Podcars

SystemsConsciousness wrote:If the train stations had vegetable markets as well, the commuters could be dropped off at the train in the morning (car pool or spouse) and then when coming back from work pick up fresh food for dinner. The key is making transit part of the culture and making it preferable, logistically to the automobile. sc

Having the train station right in a shopping mall would make this very convenient. Two examples where this could have happened but didn't are Pittsburgh (South Hills Village) and Baltimore (outer end of the rapid transit line). Seems like the mall owners didn't want a "crime element" migrating out from the "city".

Plus, commuters inundating the mall parking lot would make things difficult for people on shopping-only trips.

Companies need to take the initiative and provide shuttles to and from transit stations. Whether it is vans or a horizontal elevator or podcars doesn't matter. I still cannot figure out how to overcome the capacity limitations of podcars on circular routes serving several suburban companies or many downtown stops. There would still be sections of track where pod traffic jams would be happening daily.

SystemsConsciousness wrote:I think podcars are a symptom of a sick culture.

The problem is that people aren't willing to be near each other, so cars become preferable. This is the sickness that manifests itself in divisions throughout society. This problem needs to be fixed, then lightrail and more practical means of transport become more viable.

This being said, I still wonder if this type of technology could be useful for NJ's corporate parks.

I dont consider that a sickness..
and IMO its not a "problem" that needs to be "fixed"..

I dont WANT to live close to other people!
I want to live as far away from other people as possible!
because "people" are rude, obnoxious, annoying and loud..
thats the real problem that causes people to spread way out, far away from each other..
and that problem can NEVER be fixed..

I choose to live as far away from other people as possible..
if that means a longer commute to work for me, and a car is my only option..then thats a choice I get to make.

This is America..we dont tell people where they have to live.

Scot

In Ithaca, NY, a college town that is the home of Cornell University and Ithaca College, there was a conference on podcars on September 14-16 of this year, but it was hard to find coverage of it.

A local newspaper, the Ithaca Journal, had an article about it, Ithaca to host 2nd podcar conference next week, but no followup.

Another one, the Cornell Daily Sun, did have such an article, Rep. Hinchey Visits C.U. For Podcar Convention, complete with a lot of controversy about it in its comments.

The New York Times also had one in Ithaca, NY, Wants to Be America's 1st Podcar City. It mentioned this criticism:

'It is operationally and economically unfeasible,'' said Vukan Vuchic, a professor of transportation and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania who has written several books on urban transportation.

''In the city, if you have that much demand, you could build these guideways and afford the millions it would take, but you wouldn't have capacity. In the suburbs, you would have capacity, but the demand would be so thin you couldn't possibly pay for those guideways, elevated stations, control systems and everything else,'' Vuchic said.

It also mentioned a claimed capital cost of $25m to $40m / mile.

Someone also captured a TV-news broadcast about it in this YouTube clip, complete with a claimed capital cost of $5m to $20m / mile.

The Conference announcement now includes a report on it, which is mostly a photo album with short blurbs about what went on in the conference.

Toward the bottom of their page on Ithaca itself and getting there, is a map of the system proposed for Ithaca. It covered downtown Ithaca and Cornell University with lines southeastward to Ithaca College and northwestward to Tompkins County Community Hospital. It had about 4 stations per mile, and fewer in some outlying areas. Several outlying stations had a prominent "P", presumably meaning park-and-ride lots. With the help of Google Maps and a distance-estimator map tool, I estimated that the proposed system will have about 20 route miles.

There was no mention of possible lines northward to Ithaca's airport, Langmuir Lab, or Pyramid Mall, which are north of the freeway part of Rte. 13.

Connect Ithaca was supposed to have more info, but it's "under construction".

Ithaca's existing transit system is the TCAT bus system, a Greyhound station at the west edge of its downtown area, and a north-south railroad line from Sayre to an electric power plant to the north. Ithaca has an abandoned line northeastward to Cortland that is now a trail.

The RUF makes more sense than a podcar. Every "stop" on a RUF is shaped like a 2km diameter bubble, because the RUF leaves the system and continues onwards. Door to door, one seat, just like a car. Only you don't have to drive it on the guideway. The system forms cars into a train. Walking is great, I love to walk. But not everyone CAN walk, and not everyone WANTS to walk when it's -20 degrees with a -50 degree windchill.

A RUF is essentially a narrow-gauge railway with self-powered cars that form ad-hoc trains that don't need coupling because they're driven at the same speed with only a couple of inches between each other. Podcars are just cars that can only ride on custom roads.

RUF vehicles look like monorail hy-rail or road-rail vehicles. Wikipedia has some articles on road-rail vehicles and dual-mode transit, but existing ones have always been used on standard bi-rail railroad tracks. The most successful such vehicles have been inspection and maintenance ones, because they can easily enter and leave the tracks from nearby flat roads, thus not needing to be routed by dispatchers. There have been some efforts to develop road-rail buses and road-rail truck-locomotives, but none have been very successful.

Monorails can be very snazzy-looking, but they have had only a limited degree of success. Monorail trains have not been able to travel very fast, and monorail switches are much more clumsy than bi-rail ones.

There is also the question of turning radius, which can be very serious for a monorail-slot vehicle like the proposed RUF vehicles. For a vehicle with length l and a track with radius of curvature R, the extra slot width required is

w = R - sqrt(R^2 - (l/2)^2) ~ l^2/(8*R) = k*l^2/8

where the curvature k = 1/R.

Flat-road cars are usually about 15 ft / 5 m long, and city buses are usually about 40 ft long / 12 m long. For an extra slot width of 1 ft, the minimum track radius becomes 30 ft for cars and 200 ft for buses. This would make it hard for such vehicles to make very tight turns in many urban environments, something which both flat-road and rail vehicles can do.

lpetrich wrote:RUF vehicles look like monorail hy-rail or road-rail vehicles.

Sort-of. It doesn't use flanged wheels, but instead uses the center rail for steering and power take-off.

Monorail trains have not been able to travel very fast, and monorail switches are much more clumsy than bi-rail ones.

The RUF is designed for 140km/hr travel, and the switching is accomplished by a short section of road surface on which the RUF cars turn onto a different rail. No moving parts. Much less clumsy than bi-rail ones.

There is also the question of turning radius, which can be very serious for a monorail-slot vehicle like the proposed RUF vehicles.

The minimum RUF curve radius is 26 meters. The maxi RUF length is 6m. The extra slot width needed for the longest vehicle proposed is 6"

So a RUF vehicle would be like a road-rail version of the Bombardier CX-100 and similar vehicles? Not from the pictures I've seen at RUF's site, where the center rail extends about 3 ft / 1 m up into the vehicle.

The CX-100 vehicle has rubber tires and a low central rail for steering and power supply. It also has switches in that center rail. I don't see how RUF would feasibly do without center-rail switches for selecting which of diverging tracks. Will it require manual steering? And if automatic, what sort? Switches are an already-existing technology for automatic steering.

lpetrich wrote:Downtown Ithaca is in the flatland at the southern end of Cayuga Lake, but Ithaca's two colleges are up some steep hills from it, Cornell University to the east and Ithaca College to the northeast. Hills as steep as some of San Francisco's hills.

So to connect downtown Ithaca, Cornell University, and Ithaca College, those podcars would have to be cable cars.

What if they used a hybrid system that would be self powered, but would also be able to ride a cable up a hill like the San Fransisco system. With this system, the cars would run up to a point where a mechanized cable grip system on the car would grip a cable to run it up or down the hill. The grip system could use the same technology as the detachable chairlift/gondola systems developed by the skiing industry. The system could even use a hydraulic locking system to allow the cars to stop at stations on the steep grade.

For the run downhill, the cars could also grip the cable, using the weight of "upbound" cars to counterbalance the load, but could also use a regenerative braking system when more cars are traveling in one direction than the other.

lpetrich wrote:And if automatic, what sort?

There is apparently an existing technology for a car to follow an AC electromagnetic field being emitted from a cable embedded in concrete. The car would select which path to follow by detecting its frequency of the field it's following, and automatically steer itself into the destination guideway. That's also how the streetside to guideway transition works. The car senses the AC field and steers onto the guideway. Once on the guideway, the car reads data encoded as holes in the center rail. This data tells the car where it is.

So the RUF cars will also have to have automatic steering. And when they reach a switch, they will have to slow down so that they can safely reacquire the rail after crossing it. Slowing down for every switch will be very awkward.

Many railroad switches can be crossed without much slowing down, at least when taking their straight paths. In fact, switches for high-speed railroad lines are sometimes designed with very low curvature, so that they can crossed at close to full speed on their curved paths, even if that makes those switches very long.

Rail switches for RUF would make possible crossing switches without significantly slowing down, so it would be a good idea to include them.

Checking on the "Beamways" podcar pages, I found this list of possible systems, which included one for Ithaca. It is less dense in downtown Ithaca and in Cornell University, and it lacks a northwestward line, but it has more lines to the south and to the north, including Pyramid Mall and Ithaca's airport.

The Beamways system uses overhead beams with the vehicles hanging from them, in ski-lift fashion. By comparison, another proposed system, the Vectus system, uses vehicles on top of beams, in elevated-train fashion.

I tried out their system-layout editor, BeamEd. It's Windows-only, so I ran it in VMWare Fusion. You need to import a map for it as an image file and give BeamEd the scale of that map; BeamEd doesn't access any databases of maps. You then point-and-click to set up stations and connecting lines, though getting a network of connected lines could be rather tricky. Selecting "Simulate" will then make BeamEd estimate the typical performance of the system, and it will also warn of lines that do not go to stations or to junctions iwth other lines.