WC Archive

The problem is most places its cheaper to buy everyone a cadilac and the gas to drive it then it is to put in and run a rail line. The future realy is in elevated microlight single pod tracks. Very light they can be set up cheaply and little itty bitty people pods can putter from off the road right onto the track and back again wich means alot more ground can be covered from one line further saving money. Not to mention you never need worry about a mass transit strike as your the driver;/

Do you have any resources / links about those? Seems to me it would be perfect for the industrial park I work in: the density is so low, most buses run at below 10% capacity during non-peak hours.

No but I think you might find it searching for personal rapid transit or some such combo of search words. I ferget where I read it I know they were doing a pilot program somewhere but I never heard much more on it.

Ironically, one of the biggest problems when the light rail line opened was the lack of parking space at several of the rail terminals. In other words, the commuters haven't yet weaned themselves of the iron horse. Denver remains a car (not "cow") town, and even to get to the light rail system, you need a car. The city is big, sprawling, with the main roads full of traffic congestion and parking problems. I'm uncertain whether the light rail system will be able to keep up with the influx of new citizens the article mentions. Still, I'm all for (and voted for) the legislation mentioned.

Yup thats a big problem specialy in hot or very cold climes as few people will walk more then 500 feet to a mass transit site and from the end of that mass transit to thier work.

What jumps out at me is "sales tax". Denver's mass-transit success, if a fact, is due to this good structure: transit workers have a stake in things' being sold, and ease of getting people to where they can buy them is helpful. So although making personal mobility easy isn't easy, transit workers have a stake in trying.

A kind of bad structure that frequently occurs is when mass transit is funded from motor fuel sales, so that transit workers have a stake in -- and this is always easier anyway -- making use of their service awkward or unpleasant.

--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan
boron: fireproof fuel, real-car range, no emissions

Ruf Ruf! (Dual Mode Transport System)
http://www.ruf.dk/

"The problem is most places its cheaper to buy everyone a cadilac and the gas to drive it then it is to put in and run a rail line."

The above claim has been well and truly debunked (see www.planetizen.com). It also ignores the fact that there is no shortage of vehicles, but a shortage of roads, parking spaces, clean air to breathe (at least in Denver). Buying Cadillacs fixes none of these problems (just more Cadillacs sitting in the traffic jam which is now longer by the number of new Cadillacs).
What wintermane is proposing is the old PRT boondoggle (Personal Rapid Transit). Since PRT has never been built anywhere proponents are free to claim anything the want to without fear of opposing evidence.
VTPI has good evidence that the total system cost of rail is much lower than automobile system cost. For a fair comparision, personal and private investments of both systems must be compared. Could rail transit really cost as much per capita as the ~$000 per year that a US car costs the owner (without considering the trillion dollar infrastructure investments that autos require)?
As a volunteer who worked hard to pass Fastracks I know that the integrated system includes bus feeders to rail trunk lines, so that few users would have walk 500 feet. Bikes can also expand transit's tripshed and the local transit authority (RTD) uses bike racks on buses and safe sheltered bike parking to take advantages of the bike's extended range.

What wintermane is proposing is the old PRT boondoggle (Personal Rapid Transit). Since PRT has never been built anywhere proponents are free to claim anything the want to without fear of opposing evidence.

A pretty funny comment on a website whose main purpose is to showcase the interface of new technologies and improvement of the environment.

Flashback 100 years: Since air travel has never been done anywhere, proponents are free to claim anything they want to without fear of opposing evidence.

You apparently never travel via airports, since many of them use variations of PRT designs. I also believe a PRT system has been in use for at least 20 years or more at West Virginia University - imagine what we might be able to do with modern technology.

Or, we can just keep looking back to 19th Century technology overlays on a postmodern physical infrastructure (oh, and modern costs, too).

Actauly it has been proven time and time again when mass transit projects were shot down simply because there was no way to fund them. The problem is mass transit needs mass people going to a mass job zone and too few people are willing to mass together to make that economicaly workable for more then a small niche market.

The rest of us have to be serviced by other systems that can deal with a spread out populace that does indeed not want to live 20000 per square kilometer and who in fact dont work at a giant office building that uses regular 9-5 workshifts and so on and so forth.

If either system worked all the time the world would be covered in that system but as the world in fact isnt covered in either system its bloody obvious to even a 6 year old neither system is nervana. We need and depend on both bepending on the makup of the population and the makeup of the city involved.

As for personal rapid transit the main beenie from it is you can combine the traits of a rail line and a small personal car and get the BEST of both systems. Its cheaper per mile then either road or rail and it doesnt have any of the problems with striking workers lack of time options or lack or desitination options or even the very bloody obvious to everyone except mass trsansit proponents no need to ever share a ride with a freaking CREEP!

That last fact is why all mass transit in the end will fail.. To many creeps and thier numbers are growing.

Maybe it's true. Maybe mass transit is a nineteenth century solution to a twenty-first century problem. Assuming zoning laws change to put mini-factories (And other variations of MIT's personal fabricator idea.) within walking distance of most neighborhoods and telecommuting sends all the cubicle jobs home again, maybe that will take a lot of pressure off.

But there are problems with this. This only works if I live in a dense urban area with decent sidewalks and my job is a cubicle job. The suburbs are simply not designed to have anything major within walking distance, a school if you're lucky. (I've seen a lot parents in the suburbs drive their kids to school.)

Seems to me if we are going to continue to build suburbs, and if there continues to be jobs were you have to leave the suburbs to be someplace far away, the highways will continue to be congested. Because this is case, I think some form of mass transit will necessary.

But I think a better solution would be stop building suburbs the way we currently do. Home and work must be brought closer together. We must remove as many excuses as possible for people to climb into a box and go someplace. Think of the reduction in heart trouble and back pain, never mind the benefit to our global climate, if people found it convenient and fun to start walking again!

In the end alot of people simply wont travel anymore in 50 years.

Have a job at an office? You will telecomute into an android shell in the office.

Have a job at a bank? Same deal.

Have a job at a factory? Telecomute into a worker bot shell.

Why would companies pay for all that? Simple health care costs and lower needed wages. If your not commuting your not consuming fuel if your not at work personaly your not exposed to work related accidents. No need to worry a spill of chemical x will cause a billion dollar medical bill and 10 billion in personal claims... androids dont sue over a lost leg. Andriods dont get alergies.

If your using telepresense andriods you can put your office in the middle of nowhere and if an office is closed you dont have to fire and retrain...

And of course if your not there you cant steal office supplies;/

"You apparently never travel via airports, since many of them use variations of PRT designs."

Actually, I do travel via airports more than I would like and I have never seen a PRT design.Note the initial commenter described "little itty bitty people pods can putter from off the road right onto the track and back again". What airport on this planet has a system like that?

Most airport transport systems are some form of very light rail, but none that I have seen are dual mode. There is plenty of room to use advanced technologies to make rail vehicles lighter, cheaper, and more efficient. As with most engineering design, dual-mode (off and on rail) vehicles cannot be simultaneously optimized for both modes, which is why they are rare and expensive.

What concerns me is "The perfect as the enemy of the good" where a hypothetical nonexistent system is used to disparage a real functioning alternative (I have travelled some miles on RTD's bus and rail network).

Advocacy of PRT is fine as long as the "pie-in-the-sky" is not used to trap us in the same old automobile hell indefinitely.

I totally agree with Mr Farlops that urban design is hugely important relative to travel demand and mode choice. Walking really is the healthiest and most environmentally sound way to travel. Rather than some creepy teleprescense future where we all degenerate to immobile blobs, I hope we will eventually be strolling down flower-strewn pathways in carfree cities. See www.carfree.com

Note the initial commenter described "little itty bitty people pods can putter from off the road right onto the track and back again". What airport on this planet has a system like that?

None that I know of, but "PRT" isn't just one design, but rather a design approach.

Actually, I do travel via airports more than I would like and I have never seen a PRT design.

Well, then you're splitting hairs, as many airports use automated people movers. The only difference between those systems and PRT is the carrying capacity of the vehicles. Otherwise, it's the same idea.

Most airport transport systems are some form of very light rail

No, light rail systems have drivers.

What concerns me is "The perfect as the enemy of the good" where a hypothetical nonexistent system is used to disparage a real functioning alternative (I have travelled some miles on RTD's bus and rail network).

Advocacy of PRT is fine as long as the "pie-in-the-sky" is not used to trap us in the same old automobile hell indefinitely.

Well, there we are - the standard conspiracy argument, which is that right-wing political and auto-dependent economic interests use PRT as a foil against other forms of public transportation as part of a plan to keep us dependent on automobiles. This isn't an argument about the technical benefits or drawbacks of a PRT systems, especially in the world we live in (ie, not a 19th century factory economy without automobiles). Rather, it is a political argument which may have some basis, but ironically is a manifestation of the "perfect is the enemy of the good" mentality you yourself are decrying.

I'd love to see how one can propose light rail, buses, and subways combining to supplant the "automobile hell" by themselves. How exactly is that going to work? Are we going to depopulate the suburbs? How about rural areas?

Or how many vehicles and routes are we going to need? How are people going to get away on weekend trips? Via light rail? Buses?

And how much is this all going to cost?

And what are the aesthetic consequences of relying on all these massive vehicles and their infrastuctural requirements?

Some form of distributed, driverless, small vehicle system is clearly superior to what we have now, and certainly is superior to even the best mass transit system that anyone can imagine. Just because people may advocate PRT systems for the wrong reasons, or certain manifestations of the design principles are poor, doesn't mean that PRT is a "boondoggle", as you characterized it.

The cost overruns alone on just Seattle's light rail project probably easily exceed all dollars ever spent on PRT - so much that they needed to revamp the design that voters originally authorized. I won't even mention the bus tunnel.

It would be nice to keep some context on any discussion of this.

I didn't mean to be entirely dismissive of PRT simply because I'm not entirely clear on what the system is composed of.

I think we can all agree that overdependence on any one system or solution will not solve traffic congestion. Traffic congestion is really an abstract problem that arises in many other areas, the Internet itself for example, aside from cars and roads. It can only be reduced by attacking it from many fronts, some of them unexpected.

I also think the conspiracy idea is counterproductive. It's not that PRT is being raised as an excuse to ignore the work already being done on light rail. It's not that money spent on light rail means that we must ignore PRT entirely.

The truth is government money is always short and various ideas must fight for a piece of the pie. In this case usually with the futuristic ideas (Space elevators, PRT, hydrogen fuel cells, etc.) getting short shrift. That's just pragmatism. Officials, politicians and, especially, voters tend to go with something they already see and know something about (Light rail, HOV lanes, repairs to the space shuttle, etc.).

PRT may be a part of the solution but, it has to clear a hurdle. Someone needs to build one in city and see how it works. At that point the existence proof is settled. Until that point most officials will be hesitent to take the risk.

Also I didn't want to entirely dismiss telepresence either. Just wanted to make that clear that I think that will play a part in congestion reduction too.

Wikipedia has a very good overview of PRT at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit

While the article lists many possible advantages, the list of cost over-runs, technical failures, and cancellations of system construction attempts would caution most advocates.

As far as "I'd love to see how one can propose light rail, buses, and subways combining to supplant the "automobile hell" by themselves. How exactly is that going to work? Are we going to depopulate the suburbs? How about rural areas?"

Plenty of people, including many friends and relatives of mine, live without cars in European cities today. So if you want to know how "exactly is that going to work" you should go to the carfree zones in many Euro cities (Amsterdam 1 mile square, Venice whole city, Groningen, Frieburg, almost every mid-size French town has a carfree or car-lite zone). My impression is that it works well.

I do not believe in any conspiracy about PRT but simply noted that PRT was mentioned in the first commment disparaging Denver's Light Rail and proposing PRT as an alternative, so the "choice" between PRT and light rail was posed by the first comment and not some supposed conspiracy.

Not being so much of a misanthrope, I find the shared humanity on mass transit interesting and entertaining rather than frightening or annoying. If you start from the assumption that transportation must provide the same level of individualism and social alienation as the US car-based system, then probably you have to end up with something like PRT. Myself, I like my bus driver and I like the fellow passengers and the prospect of riding to work in my own solitary little moving cubicle does not sound appealing at all. No system of transit could compare with the social impacts of the current auto based system. For proof, compare the experience of walking down a street in Paris with walking down a street in LA. I often walk Parisian streets for the pure pleasure of walking (they have a word for that, flaneur), which not many people in their right mind would do in much of LA.

"Some form of distributed, driverless, small vehicle system is clearly superior to what we have now, and certainly is superior to even the best mass transit system that anyone can imagine."

It is not "clearly superior" or "certainly superior" to me. Moving 500 or 1000 people in one Light Rail or metro train seems clearly more efficient in space and resources than moving them in 100 trips of smaller separate vehicles. Moving people underground seems much more respectful of the urban environment than blotting out the sun with a dense web of overhead guideways and vehicles.

Ah, Tom - still wedded to specific design manifestations versus design principles.

"Moving people underground seems much more respectful of the urban environment than blotting out the sun with a dense web of overhead guideways and vehicles."

So I guess you don't really like the transit systems in New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Seattle, and the Bay Area, right? All of those places elevate some of their trains. Elevation of a PRT system does not mean that they *have* to be elevated -- only that people who have pursued designs of specific PRT systems have chosen to elevate them. Personally, I agree with you - elevation is aesthetically unpleasing.

However, compared to heavy rail, any elevated PRT system is going to have far less physical and visual impact. And if you want to go underground (my preferred option), there is *far* less cost, since it would be easy to "cut and cover" as opposed to tunneling, which is usually what's required of larger, so-called "light" rail systems.

Of course, the normal design choice for light rail is to travel at surface grade, which doesn't solve part of the aesthetic problem, and it also introduces dangers of collision and congestion effects since it's sharing the same horizontal plane with other modes.

"Not being so much of a misanthrope, I find the shared humanity on mass transit interesting and entertaining rather than frightening or annoying. If you start from the assumption that transportation must provide the same level of individualism and social alienation as the US car-based system, then probably you have to end up with something like PRT. Myself, I like my bus driver and I like the fellow passengers and the prospect of riding to work in my own solitary little moving cubicle does not sound appealing at all."

This is what I suspected - the "noble, connected community in the publis" argument. It would be a great argument if in fact riding on a bus were actually a pleasant experience. Most people who think it's a pleasant experience tend to either ride express routes during rush hours in the United States, or ride public transit in Europe or parts of Asia, where there isn't as much class segregation as we have in the U.S. with respect to mode choice. The reality is that pretty much everyone on an average bus fantasizes about not being on that bus. Come to St. Paul some time and we'll go for a ride together on the route from my house to downtown and you can listen in on the conversations, if you want proof.

"For proof, compare the experience of walking down a street in Paris with walking down a street in LA. I often walk Parisian streets for the pure pleasure of walking (they have a word for that, flaneur), which not many people in their right mind would do in much of LA."

Not having been to Paris myself, I can't directly compare the two, though from all the video footage I've seen of the city, there seems to be a substantial amount of automobile traffic. If it's such a paradise, why are so many enlightened Parisians riding around in their alienated cubicles?

As for LA, it's a pretty big city, so I think your characterization is a bit lacking and cliche. Go towards the beach areas like Venice to Santa Monica, and it's very pedestrian friendly -- not just along the beach, but in downtown Santa Monica. Hollywood Boulevard, while a bit seedy in places, can be good for a walk, as can downtown Beverly Hills and Pasadena. In LA downtown, things are a lot better for pedestrians than they were 10-15 years ago - mostly because there's a lot more business and residential activity.

Couple years ago I walked from Hollywood to Venice, and though there were certain stretches (particularly intersections in Century City and near the freeway underpass), I wouldn't say it was markedly different than most American cities, or even cities in Japan or other places in Asia. It all depends on whether you're walking near arterials and highways, or you're sticking to more local streets as well as "bushwhacking" through parks etc.

"Moving 500 or 1000 people in one Light Rail or metro train seems clearly more efficient in space and resources than moving them in 100 trips of smaller separate vehicles."

This would be the "technically possible efficiency" argument often applied to public transit. The fact that, at capacity, a specific mass transit vehicle may have high fuel and space efficiency, the fact is, especially in the United States, the average ridership on any given vehicle is actually quite low -- about 9 passengers for an average bus with a capacity for 40 or more riders (using US standards for capacity, which are low).

Again, I ask, how exactly are we going to get everyone funneled on to this mass transit you're imagining? Say I live 30 miles outside of the city center. What kind of densities are there? How can 500-1000 people get on a specific train, and still run the trains frequently and quickly? How exactly will that work in places like Houston, Albuquerque, Phoenix, etc? Or really just about anywhere?

Also, I hope you realize that an average "light" rail train can hold up to maybe 150 people, so 1,000 people would need a train at least 7 cars long.

So, why do you enjoy walking down Parisian streets by yourself? Shouldn't you be walking together on a fixed route on a schedule with 1,000 other of your fellow citizens? I thought that was the ideal experience, instead of this individualized transport that you're selfishly engaging in. [/sarcasm]

I'm curious also as to why you're avoiding discussing how exactly "light" rail and other forms of mass transit are going to lead to a sustainable solution. I'm also curious as to why you keep bringing up "boondoggles" and "cost overruns" with all these pissant little PRT test systems, yet fail to address the enormity of wasteful spending which has gone in to countless transportation projects -- both for autos and transit -- over the years. I seriously doubt if the sum total of PRT expenditures to this point even approaches a rounding error of cost overruns and waste of mass transit projects.

PRT, as a design approach, has one major advantage over both transit and cars -- the lack of a driver. For transit, driver labor is a major cost component, and that's why the vehicles tend to be as big as they are -- amortizing that cost. For cars, it represents an enormous social cost in time wasted guiding a vehicle from A to B, not to mention the danger and stress involved.

Public transportation has had over 100 years to make its mark in this country, and yet it never gets above 3% of trips (and that includes commercial air flights). And as population sprawls ever outwards, and we keep moving away from fixed schedules and outer-to-inner trip needs towards a far more diverse trip pattern, how exactly is a design principle that's optimal for ferrying factory workers from their housing to a centralized factory in the urban core going to be a design solution at this point in time?

Misanthrope? Nope just dont have the luxury of living where the insane dont ride mass transit. Nothing makes you buy a car faster then having a 10 way conversation with only 2 other people.... half of whom want to smell your hair.

Also as I said unless you have very dense populations and job sites your never going to get 500-1000 people on a train all the time throughout the day. Mass transit is for masses. Where there are no masses you cant mass transit now can you? Thats where people pods take over. And as the fact is most of the world is outside the means of mass transit to cost effectively and fuel effectively provide service for we need a much smaller lighter more fuel frugal means of moving people about to fill far more of the world.

A friend, Bruce Hammond went to Europe in 1995 to study small-to-medium sized cities that had successfully introduced mass transit. What he found was interesting: it's not enough to build the light rail or the bike paths alongside the roads for private cars. Successful cities also made things harder for cars. In other words, don't add a bike lane - take a car lane and convert it to a bike lane. Don't just add light rail - banish cars from the central city or raise parking fees to very high prices.

Oh, I can imagine the howls of protest in the U.S. - but that, objectively, is the strategy that works - at least in Europe. But here, we dislike our fellow travelers quite a bit more than there. A cultural problem, not a technical one, but real nonetheless. Do we acquiesce and keep wasting the oil, or should we learn to get along better? The economic argument is specious, since it assumes that mass transit needs a subsidy, but roads and bridges don't. The typical Congressional highway appropriations bill gives the lie to that.

The reason of course being that everyone who hated the buggers that did that in europe moved to america when they did it;/

This discussion started with Denver's positive experience with the FasTracks transportation initiative. I would certainly agree that light rail is not a panacea, appropriate in all cases.
However, FasTracks builds a rail skeleton only in those heavy traffic routes where "mass" transit is appropriate. One reason that FasTracks was successful was that the recently completed Southwest line carried many more passengers than projected.
Acknowledging that transit cannot fix all problems does not mean that there aren't many places in the US and elswhere which would greatly benefit from better transit systems.

As I said at the start in MOST not all but most places on this earth putting in a well traveled bus route or a well serviced rail line is a massive waste of energy. Thats where boondoggle light rail trips up it expands beyond the point its truely better then cars in many places and into the point of insanity in some.

You dont put a 6 lane freeway everywhere you also dont put a rail line everywhere. The low intesity tranport needs are what roads are for.

All of above comments indicate an understanding that the current system of sprawl and mobility is not sustainable, and a willingness to do something about it. That's great, and we should all share virtual cyberspace high fives for that.
The question is not simply one of "how do we keep traveling the ridiculous distances we now travel", but how do we transform our cities (where about 90% of Americans live) into spaces that don't need to spend a lot of energy and resources on moving around?
The answer is a combination of land use, housing and job parity, and then finally, modes of tranport. Walkable cities require higher average densities, mixed uses, and some (though not necessarily complete) parity of housing values and job opportunities (and secondarily some parity of amenities or whatever you want to call quality of life aspects). There is a lot of work being done on this right now all around the world, and most of it is being done on a local level, with very little initiative coming from national or even state/provincial governments.
For starters, check out the websites (and links at) www.urbanecology.org, www.urbanecology.org.au (australia), www.smartgrowth.org, www.ecosyn.us. There are some good European and Asian web resources too but unfortunately I haven't found any in english. If your Spanish is pretty good also check out www.ecocities.org. If you know Mandarin do a search on city of Taipei (Taiwan) green city program.

jaji