I'd like to see it connect Boston's North Station to South Station (Fry, did you suggest that once?), but that's not a private investment. Maybe use it to connect a stadium to public transit, or to connect an airport to remote parking? Second point: I wonder what psychological/social issues would be raised by this system that no one has anticipated. Has anyone tried just walking groups of people through a mock-up skytran experience to see what they think? I'm sure it will be different from other public transit experiences, but not necessarily worse -- when you think about it, rubbing elbows with a bunch of strangers in an elevator or subway car and pretending they are not there is a bizarre thing to do. Third point: I'd expect this to follow the mobile phone model: it will spread much faster in parts of the world that don't already have such a complete transportation infrastructure in place such as we have.

Christopher Fry

Sep 7, 2011
07:01

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Dan, There's plenty of details to work out and human factors issues are some of them. I do know that a mock up of a pod has been tested with various sized users for ease of getting in and out, including putting an average bike with the front wheel removed in the rear seat. Issues surrounding connecting North Station to South station is Boston are instructive so I'll relay my thinking on this. Passenger (read "heavy") rail runs from Florida to Maine except for about a mile, which happens to be that mile between North and South station. Every decade for at least a century, someone proposes connecting the two. In 2006, a Boston Globe editorial made the point of how much gas it would save. Unfortunately the capital costs would be about $1B. (its hard to build rail lines in dense cities!) http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/06/14/the_conservation_connection/ but its behind a paywall. Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North%E2%80%93South_Rail_Link puts the price tag even higher. I did some computations that indicated it would save more gas if you just bought a bunch of Aperta's with the money and gave them away. (back in 2006, Aptera was claiming over 300MPG. Now its less than 200MPG and as of Sept 2011 all you can buy from the company is a T shirt with no delivery date or price listed --- err, for the car. Last price projection I saw was about $30K.) Yes you could link the stations with Skytran for maybe $15m to $20M, but then again, if you have to get out of the train, you could also take the subway (transfer at Park St, and take ANOTHER subway and make it to the other Station... not convenient) But let's look at the larger picture. When you take Amtrak from Penn Station in Manhatten to South Station in Boston, (or ANY of the Amtrak stops) you're not really going from 34th St. to downtown Boston. You're going from Queens or Yonkers to Cambridge or Woburn. Because SkyTran is cheap, quiet, and has a small footprint, we can extend its guideway into suburbs. The big Vehicle Miles Traveled are not inter-city, they're intra-city or at least from a suburb to the city core, or perhaps from one suburb to another. This is what cars and typical mass transit are so poor at and what Skytran is so good at. I live in an exurb of Boston. I could drive to the end of a subway line and take it into the city. I use to but not any more. Here's why: - driving to the subway end of line is actually out of the way, as it likely would be for most points of origin and destination. - Parking at one of the subway ends is $7 and you have to have cash. (I can usually park on the street in Cambridge for less than that.) - Sometimes the parking lot at the train station is full so I have to drive in anyway. - Just going up and down in the several story parking structure takes 10+ minutes. - Once I make it to the train platform I have to wait another 10 minutes for a train. - The train stops at many stations that aren't my destination. - The subway costs $2 but that only pays for 1/3 of it (the rest come from my taxes). OK as a personal outlay I have to pay that extra tax money anyway, but with my proposal for Skytran I'd pay only the 10 cents per mile, not the $1.71 cost per passenger mile that I compute the Subway really is. SkyTran is "pay for what you use". Subway (and all mass transit) is "pay whether you use it or not.". Parking and using the subway would take me about an extra hour per day. So me, like an awful lot of other people, drive into the city (every city) and its jammed. But as bad as the congestion is, its still better than the subway which is far faster than the buses that most urbanites are stuck with. As a bonus, SkyTran is so fast, its good not just for the daily commute, but for that 200 mile trip to NY or even twice that distance to DC. Our overcrowded airports can use the relief.

Travis Franck

Sep 10, 2011
06:26

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The transport system is an important area for a proposal to focus on. Oil use in transport is one problem that will be hard to solve because there is so much infrastructure that needs to be changed and retired. This proposal ‘goes big’ by changing the entire common system, not just a slow shift to biofuels or electric vehicles. Questions: 1. What is the carbon footprint of the creating the PRT system? Seems like a lot of cement that might have a long carbon payback time. 2. It would seem that the permitting will be the biggest problem. Many locales don’t let existing public transit systems into their communities for a variety of reasons. You suggest that transit system are decided by a relative few today, pointing to Big Oil, etc. I would also suggest that public transit systems are decided by another relatively small group: local planning and zoning boards. They provide their own set of hurdles. Single bike paths, etc, can be big problems. 3. Zoning and Boston: Wikipedia says that Boston is ~90sq miles. Rounding to 100 for easier math and assuming a perfect grid that is 11 by 11 rows of track 10 miles long, right? Does that means $12100 Million or $12.1 Billion? 4. There is mention of PRT connecting urban areas. Unclear how pods would get me from NYC to Chicago.

Rob Laubacher

Sep 10, 2011
07:05

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I love the bold thinking behind this proposal, but I have to follow up on Travis's comment and probe for more detail on the cost assumptions. As Travis notes, according to Wikipedia, the city of Boston is nearly 100 square miles in area (although approximately 50 square miles is land and the remain 50 water). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston#Geography I think Travis actually may have overcounted in his calculations. If we assume Boston is a perfect grid (very coarse assumption, but stay with me, I'm simply trying to get order of magnitude estimates), serving Boston with PRT would require 10 tracks running North-South of approximately 10 miles each (100 miles of track) and another 10 running East-West of approximately 10 miles each (100 miles of track). So 200 miles of track at $10 million per mile would be $2 billion cost for track to serve Boston (not $12 billion, as Travis suggests). Now let's scale it up. Wikipedia states that the area of the NYC metro area, with a population of 22 million, is 12,000 square miles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area To use round numbers, let's say that for NYC metro area, we'd need to install a grid that is 100 by 100 miles. So that means 100 tracks that are 100 long miles roughly North-South (or 10,000 miles of track) and another 100 tracks of 100 miles each that run roughly East-West (another 10,000 miles of track). So 20,000 miles of track total. At $10 million per mile, the cost of these would be $200 billion. Might be interesting to look at the distribution of metro areas and do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to see what the overall cost estimate would be. Similar exercise for the vehicles would be useful--how many would be needed to match vehicles miles currently traveled by car? Once some rough calculations on overall system capital costs were done, then it would be interesting to compare them to two comparable figures: - amount spend on purchase of new vehicles per year - amount spent by federal and state governments on roads

Christopher Fry

Sep 12, 2011
04:24

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Fry's response to comments #18 and #19 I've been thinking of putting more financial details up but wasn't sure there was interest for them especially since there's already more detail on this proposal than (at least most of) the other proposals. But with an audience of at least 2, here goes. I'm glad you guys are taking it seriously enough to get down to some importatant details Comment 18 into: "this proposal goes big by changing the entire common system, not just a slow shift" First, I'm only proposing 1/2 of the population, not the entire system, and that's only over 3.6% of the land. Second, it won't happen all at once. We can take it One city at a time or even one few square miles at a time. The nice thing about this decentralized system is you can build it in parallel or serial. Right now we've got a lot of unemployed all over the country so I'd want to take advantage of that workforce, but the technology allows all kinds of deployment strategies. I like to have a 10 x 10 mile grid as a "critical mass", but there's no reason special "line haul" systems couldn't be built to airports, etc and the grid surrounding it built out later. Comment 18, #1 "carbon footprint and concrete." Reading between the lines I bet you're thinking cradle to cradle and that's exactly the kind of scruteny we should have for all large projects. The poles are steel (if we galvanize, no need for initial or subsequent paint), the track is composites, aluminum wires and electronics, the pods are mostly composites so the only concrete is in the footings for the poles. If we have 2 ft x 2 ft x 5 ft (which would be generous) that's 20 sq ft. I talked to my town's public works director recently who told me a sidewalk was 3 inches thick and 5 feet wide. For 30 feet of sidewalk (the pole spacing) that's 37.5 cu ft or roughly double SkyTran's use of concrete. At that Skyran will save a huge amout of concrete. Think of the roads and bridges not built or refurbished. I'm much more worried about lobbying from the concrete industry to not build SkyTran! (Note: if the concrete industry realizes its in the "foundation" business, then there's lots of work for them.) But we can probably do better still. Coincidentally this weekend I've been working a on a design to minimze even that concrete and the installation process. At MIT there's a new "foam" concrete, and I bet we could divert some land fill material and recycle it into pole foundation material. This is a great area for some creativity, but I'll admit to not being a foundation expert. Since this will be reproduced many times (42M poles in my design), it's worth it to do some first class custom design here, probably to the level taking advantage of local materials. Postscript on Concrete use: Travis' comment got me thinking, could we eliminate the concrete in the pole foundation? Turns out in most cases yes. You can "pile drive" a pole into the ground. There is also a helical "screw" foundation, ie you just screw it into the ground and leave it there as a base for the pole. http://www.ecputility.com/Light_Pole_Foundations.asp As the above website points out, their foundations are just steel and steel is the most recycled material. Pile and screw foundations require firm ground and some situations won't have that so their still will be a need for some concrete. But even if 100% of the poles needed that, it would be WAY less concrete/asphalt than the roads this system can replace. When we get to recycling the pods every 20 years or so, it would also be advisable to think up front what materials could most easily be reused. But at 200 pounds, a pod is one tenth the weight of a car, and each pod, because its used by many people a day, takes the place of a bunch of cars. So we're starting off from a very favorable position with respect to today's technology. Comment 18, #2 "permitting, right of way, etc". Yeah this is a pain. People can argue about some very minor effect and miss the big picuture, ie the whole civilization goes down if we don't do something sensible. As for planning boards specificially, if they just realize how much money will be saved by this, then those responsible to taxpayers will pick up the cause. Other planning boards might want to build a new school or library with the money saved on transportation so I expect once these costs are understood, there will be plenty of proponents. Yes there will still be those that don't care if they kill off everyone, they just want their pet bus project or whatever. Either rationality prevails or we die. Comment 18 #4 (I address #3 later) "intercity transportation: how pods wold get me from NYC to Chicago"? You walk up to the station, sit down in a pod and say "Sears Tower, Chicago please". NY to Chicago is 714 miles as the crow files. We just connect all the city grids along the way with 2 way track. We can go a bit indirect to take advantage of intervening cities and their grids, ie Philidelphia, Pittsburg, Akron, Cleveland, Toledo, Gary. Will there be enough population to support this? Here's my reasoning: My average density for the 1/2 the population is 1.5K people per sq mile. This population can support "Its square mile". One way to think of it is the population of each sq mile pays for it, and lets everyone outside of their sq mile ride on it for free as long as they get to ride for free on everyone else's sq mile. If people travel 15K miles per year, at the LOWEST car rate that's 50 cents per mile or %7.5K per year. With Skytran at 10 cents per mile, that's $1.5K per year. We're saving people $6K per year and that's not including the oil wars, highway building etc. Savings in that sq mile is thus at least $6K x 1.5K = $9M. The track is only $20M for that sq mile so payback in a little over 2 years from that savings. But we're giving that $9M back to the public, so we're just using the $1.5K x 1.5K = $2.25M to pay off our loan of $20M. Straight payback period is only 8.8 years but with interest, its a few more years. However, I expect the system to last for 50 years so we're in really great finanial shape here. The east coast is pretty dense but probably not 1.5K dense though all the distance between NYC and Chicago. But a length of track going through a rural area will have a larger area to get passengers from since their won't be competing PRT. So you might drive 5 or 10 miles to the the nearest staton, park and ride the rest of the way to the big city on PRT. (it will save you money and time). But here's another reason to build the track. The big win with PRT is when most users don't own cars. When they're in that showroom thinking of buying the car, maybe they think they won't need it for their daily communte since PRT is great for that, but they still want one to visit their mother in Chicago once a month. But if PRT goes there too, that's one less reason to buy a car, and more passengers for the PRT to defray its cost. Comment 18 # 3 and Comment 19. First, think of 2 track miles per 1 sq mile (cover the north and east sides of the square, then tile and we get grid coverage. Now on to a city, say Boston. You guys are thinking "inner city". Yes we need PRT there. Go to any Cambridge residential street and notice its jam packed with cars. I bet a lot of those people work in Boston where they could just ride the subway but don't since its too inconvenient. But some of them want their car for visting their mother in Chicago, so see above for that. However, I think the BIG vehicle miles traveled is between city and suburb or suburb to suburb. To cover that we've got to get a much wider system than 11 x 11 miles for a city the size of Boston. Fortunately the suburbs are pretty dense and can support their own sq mile (see above) or be "subsidized" by denser regions (inner cities go to 5K per sq mile and up). We just need 1.5K people AVERAGE per sq mile. Comment 19 "amount spent per new vehicle per year" Well first its far more commprehensive to use cents per mile as that includes insurance gas, etc. but this is a nice "check" to see if we're missing anything big. New car cost os abotu $20K and we throw it away in a decade. Pod cost is about $15K, I'm not sure how long it will last but: - A car is used less than 10% of the time. A pod will be used much more since many people can use it during a day. So our "cost of sitting capital" is much lower. - Pods are much simpler than cars. Plus there's a lot less wear and tear on them due to that simplicity, electric drive, no batteries, no tires, doesn't touch the road/guidway, less accidents, etc so we get a lot more vehicle miles out of them. - A sq mile of guideway is a lot cheaper than the roads it replaces. Think of NO interior roads in the sq mile. Just bike paths and sidewalks. (yes I need some harder figures on this ... any takers?) You might complain that the roads are already there but actually, a road costs about 1/10 of its capital cost per year, so each decade you buy it again. Guideways have MUCH lower maintenance. No pot holes, no tires, no snowplows or street sweeping or resurfacing, repainting, re signing etc. Comment 19 "amount spent on roads by goverment". From http://www.vtpi.org/tca/tca0506.pdf a highway lane costs about $10M per mile, the same cost as a SkyTran guideway mile. A SkyTran Guideway has 3 times that carrying capacity and much lower maintenance costs. The above url also says in 2007 all US roads are valued at $2.6T. I can't find a figure on how much the US spends on roads each year. The D.O.T. 2010 budget was $79B but that doesn't include states and towns but does include other transportation expenses besides I'd guess about $100B spent on roads each year in the US just to put a stake in the ground. Note that gas taxes (included inthe 50 cents per mile for cars) do NOT cover all the expense of roads, even from the federal government road building. But all this is kind of moot. SkyTran's 10 cents per passenger mile covers capital and operational expenses with NO government subsidy. 50 cents per passenger mile for cars doesn't cover all of road capital costs and a lot of other externalities. For those of you interested in big numbers, see my $6K per person saved per year in using SkyTran vs car. For a city of a million that's $6B. For 1/2 the US popuation, (150M) that's $900B. Aggregate over a few decades and we're starting to talk about real money saved. For comparison, US National Debt is now (Sept 2011) about $14.7T or 16.3 years of savings with my PRT proposal, and that's just the barest mimimal savings, not including war, the environment etc. The federal annual deficit is $1.3T. Add in the externalties of cars not included in 50 cents per mile and my guess is SkyTran savings would more than cover it. (I'm not saying we should distribute this money to the deficit, but just to give you a sense of the amount of money we're talking about.) A comprehensive PRT system will not solve all the problems of the economy or the environment. However, it will give us a lot more resources to tackle other problems. We could use those savings to help: - deploy bike-share to cities - help rural citizens get more efficient cars, ie 200MPG or electric - drastically improve energy efficiencies in buildings - Fund at least some of the other fine proposals in this contest.

Christopher Fry

Sep 12, 2011
08:24

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Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of "9/11". Many of us who live in the town that the planes took off from, or where they landed, will be reminded of personal stories. I'll spare you mine for an impersonal story. The attacks were funded by Osama bin Laden. He got the money from his wealthy family. That family was in the construction business in Saudi Arabia. They had a lot of business because the country was (and still is) awash in money from selling oil. A lot of that oil was bought by Americans, indirectly, at their local gas station. Stopping terrorism is tough, but here's my plan A: Stop giving money to the Middle East. Since the bulk of that money comes from buying oil, we need to reduce our oil consumption. Bush claimed we're addicted to oil. I think that's inaccurate. We're addicted to travel. The primary energy source of our existing transportation technology is oil. Skytran is the most practical transportation technology I can think of, which will allow us to keep our addiction to travel without funding terrorists, or Iran's nuclear weapons program for that matter. This is not a complete plan. However, with SkyTran as our transportation backbone, it will be a lot cheaper to stop giving terrorists money than buying expensive weapons to blow up people, making the survivors madder at us. After we enact Plan A, there's a host of additional strategies that need to be deployed. I do not believe the greatest near term threat to the economy or the environment is oil. I believe it is war. However, an extensive PRT system could significantly decrease both oil use and war, improving the economy and the environment in the process. What will this cost us? Well first, what did the previous plans cost us? Newsweek Sept 12, 2011 p. 9 says the cost of fighting terrorists and protecting the US since Sept 11, 2001 is $3.2T. What has this bought us? In Afghanistan, an interview of the NY Times Kubul bureau chief Alyssa Rubin http://www.npr.org/2011/09/08/140224675/growing-violence-clouds-afghanistans-future states "Rubin talks about the growing corruption and violence in Afghanistan" and "August (2011) was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in the nearly 10-year-old war". In Iraq there's a lot of different opinions, but for an overview of American sentiment, see http://www.gallup.com/poll/142367/slim-majority-says-iraq-war-judged-failure.aspx I propose a change in strategy. Stop pouring gasoline (oil money) on the fire (Middle East). This plan calls for no money being spent outright, in fact a huge decrease of money would be spent on war and transportation. It does require a loan of $20M and a loan guarantee on $200M, (in verifiable stages) which adds up to less than 0.007% of $3.2T. Or we can spend another $3.2T plus a big fraction of conventional transportation costs for the next decade with our ongoing "business as usual" approach.

Mike Plusch

Sep 18, 2011
08:27

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How many PRT cars/pods are required per square mile of average density (1,500 people) if everyone used the PRT? I attempted to determine this and came up with 100 or 6.7% of the population. A large city of 10 million (Chicago) would need 670,000 pods. That number could replace most other forms of powered transit (cars, buses, taxis, trains). The number should accommodate average peak loads (during morning commute) with little waiting.  Here's how I arrived at this number. Average commute is 16 miles (http://askville.amazon.com/average-commuting-distance-americans/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=2554434) and since the proposed PRT design is point-to-point with no stopping, if we assume an average speed of 80 mph, then the average commute time would be 12 minutes (which is about 1/2 of the current commute time). If 50% of people commute (need statistics), then there are 750 commuters per square mile. Because commuting is generally one-way, pods may be empty for the return trip, or perhaps to better handle peak loads, each pod might stop once to pick up a second passanger that is going to the same destination -- I did not factor in either assumption. If everyone commutes during a 2 hour window (an assumption), then a peak 15 minute period might have 100 commuters in pods. So, with a lot estimations, the number of pods is approximately 6.7% of the population.

James Greyson

Sep 19, 2011
08:54

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Christopher, tx for your reply @13. Like the way you connect "educating the market" with "WELL DESIGNED economic tool". Yes, conventional economic tactics have failed us by being too incremental and siloed. Correcting markets to account for all kinds of wastes would signal a new scale of ambition (compatible with your proposal) and also a new large flow of funds (compatible with funding small and large-scale initiatives that cut waste dependence - including yours). So the economic tool can educate the market. How do you view the complexity of PRT compared to the prevailing car system? From #20, can the composites in track and pods be C2Ced? From #21. Good to discuss patterns of conflict. Yes, non-oil dependent transport would help a lot. Also needs a systemic fix to reverse trends in weapons spending, eg http://bit.ly/fourthswitch This can even become a financing mechanism for sustainability/regeneration initiatives (as mentioned in the 'how' section of my Fix the System proposal).

James Greyson

Sep 19, 2011
08:56

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Comment copied from twitter via David Gow @WiselinePRT: @ClimateCoLab http://t.co/enuwLkJY Any tips to improve? // Yeah. It needs to be framed as a tool that policymakers/planners can adopt now, complementing existing transit planning and systems. Otherwise it's incompatible with implementation across #urban areas. #eco #transit #energy #prt #pods

Christopher Fry

Sep 20, 2011
06:45

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Fry's Response to comment #23 Re: Economic tools, etc. Getting our "price signals" right can help a lot of things. Its been difficult to do that with transportation because of the difficulty of billing, the non-incremental purchases (ie you have to buy a whole car, then you're stuck with it, etc). One of the flexibilities of PRT has to do with dynamic pricing. If we look at comment #22, we assume we need to design and implement the system for maximum capacity, ie rush hour. Overall this is a good strategy though it means that much of the capital equipment is idle much of the time and thus its a waste. Now note that in cars, its extremely bad in this regard since everyone has their own car and it sits taking up a valuable parking spot most of the time. PRT is better in that the cars can be used many times a day by many people. But we can also design in dynamic pricing to encourage people to "pod share" as well as shift their time of use. For instance, if you go to a station, you could declare you want to "pod share" to the city center, by using an app your phone. If someone is already waiting to go to city center, you share a pod with them. If not, the system tells you to wait for a potential passenger. For this inconvenience you pay less, which could mean at peak times you pay nothing or even negative. We might set up the system such that if you agree to wait 5 minutes and nobody shows up in 5 minutes to pod-share with you, you get to take your own pod but at the reduced rate so you're guaranteed a financial advantage. We can also charge different rates at different times of day to encourage people to not ride during rush hour. By building a sophisticated model of such schemes we may find that we can get away with less infrastructure and pass on this cost savings to the riders. This modeling isn't free but hopefully guys like James will pitch in here and figure out optimum strategies. Re the complexity of PRT vs Cars. That's a tough question because the complexity has so many dimensions. - The vehicle itself: Pods are much simpler than cars. The mag-lev is a newer technology but the fundamental lifting is done by permanent magnets passing over wire loops in the track which generates a current which makes a magnetic field that "repels" the permanent magnet to give you mag-lev. But all the complexity of the internal combustion engine, gears, wheels, tires, differential, suspension of cars goes way. - Track vs Road. The track has some sophisticated electronics in it with no analog in a roadway. But, the track is built in nearly identical 30 foot sections (there will be a few different lengths and some with curves, but only a small number of very similar sections). The track sections can be made in a factory under controlled conditions. Same for the poles and most of the foundation (see my new edit in comment #20). A road on the other hand you have to level a large surface area, then "bend" for drainage, put down gravel and layer or two of asphalt (and keep doing it every few years), paint, signs and lighting. This takes orders of magnitude more material and labor than a guideway and must all be done outside in the uncontrolled weather. - Control Structure PRT needs a sophisticated guidance system, ie you have to time the cars leaving a station precisely. To do this well, you need to understand at least the traffic on the preceding segment, though a larger area knowledge might help. You might have no control of a road, or you might have traffic signals, train crossings, dynamic signage telling you your speed, maps & GPS units in cars, police, traffic court, ambulances, emergency rooms, as well as oil drilling, refining, & distribution. Summarizing the above for one complexity comparison is a judgment call, trading off the somewhat higher tech (though I think ultimately simpler) technology of PRT with the sheer volume and cost of a perhaps familiar, yet rather complex network supporting automobiles. But the big measure of complexity is just, what does it mean for the day to day activity of a traveler? Here's where PRT is WAY simpler. Re recycling composites and cradle to cradle. I'm no expert in this area but there is already a case of carbon fiber on high-tech vehicles (Trek bikes) being recycled: http://www.gizmag.com/trek-begins-carbon-fiber-recycling-program/18493/ for a savings of 96% of the energy compared to making it new. Re Weapons spending. etc. The book and movie "Blood and Oil" by Michael Klare details the political and economic problems induced by extracting oil. By not using foreign oil, there would certainly be one less reason to engage in war and less resources for dictators of oil-producing countries to suppress their own populations with. This is a proposal for the US, so my plan for the US would be to reduce military expenditures over all. But initially we might redirect the efforts of the military to help build this infrastructure. They've got lots of heavy equipment, skilled labor, and sophisticated tools for managing the equipment and the people. I'd argue that doing so would help US security at home and abroad and thus be aligned with the military's primary purpose. So James is correct that redirecting military funds could help finance the system. But note that the system I propose can support itself off of fares, so we could also just collect fewer taxes in the first place.

Christopher Fry

Sep 20, 2011
08:37

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Fry's response to Comment #24 I don't like terse comments like #24 as its hard to unambiguously interpret them, but I'll do my best. Re: Framed as a tool for policymakers: $20M loan for a test track to be built in 18 months, and a $200M loan guarantee for the first city with installation in 18 more months. Re: Framed for planners: Deploy in 3 years. Re: Complementing existing transit planning: What planning? If you're not fitting something as beneficial as SkyTran into your transit planning, I wouldn't call it planning worth doing. Most conventional transit "planning" is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Re: Complementing existing transit systems: It complements existing pedestrian and bike systems very nicely. You can walk to a station or bike to it and put your bike in the back. NYC will roll out bikeshare of 10K bikes at 600 stations in 2012, similar to Paris, Montreal, Boston, DC systems as well as many other cities the world now in place. The commissioner of NYC Transit just told me the average bus speed in NYC is 8MPH. Just throw them out. Subways are faster but with few places that they stop, not convenient. Extend them? NYC's new 2nd Ave line costs $2B per mile, 200 times a SkyTran guideway. Since subway cars are heavier per person, accelerate much more per passenger mile, require drivers, stations workers and much more maintenance, their operational costs are far greater than SkyTran. The "disruptiveness" of installing SkyTran is roughly that of putting in utility poles for lighting or carrying electricity, though the important effect will be a decrease in cars, energy use, transportation time, frustration, hospital visits and money spent on transportation. Re: Incompatible with urban areas: The existing transportation is incompatible with urban areas. Pedestrians, bikes and cars get hit by other cars. People die from car produced smog. Congestion, parking and road construction are all pretty incompatible with people living densely. SkyTran will be far more compatible with the primary function of a city: civilization.

James Greyson

Sep 21, 2011
05:51

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Have invited @WiselinePRT to continue chat here."Thanks @WiselinePRT: please see reply by the proposal author bit.ly/nTN1am and continue chat at @ClimateCoLab" Great plan to include variable pricing. Agree PRT is less complex than cars system, esp incl car sales, servicing, fuel supply, lighting, cleaning, accidents,... Would pods by carbon fibre or glass fibre? Wouldn't advise chopping into 1" pieces before pyrolysis. Precycling premiums would build in recycling cost - expect it would be cheaper than end of life costs for cars.

Christopher Fry

Sep 21, 2011
05:36

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Re carbon vs glass fiber I don't know the details here. The criteria of strength to weight, cost and longevity should all be factored in that choice along with down-the-road recycling costs and externalities. Some cars are now being design to simplify recycling, ie http://www.vauxhall.co.uk/owners_services/recycling/recycling-oriented-design.html which is the way to go. Since a SkyTran pod is simplier than a car, recyclability is another advantage of pods over cars. If I understand precycling correctly, it could be applied to any physical good, regardless of whether it is purchased by an individual, a company, or a government, so using it for PRT is fine by me.

James Greyson

Sep 22, 2011
06:05

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Super to be thinking ahead to make your project C2C. You're precycling already - preparing for the products to not become waste. As you say, the simplicity of PRT gives it an advantage with C2C and will cut costs. If economies implement precycling premiums in future it will cut those costs (less risk of waste = lower premiums) but even if nations try to do C2C by regulation your scheme will still be cheaper.

wiselineprt

Sep 22, 2011
12:47

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I design, write and manage the Seattle-based websites Get On Board!PRT (and subsidiary blogs) and Get There Fast. I've taken a couple of stabs at drafting something that might be received as helpful to "PRT Grids" at this stage. What I've decided to do is communicate some of what I've learned in the last 22 years of studying PRT and observing attempts to implement it. I hope it will help you in creating a proposal that is able to make the jump from idea to reality. There are three main reasons why the Masdar system was the first PRT system to open since the UMTA program of the 1970s. 1. Everyone knows this one: the lack of commercially available products. As a result, any grassroots support PRT does attract is way way ahead of the industry. Advocates' appeals boil down to "PRT will be great, we should just save our money until it gets here." As advocates we need to not rush to embrace specific designs or make grandiose promises. 2. Design errors. Most would-be designs look good on paper, it's only after things go wrong that the critical mistakes become apparent. Morgantown's guideway contractor was told to start work before the vehicle had been designed. Raytheon departed from the original design for no good reason other than convenience. Masdar's architect decided to run PRT in a below-streets sublevel -- inadvertently making that sublevel the most expensive PRT guideway ever undertaken. I can't help but think a more open process could have helped these proprietary attempts. In future I would advise avoiding disorganized organizations and those ruled by unreasonable secrecy. 3. There is a belief among PRT advocates that a dominant transit paradigm is blocking innovation. I see a lot of this language in "PRT Grids." I once held this belief briefly, in a moment of frustration, but I quickly realized it to be simplistic and wrong. It feels good, but it's wrong. This will take some explaining. There has been an anti-establishment thread running through support for PRT. Some say the status quo is the roadblock to PRT and see it as responsible for our urban mess as well. "It's the dominant paradigm," it is thought, "we need to do something revolutionary." While we need to do revolutionary things, in this case it is a mistake to blame a dominant paradigm. The reason PRT has generally been rejected is because it has not met the criteria of public servants doing their due diligence, within our system of representative government. I'm a policy guy by training. That means evaluating and recommending policy options on a number of criteria including, but by no means limited to, "Does it meet stated community objectives?" "Is it fiscally responsible?" "Does it 'fix' a problem but cause other foreseeable problems?" and "Is the implementation plan viable?" And yet many PRT proposals have been distinguished by the way they challenge both the public's transit systems and the processes through which they are planned. This approach has made the PRT option a non-starter, because it immediately alienates transit's natural support, the Pro-Transit Coalition of transit users, community activists, urban businesses, and environmentalists. This leaves the PRT supporters scrambling for allies, and what they end up with are entities outside the coalition who don't really have a stake in urban progress. What I want to emphasize is that when PRT advocates talk about changing the status quo, we need to keep in mind that what we have a problem with is automobile dominance, leading to pollution, wasting energy and blighting of our communities. The Pro-Transit Coalition ought to be a natural ally. But PRT supporters shoot themselves in the foot when we form alliances with entities from outside that coalition -- and make no mistake, by being non-mainstream you will attract those entities. The PRT option becomes imprinted with their ideologies. This imprint leads to pitfalls rendering PRT less competitive when a proposal lands on a policy analyst's desk. Since the 80s we have bought into the idea that PRT offers a new paradigm. But really, PRT borrows key characteristics from the elevator. The only real difference is the offline station -- and that comes from railroads. And average people are already familiar with PRT, because they use elevators all the time. In retrospect, it is obvious that improving urban transit _is an evolution, not a dialectic_. The real paradigm is the public sphere, not transit. If we recognize this, the idea of replacing the paradigm is illogical. Conventional transit is not the problem, it is only a set of tools employed by the public sector (the people collectively) to address a number of externalities created in The Commons by the private sector (business and people individually). For a long time rail and buses have been the best tools available. Given the availability of new tools called PRT, there is no reason a transit agency wouldn't use them so long as PRT is the best option to meet specific needs. Remember that it was the public sector's biggest actor, the US government, that created the first momentum for PRT. We chose that government, and we could do that again if enough people are convinced PRT ought to be a priority. PRT's features need to be offered in ways that let planners see how it can help them fulfill the public's demand for clean, fast, widely available transportation. Language denigrating existing mass transit systems is not one of those ways. Rather, it is unproductive and polarizing, a red flag to transit supporters. It will be exploited by opponents of the public sector, who by definition oppose transit. Anyone who doubts this analysis need only look at other countries where PRT companies are planning systems and lining up clients. Within the existing paradigm. I wish you good luck.

Dennis Peterson

Sep 22, 2011
12:36

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By way of comparison: my city spent almost half a billion dollars on a single ten-mile light-rail line: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_Rapid_Transit_Services If concrete does turn out to be a large component, carbon-negative cement might be an option.

Mike Plusch

Sep 29, 2011
05:19

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To get PRT adopted, it needs to cross the chasm from innovators, who are outsiders in transit planning, to early adopters who understand how transit decisions are made.  That is the main point that I took away from WiselinePRT's comment #30.  To be successful, the innovators, who are outsiders, need to reach the early-adopters, who are insiders and can present PRT as a viable option. This contest has the potential to be the bridge that helps cross the chasm and get this proposal in front of those early adopters who have the money, influence, and interest to be the first to implement. Having a working system is critical to reduce risk and to make Skytran a viable option for many more communities.  --- On the topic of whether to support PRTs in general or a specific one such as Skytran, I see it as similar to the tablet market when the iPad was first launched. There had been many tablet computers before the iPad, but they never caught on. It took the unique design of the iPad to be successful. PRTs in general are like the tablet computers before the iPad -- promising, but lacking in important ways.  SkyTran is like the iPad -- an elegant design with a compelling value that could wean many people from their private cars.

Dennis Peterson

Oct 3, 2011
10:19

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What about congestion? With cars or light rail, a lot of people can board in parallel. With SkyTran, each station can only handle a car or two at a time, so you might get long lines of people waiting for those in front to load themselves and their stuff. You could definitely improve matters by building a lot of extra stations in areas that attract a lot of people, expecially around places that host big events where everyone arrives or leaves at about the same time. Has anyone worked out how many stations would be needed?

Christopher Fry

Oct 4, 2011
02:26

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Response to comment #33 This is such a common question for PRT systems that I'm surprised it didn't come up before, but glad you brought it up. To get concrete, let's take the Boston Red Line subway for example. Each train car seats 50 but maybe another 100 can stand so let's call capacity at 150 per car. They are grouped in either 4 or 6 car trains so for the maximum capacity we've got 150 x 6 = 900 passengers. But at any given stop, not every body changes. let's say the change rate is 10% so that's 90 passengers boarding per stop per station. During rush hour weekdays, the official schedule says that most trains leave 9 minutes apart. That gives us 6.6 trains per hour for 600 passengers per hour per station. If we take all 4 subway lines (blue, green, orange, red) we get roughly 120 stations (its a bit of a judgment call as to exactly what's a station but that's at least close) So we get a subway system TOTAL boarding capacity per hour of 72K passengers. Now for Skytran, we get 1.2 passengers per car, loading time of 20 seconds per car, for a boarding passengers per hour per station of 216. If we have a 1 mile grid over the enclosing rectangle of the subway system that's roughly 12 x 13 miles for 156 sq miles with 2 stations per sq mile (one on the north-south guideway and one on the east-west guideway) that's 312 stations. Multiply that by our 216 passengers per hour per station for a grand total of 67K passengers. So with these numbers Skytran is just 6% less than subway. Why? Well each subway train can have more boardings per hour (600 to 216) but in Skytran we get more stations (312 to 120) so these roughly balance each other out. But the passengers get a big win since, with 2.6 times more stations, they have less to walk between their point or origin and the station and their station to their final destination. Also they don't wait an average of 4.5 minutes in a station for a train, they just get right in when they arrive and go. Plus they don't have to stop at every stop along the way, just their stop. But let's see what we can do to boost capacity. After all, if we get rid of most cars and we handle all the bus traffic, we're going to have a lot more passengers. The cheapest thing is to encourage more passengers to buddy-up. The 1.2 figure is from car average passengers. Especially during rush hour to or from downtown, we are likely to be able to pair people, at least going from exactly the same downtown station at the end of the day or to the same downtown station at the beginning of the day. The other points we could "get somewhere close" without too much extra distance and one extra stop for 1 of the passengers. So we ought to be able to boost that 1.2 to 1.5 with a smart smart-phone app. Next, we can do some parallel loading, even without extra track by grouping 2 or 3 pods into a "launch window" and nearly double or triple our boardings per hour. or we can have diagonal 10 foot track sections for multiple pods off of a station and load them in parallel for perhaps slightly larger increase in boardings. But what I like better is just having more stations, as Dennis creatively figured out. These stations are not like subway stations, They are CHEAP! Just some extra track, stairs and a very small platform, maybe with a roof. A few 10's of thousands, not millions like subway stations. So we could have 2 per linear mile instead of 1. That gives us not just extra capacity but less walk time for the passengers. For really dense areas, we might break our 1 mile grid into a 1/2 mile grid and get not just 4 times as many stations, but 4 times the guideway capacity as well. Plus an even shorter walk. Strategic placement of guideway and station locations is a job where local transit experts can add a lot of value. As Dennis implies, emptying a football stadium is the worst case scenario. Boston's Patriot Stadium holds 68K people. Handling this crowd for 10 games a year is expensive (well ok there's a few concerts and soccer games but the capital equipment is mostly idle so not efficiently used). But we can have the stadium owner pay for that just like they pay for the parking spaces now and pass it on to the fans. We can also bring SkyTran guideways up into the stadium. Imagine several guideways that circle the seats at different levels with numerous stops per level. I'll allow the stadium owners to figure out how many dollars a fan is willing to pay to get out a minute earlier and build in the appropriate number of stations. They will take up little room and a LOT less room than parking, which is many, many times the land area of the stadium itself.

2011 Judges

Oct 11, 2011
05:03

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Overall assessment: PRT is not a new idea, but there some new thinking in this proposal in the areas of bike sharing, charging stations for electric cards, inter-city PRT, and freight hauling. The team may want to expand its discussion of the economics of PRT and how the PRT might start to be overlaid on the existing transportation network. Specific comments and suggestions for improvement: - I need to read this more closely to judge its practicality and details, but it seems new and obvious questions are raised directly by the proposers. - This is a highly creative proposal. I am skeptical about the Maglev economics, and the ability to construct such a system as an overlay on the existing layout of cities. Those issues need to be addressed. The presentation is lively and informative. The enthusiasm pours through.

Mike Plusch

Oct 21, 2011
05:21

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One of the main advantages of the Skytran PRT system is that its lightweight design, elevated guideway, and grid-based layout enables it to overlay on existing city infrastructure. This dramatically reduces the cost of adding a PRT system, and enables it to easily integrate with existing transit systems including cars, taxis, sidewalks, subways, and bus lines. Cities are primarily designed for vehicle and people movement and use a grid-based street and sidewalk layout which places almost all activity on the ground level plane. Because Skytran operates at a 20 foot elevation, with stops at 10 feet, the system can operate in parallel with existing city traffic. Most elevated trains are massive with enormous visual clutter and cast a large shadow, but the proposed PRT guideway has an extremely small cross-sectional area because the pods are orders of magnitude lighter than light-rail trains and require much less structure. Street lights and some utility lines can be integrated into the guideway, further reducing the visual clutter. In addition, many existing buildings could support a Skytran guideway, eliminating poles on the ground. Buildings could be designed to integrate a Skytran stop and use the existing stairs and elevators of the building, minimizing the use of precious sidewalk space. The noise and dirt from an elevated track is a common problem with other light-rail and PRT systems, and significantly constrains the placement of lines in a city. Because Skytran has practically no moving parts and uses small and lightweight pods, it generates almost no noise and is very clean. With its optimized tear-drop shape, even the wind noise of a pod is minimized. The combination of clean and noiseless operation makes it possible to use Skytran throughout all areas of a city. A city's existing grid-based layout is a natural fit for the PRT's grid-based design. Skytran guideway can be placed along existing rights-of-way and the small, lightweight, and tillable pods enable the turning radius of a line to fit within a typical city intersection. Lines can be placed in north-south and east-west directions, following existing rights-of-way. Other subway and light-rail systems require a hub-and-spoke design which does not fit within a city's grid-based layout - their hub-and-spoke design is required because of the extremely high-cost of typical subway lines and their large turning radii. The size, elevation, and location of stops enables Skytran to easily integrate into existing transit systems. A person walking on the sidewalk only needs to climb one flight of stairs to get into a pod. The transfer from an existing bus or subway stop to a Skytran stop would be just as easy. The effort to enter or exit a Skytran pod would be as easy and probably safer than getting into a taxicab. To be economically feasible, a PRT system must be able to easily integrate into an existing city infrastructure. Skytran's unique design enables this integration, taking advantage of existing sidewalks, streets, buildings, and mass transit systems.

Christopher Fry

Oct 25, 2011
07:15

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Fry responds to Judges comment #35 -"PRT is not a new idea " True. There are three generations. The first started in Morgantown, WV starting operation in 1975 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Transit This generation is often referred to as "people-movers", 10 to 20 people per train-line or bus-like car on a dedicated guideway, not requiring a driver. The 2nd generation has a reduced passenger count of 4 to 6, overhead guideway of 2-rail tracks, off-line stations so the cars can bypass unneeded stop at full speed which maxes out at about 30MPH. The latest installation of this generation is Heathrow Airport in London. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ULTra_(rapid_transit) The Heathrow system uses rather heavy overhead concrete guideways. The cars are battery powered so they are expensive, heavy and inefficient. The 3rd generation is both cheaper and more efficient. It uses 2 person cars (more efficient since most trips require only 1 or two passengers traveling together.) Hanging the cars below the guideway is more stable and reduces the Guideway "skyprint". Getting power from the guideway reduces battery weight in the vehicle. Mag_lev reduces "wheel friction", and makes switching tracks faster and more reliable. Tandem seating for reduced frontal area and an aerodynamic body further reduce energy consumption as does regenerative braking. Skytran is the most carefully designed of 3rd generation PRT. - "economics" When I first heard of SkyTran I immediately thought it would be too costly and set about making financial models. There's numbers about this elsewhere in the proposal but I'd be willing to supply more if anyone has specific requests. One important area that hasn't been harped on in this proposal is the tendency for large transportation infrastructure projects to have "cost overruns". Boston's big dig was particularly bad at being initially estimated at $2M and ended up costing nearly $15B. How can we be confident that Skytran won't suffer the same fate? We can't guarantee that of course but this proposal provides stages of development whereby we can test the assumptions at each step spending just enough in a stage to justify spending the next lump of money until the system is proven. Though I'm proposing building out PRT for half the USA's people, I certainly don't want to attempt that in one fell swoop. One of the biggest problems in cost overruns is the uniqueness of each large project and the uncertainty about local conditions (weather, ground, labor) for building. Skytran has just a few large components (foundation, pole, guideway section, pod) each of which can be assembled in the controlled environment of a factory and shipped to the installation site in a truck. Installation is, relative to a roadway, straight forward: Screw the healical foundation into the ground, bolt the pole to it, bolt the 30 foot long guideway sections to the tops of the poles, insert the pods into the guideway (unless its connected to another guideway, in which case they can drive themselves to their first station. The most unpredictable task is foundation installation. Helical foundations can't be installed in swamps, but then swamps are so low density in people you wouldn't put a guideway there. You also can't screw them into rock, but then you can use relatively little concrete on top of rock for a foundation. The lack of concrete in the foundation saves greenhouse gas, installation time and mess, including drying time, and a lot of mass to be transported to the sight. Although PRT is a new infrastructure, over time it will lead to less infrastructure. Less roads means less storm drains. We can get rid of all sewer with graywater gardens and composting. We can eliminate water mains with rainwater catchment from roofs and a cistern tank to store water until the next rain. By making houses efficient, we can reduce their energy requirements to what can be harvested from the sun, wind, and/or geothermal. That gets rid of power lines and natural gas pipelines so no more delays for digging up roads to repair those things. whoops, we don't need roads either. Skytran will have far less delays due to construction because its so much simpler than roads and cars. When repair is needed, you're rerouted automatically around the damaged section. Fiber optics can be put inside the guideway for communications with WiMAx-4G or cell transcevers mounted on the PRT poles for last 1/2 mile communications. In that world, NO physical conductors go to a house ... well ok maybe we have sidewalks and some dirt tracks for special, infrequent vehicles. You can fit a refridgerator in a pod, and wheel it on a dolly down the sidewalk to your house. Mail? First get rid of the sending of junk mail. Then have post-office boxes at your closest SkyTran station. You have to go there most days anyway. The post boxes could be stuffed by a special built-in robot that gets the letters from a driverless pod so no need for mail trucks. You might complain that you can't just jump into your car in your driveway. Well first you don't need to have a car or a driveway, but perhaps even more important, a 1 mile grid forces you to get a 1/4 mile walking exercise roughly twice a day. Its part of the SkyTran preventative health plan. The other parts are: eliminating 20K annual auto accidents, cleaner air (no smog or tire pollution), no asphalt air pollution especially bad in the first month after paving, and less stress due to the lack of congestion driving. That will save at least 10's of billions of dollars on the national health bill all with no paperwork or insurance companies involved! The government gets involved in both health care and infrastructure projects. I'm not concerned with big government per se, I'm concerned with inefficient government. The fewer pork barrel projects that congress has excuses to spend your money on, the less corruption there will be. Skytran is a lot cheaper than roads and way cheaper than bridges to nowhere. (A SkyTran bridge over a river is a lot cheaper than a bridge for cars because its payload is much lighter.) Yes we could build a guideway to nowhere but with some simple metrics like population density and riders to the existing edge stations, we can easily limit building guideways to areas that will pay for themselves. With the "Occupy" movement, there's been a lot of complaints about the rich getting richer. PRT will make everybody effectively richer, though probably the poor will benefit proportionally more. For basic day-to-day transportation, people won't have to own a car, nor will they have to spend hours a day on a bus. With SkyTran, they will spend less than even today's subsidized tickets to get to their job. Besides the comparatively tiny startup loans outlined in this proposal, this transportation network is not subsidized (like all transit and car transportation is now). So it is a way to benefit the poor without raising taxes or debt. In fact, government spending on transportation (and health) in the long run should fall considerably. The Tea Party, the Democrats and the Occupiers ought to like it. - "how the PRT might start to be overlaid on the existing transportation network" Hopefully comment #36, the new pictures at the top of the proposal and the picture section at the bottom of the proposal address this. But let me say that we still need competent urban planners for optimum guideway and station placement. I don't claim this is simple, what with zoning politics, etc. but its clearly doable. Any community that fights with itself hard about where to place the guideway simply doesn't get one and will suffer comparative inefficiencies.

Robert Means

Oct 29, 2011
08:22

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PRT systems are worthy of implementation because they can help solve the related problems of congestion, dependence on foreign oil, and planetary climate change. Although reading about SkyTran was my entry into the world of modern transit options back in 2000, I am more of a "supported" rather than "suspended" guideway guy. So, please also consider SkyWeb Express technology. Here is a 3-minute introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIOA6ExOq6c Regardless which specific PRT technology gets support from this group, count on a cost of about $20M/bi-directional mile (or $10M/one-way guideway mile). This compares favorably to the $40M-$60M/mile for LRT and $20M/mile for BRT (bus rapid transit). The clincher is the low O&M costs for PRT. One PRT application not generally considered is the crossing of barriers (freeways, creeks, RR tracks, etc.) for pedestrians and cyclists. Here in Milpitas, CA, a PRT crossing of the RR tracks will cost less than the standard steel-and-concrete pedestrian over-crossings (POC) than are customarily used. Here is a proposal for the project: http://www.electric-bikes.com/prt/ferry.html Such a simple PRT system (really just a ferry to take people from one side to the other) could be built for $3M. As I have said for years, PRT implementation is not an engineering problem or a financial problem, it is a political inertia problem.

Jerry Roane

Oct 29, 2011
09:33

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There are several designs that accomplish this concept at an affordable cost. Some are captive pure PRT and some are a hybrid of guideway cars that convert to street cars to go the last few hundred yards. The advantages of elevated guideway allow this to end traffic as we have come to accept it and is energy efficient enough to end our country buying any imported oil at all. Guideway also ushers in the fully electric car because it also provides the battery infrastructure to all these new cars. Some dual mode systems swap batteries on the fly as the cars convert from guideway to street eliminating the customer dealing in any way with charging anything. Several of these have been proposed over the last 8 years to different states but so far the oil interests or fear of oil interests has derailed these efforts regardless of the energy gains and ending of traffic congestion. At the moment oil prices are relatively low because of the world depression but once this economic cycle is over oil prices will reach record heights and building a system that needs no oil or any extra power from the electric grid will be valuable. A few of the systems proposed can power themselves with the area under the path of the cars using concentrated PV solar under the protection of the guideway. This is a concept who's time has come.

Francois Allard

Oct 30, 2011
12:49

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The small frontal area of the proposed Skytran system not only means an aerodynamically efficient system, but one that can be placed underground for relatively little cost. I've seem water mains put in that require a larger diameter hole than this proposal would require. It's been suggested that both these installations could be performed concurrently making the transit system underground cost minimal. When you place the system underground where needed, say in highly populated areas, stations can be just under the surface (perhaps as little as 2.5m below grade) so no elevator would be needed, even ramps might suffice for wheelchair accessibility. Access could also be from the basement of nearby buildings. Though putting the system underground in highly populated areas would increase cost, this cost would pale in comparison to alternatives such as rail systems or "Big Digs". In this case, not only would emissions be reduced for the travelling vehicles, but the avoided energy costs of building large tunnels would also be gained. Underground PRT is an option where above ground solutions might be problematic.

Francois Allard

Oct 30, 2011
09:31

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proposal improvement: "Frieght" in the titles should be "Freight" (or cargo). ;-)

Francois Allard

Oct 30, 2011
11:35

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An alternate answer to "will big events overwhelm PRT" is: Use Buses as well as PRT. Full buses are very energy efficient. PRT can aggregate an area to a bus pick-up/drop-off point making the combination an efficient model. The buses can be otherwise unused (rural) school buses or even borrowed from other (smaller) cities in advance of a scheduled event.

Bill James

Oct 30, 2011
04:50

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Great job. Voted to support you and will encourage other to also. The PRT market will open very soon. Here is a 15 minute presentation recently given at Duke University: http://youtu.be/SDFomixInUE Please consider asking political leaders to adopt a free market approach. Here is the draft we have proposed (http://www.jpods.com/PerformanceStandard_1.html). If I can get New Jersey to adopt such a standard, would you be willing to build factories there? Thanks Bill james www.JPods.com

Jim Berergi

Oct 30, 2011
07:28

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Hi Christopher, I think something does need to be done to improve urban transportation. I agree with your goals. Land based transportation used almost 70% of total US oil consumption creating almost 33% of total CO2 emissions. http://epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/downloads11/US-GHG-Inventory-2011-Complete_Report.pdf 57% of all oil consumed in the U.S. is imported. http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/security.aspx The scope of what you are doing needs to expand to mitigate more of the server problems facing the US and the world. $500 to $700 billion annually is sent out of the country buying oil. We need to spend that money here to create jobs, and pay for a better education for our kids. I just now discovered this website and this contest. My company Solar Transportation Technologies is developing a nationwide transportation system called Freedom Transit which uses electric cars on an automated and elevated roadway that powers and controls the cars while in the system. Please see http://freedomtransit.com/whyft.html I welcome comments.

Howard Goodell

Oct 30, 2011
09:25

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I have been thinking about this system awhile. In 2006, while I was a postdoc in Paris (which has perhaps the best urban transit system in the world), I started this wiki site to consider its "social, economic, environmental and other factors": www.skytran.org -- some perspectives on issues raised in these comments. Looking at the last dozen or so, here are some points I'd like to make. First, maglev PRT in 200-pound cars that get 200 MPG equivalent at 100 or 150 MPH occupies a functional niche I don't see addressed very well by PRT or other proposals. It is the glue that can tie together systems that work at small scales, like bike share or Segway, with the spread-out megalopolis/suburban/exurban American transit reality. This Climate CoLab proposal addresses the low-hanging fruit: the 50% of American population living in the densest areas. However, I see it not ending with a 1-mile grid, but simply reducing density to match population. Even a grid every 50 or 100 miles would still be transformative in rural areas. Electric car range works everywhere, etc. Even if you drive 25 miles in a 12-MPG pickup, the rest of your trip is 100 or 200 MPG. If you want a mixed-mode system, you need to be able to leave a lot of components on the ground to have a 200-pound vehicle (BTW mostly up inside the guideway: I think the budget for the passenger compartment is more like 60-80 pounds.) I'm not a mechanical engineer, but it might be possible to pop the passenger compartment off the guideway "bogey" and onto a compatible overhead support in a specially-designed ground vehicle that waits in the stations. There will be a whole ecosystem of local transportation alternatives at the 1-mile through the 100-mile grid spacing I anticipate. Another "last helf-mile" solution might be very inexpensive overhead tracks. Vehicles will have wheels to go into stations (when the speed is too low for maglev) and a small motor and battery to get to the next station in a total system power failure. A light track with mechanical wheels at 10-20 MPH, under battery power or track-powered with a traditional mechanical wiper or an contactless inductive pickup, or even pedal-powered like Shweeb www.shweeb.com could take you right to the second story of your apartment, etc. faster than getting out and onto a scooter/bicycle/Segway etc. Second, a 200-pound 2-passenger vehicle (700 pounds with 2 passengers and their stuff) supported by a light 1-foot-wide guideway can economically occupy a wide-open *physical niche*: 20-30 feet up, supported by ordinary utility poles. While vehicles may go underground in special circumstances, I think passengers would prefer to be in the open air. (Paris elevated subway rides in the treetops seemed magical.) Since person-wide well-streamlined vehicles at 100 MPH have a tiny skyprint compared to any other proposed system, this won't be unsightly. The inventor Doug Malewicki calculates the noise at ground level will be less than a bicycle. Since he's MS Aerospace Engineering from Stanford, I'll take his word for it. Big concentrations of people mostly go away if you have stations every mile -- why would so many people collect and wait? Special situation like a stadium is manageable: you put stations around the stadium *on every floor*. No need to wait for the other floors; walk straight out and get on. The tracks to the stadium will be packed with vehicles automatically assembled from all over, approaching the stadium at 100 MPH. The tracks leading away will be packed with occupied vehicles headed away at 100 MPH going directly where each spectator lives. Similar with a large office building: at quitting time you leave from your floor. (See my article "SkyTran Equals Elevator" in the wiki site.) The SkyTran team are actually very free-market folks. Pitch to the Tea Party: this can be a private system that makes money with no government subsidy. Pitch to the Democrats: this system won't cost taxpayers a dime, and it helps poor people save money (and saves the environment). Pitch to occupiers: instead of Big Dig style boondoggles, this is a system you can build neighborhood by neighborhood (BTW without dividing it like a freeway would) in a decentralized way. Companies or transit districts or coops can pay for tracks in their area that meet their needs, and connect to the world.

Christopher Fry

Oct 31, 2011
05:34

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-Fry response to the last several comments: First, thanks for all the great contributions from readers above. Lots of creativity out there. The power and communications has been down at my house due to a storm since this flurry of comments and due to other commitments plus the contest deadline, I don't have the time to do justice to them. Since wires can be embedded in Skytran Guideways (and other PRT systems), perhaps I wouldn't be out of power if we had PRT! Jpods is the closest PRT system to SkyTran so I like it. It is the only other one I know of that hangs the pod below the track. This reduces the SkyPrint because the track can be just a single track rather than 2 like a railroad or a whole road surface. Yes there are monorails, but usually the vehicle wraps around the track, its not purely on top. The monorails I've seen plus any track where the vehicle is on top are simply more likely to derail, especially if you want to keep costs down by keeping the material (of both the track and the vehicles) down. Hanging also lets the vehicles swing out which is just more comfortable around turns and it can accommodate ANY speed (including 0MPH) whereas with overhead tracks you have to be very careful to bank the track for a particular speed so your MPH range is more limited. But heck, just about any PRT is better than no PRT. JPods is cheaper per track mile, but is limited in speed due to wheels & switching plus more moving parts means more maintenance. But there may be some combination of the JPods and Skytran that could work for some situations. JPods is a cool system! Dual Mode, ie drive your car onto the guideway, is a common dream, just like a flying car, or one that goes underwater. To make them safe, they are a much bigger SkyPrint, and much more expensive. Being bigger and more expensive means they won't get deployed as widely, and that means they won't be used as much (bigger networks are more valuable to all). The Solar Transportation Technologies is a well done website with a lot of excellent facts about the expense of existing autos, foreign oil, etc. (it is a nicely designed website as well which is important for getting public buy-in!). It is, however, a dual-mode system. This will be initially very appealing to people until they look at the cost and the Sky and Foot Print. The goal of a transportation system that can power itself is one that SkyTran and STT share. I infer from the STT 3 cents per vehicle mile in fuel costs that SkyTran uses 1/3 the energy per passenger mile as STT. That means it needs 1/3 the solar panels which means 1/3 the cost and 1/3 the land area. I conclude that most of the goals of STT will be better met with SkyTran technology than STT's dual mode, vehicle's above track technology. However, Howie's #45 comment cleverly invents a system that we may be able to standardize on a SkyTran-like guideway, and have special off-guideway "carriers" to allow people to use their own cars on city streets thus getting the advantages of the dual mode without its disadvantages. I still like getting rid of most cars altogether, but with very efficient, small cars, they could greatly extend the range of the overall network. Whether the person has to physically get out of their car, and get into a PRT pod or not, just doesn't seem to me to be a big deal, but heck, with the right engineering we can make the James Bond fans happy. We don't have to wait until the more complex technology of STT is worked out. Skytran could be built sooner and Howie's dual mode carriers become an add-on later on with collaboration with STT engineers. We could use solar panels on garages to supply the energy for the getting the cars from your driveway to the nearest PRT station.

Mike Plusch

Nov 3, 2011
06:38

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Another way to justify the price of PRT comes from just the cost of automobile deaths. According to the latest AAA figures, a fatal crash costs $6M (http://usat.ly/sU9xHY). If the improved safety of PRT saves 20,00 lives per year, that comes to $120B per year, or $2.4T for 20 years. Fry's rough calculations (comment #4) puts the cost of PRT to serve half the population at $2.5T. So, PRT can roughly pay for itself just by looking at the deaths prevented. Automobile accidents are the leading cause of death among people aged 5 to 34.

Bill Moomaw

Nov 4, 2011
08:25

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Personal Rapid Transit Grids The concept of PRT is not new, but this proposal examines the technological and social dimensions that would be optimal It identifies the features and explains why each is the optimal choice. The ony issue not addressed is cost, e.g. mag-lev. The cost savings by citizen riders is discussed qualitatively The integration with electric vehicles and bicycles demonstrates a systems thinking approach that multiplies the benefits. Acknowledging that it is just one part of the needed solution demonstrates a realistic set of expectations The presentation is excellent and convincing Strong contender

Christopher Fry

Nov 4, 2011
03:04

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Fry comments on #48 "The ony issue not addressed is cost, e.g. mag-lev. The cost savings by citizen riders is discussed qualitatively" Unfortunately this proposal and its comments are so long that it is, admittedly, hard to find informtion in it. On both the proposal and the comments pages, please search for "$" and "cents" to see some quantitative cost information. In particular, comment #4 hits costs head on. If there's some additional numbers you'd like to see, please let me know and I'll do my best to come up with them. I do not have specific numbers for the mag-lev component of a track though, just track total cost ($10M per mile). Operationally, mag-lev reduces cost of "fuel" (electricity) due to its low resistance to a penny per vehicle mile as well as in maintenance due to reducing moving parts and non-wear due to no-contact. Sorry, I don't have figures for those savings but you could compute part of it from tire sales and lubrication costs of automobiles. As Comment #47 points out, there's some rather large indirect cost savings. Follow the link to the url it references and you'll see costs not just for auto deaths, but injuries and auto congestion costs as well, all of which pretty much disappear for SkyTran passengers.

Francois Allard

Nov 9, 2011
01:27

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An alternate maglev supplier is MagneMotion. They have outlined a similar system (see link) that was cost (in another paper APM07PRT.pdf in 2007) as around $3500/m for the stators, inverters, and all control electronics. Advantages of MagneMotion's approach include: no magnetic drag and a passive switch (no moving parts). Perhaps a combination of the Skytran system with MagneMotion's maglev would also work? http://www.magnemotion.com/userfiles/files/FutureOfMaglev07.pdf

Christopher Fry

Nov 9, 2011
09:13

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Fry responds to comment #50 MagneMotion has great technology that is indeed very much in sync with SkyTran, even more so that JPods. In the link provided in comment 50, one section describes a PRT system of a small pod that hangs below the track, maglev linear electric motors for propulsion and uses magnetic switching with no moving parts. These are all the right design choices which SkyTran has also made. MagneMotion has proved this technology in their commercial freight systems of small package (less them 2 kilograms) within factories. But as they describe, there's no reason this technology won't work just fine for moving passengers. The paper describes a range of systems from 3 passengers to 160, from 34 mph to hundreds of miles an hour, including free air transport for the lower speed systems and evacuated tube transport for high speed yet still highly efficient vehicles due to greatly reduced aerodynamic drag. The cost of $3500/m, given in comment 50 adds up to $5.6M per mile. I infer from the above message that this figure does not include vehicles, stations, and perhaps a few more components so cost-wise the systems are probably about the same as well. See a nice long video of applications of maglev technology at: http://www.magnemotion.com/lsm-technology/index.cfm There are slight differences in the technologies for levitation and propulsion (I'm not an expert in this area) and vehicle design (I think 2 is the right number of seats), but I agree with eph that these two teams could benefit from each other's work and there's certainly a cross-validation of many of the core ideas.

Mark Kelly

Nov 13, 2011
09:11

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This has actually enhanced my previous understanding of the whole project and I am a close friend of Doug Malewicki. It is painful to see an idea which SUCH OBVIOUS benefits to society as a whole not to mention urban traffic specifically, that will have a huge uphill battle because of all the big industries that support old ineffective transportation, lobbying against this. New radical change has always come with great struggle- even Henry Ford had it. Good luck comrades! Jockdoc

Bob Bowles

Nov 20, 2011
09:02

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Thank you for this information. It will go a long way in educating my fellow citizens and local community in the concept of PRT. Well Done ! I live in the metro Vancouver area of British Columbia, Canada We have had Skytrain here still 1986

Christopher Fry

Nov 21, 2011
01:11

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Fry responds to comment #53 Vancouver's SkyTrain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTrain_(Vancouver) is a light rail system that is very different in architecture than SkyTran, despite the fact that their names differ by just one letter. Unlike other light rails systems, SkyTrain shares one important feature with SkyTran, it is driven by computer, not human. This helps cut costs and might even increase safety (A Boston Subway driver who was text messaging last year caused an accident!)

Glendon Smedley

Nov 21, 2011
10:09

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Regarding Personal Rapid Transit Awesome! I just like to say that I have worked in the tar sands before and I saw a use for the SkyTran which would help make workers Safer on the work site where the sand is changed into the bitumen product and oil for transport on the pipelines. One time when working the workers had to be evacuated from the site and the buses were not ready at a moments notice to evacuate in a prompt quick manner of evacuation like you would expect while waiting. Just one of these sites holds more than 10,000 workers. If a problem occured and proper safety was in place it would be an advantage to the companies in area to have a quick escape plan, especially if you had only One hour to evacuate before the hydrogen plant was to blow up. I would not want to see the SkyTran solution implemented after an explosion. Can you imagine the magnitude of the collateral damage if this explosion was to happen. Much better if SkyTran was installed now, also the benefits for quick transportation to the work site and to the nearby city of Fort McMurray would improve the city and surrounding area. The traffic jams they have up north on the narrow roads is a huge problem already. I would be interested in building the SkyTran System and look forward to future conversations.

Rob Laubacher

Nov 30, 2011
04:26

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Interesting article that features a pod concept but without maglev: http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/975 This article was mentioned in a piece on the future of roads in the October 9, 2011 edition of the Boston Globe. RL

Christopher Fry

Dec 6, 2011
05:54

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Re comment #56 Thanks Rob. There is just one comment at the bottom of the link you included. It was written by me in Sept, 2011. My comment is titled "A Better PRT" in which I say, in essence, SkyTran (the PRT of this Climate Colab Proposal) meets the goals of the authors of that paper better than the technology that the authors propose. One author is from the Harvard GSD. I've tried to reach him and he hasn't responded. He has also not responded to my comment in 3 months at the URL even though I asked the site administrator to let the authors know about the comment. The more you research PRT, the more systems you'll find. One can't hope to say definitively that X system is best as there's new ones that pop up that just might have a clever idea. My approach is not to attempt to compare SkyTran to all other systems. Its to compare SkyTran with what's physically and economically possible, come up with a theoretically sound design and see how SkyTran compares to that. This is the same strategy that the engineers who originally designed the system used. My "Why SkyTran" paper uses this approach for those of you curious as to the most relevent criteria and how SkyTran meets them. http://web.media.mit.edu/~cfry/skytran/why_skytran.html To be fair though, we might say that any system that we widely deploy ought to be at least as good as SkyTran, and if something better comes along, great. My guess is, though, that most improvements are likely to be things that we can swap out currently designed components and swap in the new technology. Say for example if we get a solar panel that's twice as efficient for the same cost, the solar panels only need to be 1 foot wide instead of 2 feet wide on the guideway. That would decrease wind loading on the guideway and perhaps enable a slightly cheaper design for the guideway and supporting poles. Not a big change and not imcompatible with an existing installation, but worth taking advantage of as better components become available. The meta-design of any such system should consider it as a "framework" to extend. Flexibility without too much cost increase helps "futureproof" any such complex system.

Dennis Peterson

Dec 8, 2011
01:40

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I came across a pretty in-depth analysis of a SkyTran-style system here, using a simulator and algorithms to optimize traffic: http://swiftprt.com/blog/2011/12/the-future-of-ground-based-transportation-systems/ The conclusion is fairly negative but the economic analysis doesn't assume any price on carbon. Also it could be interesting to brainstorm ways to address the various limitations he mentions.

Mike Plusch

Dec 11, 2011
11:43

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Re: Comment #58 on Aaron Patzer's analysis of a PRT system similar to SkyTran There were several major problems with Patzer's analysis that led to questionable conclusions and recommendations. First, he didn't consider the high cost of car ownership. Second, he underestimated the speed in turns and assumed a suboptimal design for track layout. Third, he overestimated the number of stations that are necessary. Forth, he didn't factor in any of the other associated benefits such as reducing congestion on roads, reducing automobile deaths and injuries, and reducing our dependence on oil. Patzer's analysis primarily compares only the cost of road/track infrastructure and not the entire cost from a user’s perspective. He did not factor in the high cost of car ownership when comparing roads to SkyTran, and therefore seriously underestimated the full cost of car travel. Patzer stated that 0.25 g-force lateral acceleration was the maximum allowed by government. This statement had no reference and it was also for LATERAL acceleration (side-to-side), not the in-line acceleration a person would experience for on and off ramps. A very fast sport car experiences 1g when going from 0 to 67mph (100 km/hr) in 3 seconds, and that might be too many g's. A 0.5 g-force is a reasonable level of acceleration that would take 6 seconds to go from 0 to 67 mph. Skytran pods tilt when going around turns to reduce lateral forces, a typical city intersection could support a 93 meter radius turn even if buildings were spaced 27 meters across the street. He assumes a much smaller radius turn. Furthermore, the high-speed guideway would be relatively straight and not need to take 90 degree turns. Turns are typically done when moving between a north-south guideway and a east-west guideway, and therefore pods would be off the main line when it slows down to take a turn. Patzer's analysis assumed sharp turns on the main guideway that would cause all pods to slow down. His assumptions increased the spacing of pods and reduced the average speed which significantly reduced the capacity of a guideway and therefore significantly increased its cost per rider mile. Patzer assumed that stations would need to be close enough to take only a 2-3 minute walk from home. I think that a 5 minute walk is a very reasonable assumption and that would enable stations to be 1 mile apart (so an average distance from home is 1/4 mile). There are also many solutions that can solve the last mile problem: small electric “Razor”-like scooters, bikes, and automated mini-cars to shuttle people to and from home. Reducing the number of stations by half significantly changes the economics. As population density decreases, the stations can be further apart. Finally, there are many factors left out of his cost comparison. For example, the reduction of automobile deaths and injuries, the cost of congestion, and the cost of carbon emissions to name a few. I had submitted a comment on his blog that pointing out some of his questionable assumptions and analysis, but he did not post it. He made a number of design assumptions that were suboptimal and he left out the major costs of cars. I believe there is reasonable evidence to come to the conclusion that his true objective from the start was to disparage a SkyTran-like design, and that he had no intention of starting a PRT company. At best, I found Patzer's analysis incomplete and misleading.

Dennis Peterson

Dec 12, 2011
07:10

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Thanks Mike! In my city (Charlotte) there are plenty of fairly straight roads that go at least halfway across town, plus a beltway. Assuming that those routes will be limited to city-block speeds definitely seems overly conservative. "Automated mini-cars" for the last mile sounds like a perfect application for Google's self-driving cars, and it'd be easy to make them electric, too. Drop off a passenger, pick up another (called by smartphone), recharge at the station.

Glendon Smedley

Dec 29, 2011
11:20

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Solve Housing Problems Allow people to live farther away and commute to work. Therefore people can take advantage of the lower rental rates in farther away communities. Not have to pay $2.85 per square foot in Vancouver, like the Housing which just recently came onto the market for $850/month for a 298 square foot studio suite. Kelowna has rental housing for $1.00 per square foot.

Glendon Smedley

Dec 29, 2011
11:56

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Just think that is a savings of over $6600.00 per year for one person The price of one transport pod.

Rich Bono

Feb 15, 2013
02:43

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I agree with your solution...but my solution is maybe a bit simpler..and focused upon the neighborhood. I have the notion that in our populated areas, we need two things.....a mass transit system of some type..electric rail, trolley, bus,...etc....which could be on the lines you describe....but could be in fact, any of a number of green technologies, designed to carry significant numbers of people thruought the regional grid of small town centers...but also stopping a locally. The way to get to the transit stops from the home.....other than the ideal of walking or biking....I think of a small electric vehicle, similar to a better designed golf cart...is all that's necessary. Individual homeowners...for I assume the suburban patterns will remain intact...would be responsible for charging these vehicles. I like the idea of individual transportation locally, and public transportation, taking one around one's region, and inter region.

Jim Berergi

Aug 11, 2014
07:49

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Your system requires a change in mode and style for most Americans. We like the convenience of our own vehicle. Freedom Transit is a Dual Mode PRT system that does not require you to give up you car. Please see the advantages and revenue of the Freedom Transit proposal. https://www.climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/1300202/planId/1307121

Christopher Fry

Aug 22, 2014
12:07

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To jberegi: Freedom has many dimensions. Traditional cars cost about $8K per year to support in the US. Because a dual mode car has extra functionality, it will probably cost even more. Plus you'd have to have both roads and a PRT guideway, boosting the overall expense further. So is the "freedom" of a car worth the "slavery" of having to work an extra month per year to support it? Some people would also say they'd prefer the freedom to text, sleep, or work on their laptop while being transported rather than having to drive. That frees up your time. Because dual mode uses more energy per passenger mile, it will pollute more, so your life is shorter, not just from the accidents but from the air pollution of using cars. That's a big restriction on freedom. The extra energy to run dual mode on the guideway and off means that energy has to come from somewhere. Even if its solar cells, they still have to be made. If that energy somehow comes from oil. coal or natural gas, that money will be used to suppress the freedom of the people where the fossil fuel comes from ... this just tends to happen in the US, the mid east, Africa, etc. By requiring roads and parking lots, that means we have less freedom in deciding how to allocate land. American's owning cars is unsustainable so that will change. The question is not whether Americans will give up their cars, its will it be soon enough to prevent a larger collapse? I understand older Americans are emotionally attached to their cars. But that emotional attachment doesn't transcend death. Teenagers today are less attached to a car than their phone so hopefully the car won't completely do us in. Yes cars were useful for 100 years. But to prosper now, we need to move to a better transportation infrastructure. I admit that dual mode is superficially attractive and thus its easy to get proponents for it. Perhaps our biggest difficulty is in deep reasoning about making complex choices such as transportation infrastructure.

Grace Adams

May 28, 2015
03:40

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I like it. It promises to be more efficient and cheaper than most other means of transportation once it is up and running. With no more than 1 mile to walk to get to a station, I would walk. Some with mobility problems would need help getting up and/or down the stairs, and/or would need at least an adult tricycle to get between home and station. I hope the stations each have good hand rails around them to keep anyone from falling off.