Individual Maglev/Monorail System (PRT)

[Jason Saunders]

The American company UniModal Transport Solutions developed a concept for a very high-capacity and high-speed Personal Rapid Transport (PRT) network. Pictures and information of the sky transportation vehicle are shown.

[Dan Wentzel]

Call me a PRT-skeptic, but...

Don't we already have a personal rapid transport system? It's called an "automobile". And, the overuse of the "automobile" is causing long-term economic and environmental side effect.

God forbid someone should have to share a vehicle with someone else.

The PRT systems I've seen seem like someone's desperate attempt to preserve the "car culture" through public transit.

[Tony Fernandez]

Those look unbearably cramped, and it must have a simply minuscule capacity.

[joequality]

Too many rails. Once cars get smart, fully automated, and eco-friendly like in Minority Report, then it will be a practical PRT

[Mac]

Imagine of one of those cars gets stuck... then you would think traffic is bad...

[nickv]

Technology Pipedreamers Hype + PRT

New transportation technologies... As I grew up over the past several years, I saw (and continue to see) the dawning of new technology for our public transit system. We have Metrolink trains, CNG buses, and electrified LRT & subway trains, which were good investments; we have monorail which has had a wide history of troubles and problems; we have BRT which, although never became trains on rubber wheels, actually became a popular option for transit riders over local bus travel, and then there's PRT on a maglev rail line known as SkyTran.

And all I can say about this is... Well... I doubt this system of mass transit will work for the good of the community. This system of transit promotes solo commuting in a different kind of a car. Imagine trying to place something like this along Wilshire Bl or the SR 91 corridor... If you're looking for a new form of both pedestrian and vehicle traffic gridlock in the years to come, then welcome to PRT maglev. So what's wrong with PRT maglev? Let's go ahead and see.




When a commuter boards this PRT vehicle at a station, he/she presses a destination station button and the car travels non-stop to that station; this concept is similar to an express elevator, except only 1-2 people can ride per car. Between the two stations, the car can travel at high speeds of 150 MPH. The designer claims that such a system costs 10 times less than LRT; therefore the system can be built all throughout SoCal at the same cost as 50 miles of LRT. The entire system would be elevated with two points per station: a discharge point and a pick-up point. Station stops would be placed every 1/4 mile where a side track would divert from the main line to serve the station. This doesn't sound that bad of an idea at first, but this project does suffer from some basic flaws.

The biggest problem of this project is that it runs totally counter to the principles of ridesharing, and therefore could cause massive pedestrian gridlock at several orgin stations during rush hour. You heard that right; pedestrian gridlock. No transitway can hold an infinite number of cars; that's also true for PRT. Take for example a high demand transportation corridor like the SR 91 corridor through Santa Ana Canyon. The number of PRT cars that can travel along the guideway is finite. But let's suppose at a typical station, the interval between cars is 20 seconds. If 15 people show up at a station at the same time, and each person took 20 seconds to board a car (3 seconds for the car to pull up, 2 seconds for the door to open, 10 seconds to board & push the destination button, 2 seconds for the door to close, 3 seconds for the car to leave), the last person in line would have waited over 5 minutes to board his car. Imagine if the line had 40 people waiting. Also, when a passenger "takes too long" to board a car, I can envision quite a bit of this during a PRT ride:

Playful spooks have interrupted our tour. Please remain seated in your doom buggy. We will proceed in just a moment.

Imagine something like that on Wilshire Bl. Let's not forget that if one car breaks down on the main line, the entire system could be in gridlock until the car is fixed, or somehow towed to a side track.

Another problem is the frequency of stations and the complexity of maglev switches. At each station, a side track diverts from the main line to board and discharge passengers. The main line bypasses the station. The designer claims that the system can have stops at every city block. The problem is that maglev switches are so complex, we're talking big time maintenance costs for each station. Plus with the frequecy of cars using the line, the switches will have about 1 second to switch should a car traveling at 150 MPH need to discharge its passenger. If the car slows down on the main line, that would create gridlock for the for the other cars since the cars are traveling so close to each other. The side tracks would also need to be long enough so that the cars can accelerate and slow down properly. A car traveling at 35 MPH entering the 150 MPH main line would cause trouble.

Other issues are maintenance and access for the handicap. Can replacement parts be purchased, or do they have to be custom manufactured? How much will it cost to maintain the maglev corridor and its switches? Are elevators at each station in the budget? Can somebody in a wheelchair use the system? Are emergency walkways in the budget?

So there you have it... PRT Maglev. The designers had some creative ideas which might benefit certain groups of people, but for everyday commuting, traveling, shopping, and errand running, let's advocate something that acutally works in other major cities... the train.

[James Fujita]

you're not going to see a single "yes" vote on this, at least not on this message board.

people who design systems like this just don't get it; or else they're hoping that our government just doesn't get it.

yeah, let's waste our scarce transportation dollars on a system that combines the worst elements of single-passenger automobile and fixed-guideway transit commuting.

[bobdavis]

Another "Gadgetbahn" system that looks "cool" on the cover of Popular Science, but has no place in the real world.

[wad]

Did anybody ever read "You can't spell monorail without M-O-R-O-N" on MetroRiderLA?

It points out the fundamental flaw of gadgetbahn proponents: their mode does not demonstrate any financial or engineering improvement over existing technologies.

Monorail has the "It's not TV, it's HBO" thinking. What do you need to watch HBO? A TV! Monorail proponents often show a disdain for public transportation -- rail and buses -- and make the mutually exclusive claims that monorail is nothing that public transportation can offer yet similarly do better than existing systems.

PRT proponents have a similar disdain for public transportation, yet their solution is to "combine the best of both worlds of cars and public transportation". Yet, take the frame off the "best of both worlds" and you're also getting the worst of both worlds: the inherent inefficiency of individual transportation with the operational inefficiency of public transportation. Simply put, PRT just puts automobiles on leashes.

In both cases, the switching costs to monorail and PRT outweigh any sort of benefits they may deliver, if they can even demonstrate them. Conventional rail and road building are open source, so building costs are low and there's a massive knowledge tree for construction and maintenance. The other two modes have very few working concepts, and the money made in them is from the license of proprietary technology. The licensing, plus the imputed research and development costs, makes the projects more capital-intensive than they need to be.

This doesn't even mention the effort needed to make the things work.

[nickv]

Technology Pipedreamers Hype:
Your Car on a Monorail Line
Cincinnati Inventors Show Off New Monomobile Car


From: jasonandress

"Ridin' Along the SoCal Rails" is a mode of transportation I have personally grown up to enjoy. Being able to put my feet up (well, not literally on the empty seat), relax and watch the scenery go by is something I've enjoyed as a child when I took my first Amtrak trip from Santa Ana to San Diego Sante Fe Station with my folks. After that trip, I remember begging my folks to take me on more Amtrak train rides.

However, my next Amtrak train ride would not come until my college years...but all throughout my childhood days, I was riding in the back seat of the car on SoCal freeways, sitting in traffic. Back then, I imagined...wouldn't it be great that if the car could drive itself on a track of some sort just by pushing a button (like an elevator) and becoming a "train"? The Monomobile that was featured in this news story might be the answer, right? Well, not so fast!

Technology Pipedreamers Hype

Okay, let's just get to the point. The idea of placing a monomobile network all over SoCal will be a disgrace to the SoCal image and quality of life. After looking at a SoCal map and examining major transportation corridors, what I saw is that if our freeway system were to be replaced by Monomobile, a concrete jungle of monorails and monorail switches would dominate the SoCal scenery. What I envisioned in my head would make the extensive freeway interchanges and networks in Orange County look like Portland... It's that complex...and I know it's hard to vision an transportation eyesore that's worse than a bunch of congested freeways.

First, the newscast features Monomobile going from one end of the line to other. Take for example a trip from the SF Valley to Downtown LA. The US Hwy 101 is a heavy freeway from the Valley to Downtown. What we have to remember is that some of Metro's highest performing transit lines such as Metro Rapid, the Metro Orange Line, and Metro Rail, offer a wide selection of intermediate station stops. Not every rider rides an end-to-end trip. Intermediate off and on "ramps" could be added into the Monomobile network, but good luck trying to sell that idea to local planning committees. These "ramps" will basically have the the same fundamental issues and problems like the SkyTran has. And it doesn't end there.

Based on experience, whenever I'm riding a train, I often see young kids that smile and make comments when the train passes stopped traffic on the freeway. Well, Monomobile will also be able to bypass local city traffic, but there's just one problem. Parents cannot take their kids (or their spouse, or their carpool) onboard Monomobile just yet because the car only has one seat. Yes, looking at the car in the news report, the car has one seat! That runs totally counter to ridesharing. And to top that off, the Monomobile Web site claims that the system would require less room than a typical freeway. That logic is completely lost when we factor bumper-to-bumper traffic into the equation and the fact that each Monomobile car can only transport one person.

One other point of Monomobile that is flawed is its maximum speed and power limitations while the cars are being driven. A regular car has enough power to take its passengers through country roads, mountain highways, or other streets where its safe to travel over 40 MPH. Monomoblie cars just do not have the power to travel into areas such as the mountains or into the countryside, and building a complex monorail network with monorail switches in a national park or national forest setting is simply not an option.

The last issue I have of Monomobile is that the cars look so fragile that even the lightest traffic wreck in the city would send the driver to the ER. A wreck with a bus or a truck would not be good at all.

The designers of Monomobile certainly came up with a creative idea, but looking into the reality of this idea, Monomobile just certainly will not work in SoCal. This concept, as it is presented will be a disgrace to the quality of life with a new type of traffic congestion as there are no choices at all to rideshare. I am thankful everyday that our local transit agencies are smart enough to provide us with finished transit products that are not from pipedreams....projects like the subway, light rail, regional rail, bus rapid transit, and CNG buses. Sure, sometimes they do drift into pipedream ideas, but the agencies are smart enough to complete the unbiased studies before breaking ground. It is a shame that several people and companies are spending huge amounts of money advocating technology such as this without first completing unbiased study; every dollar spent on pipedream projects could have been spent on projects that are actually worth it: