Personal Rapid Transit

[Riverman]

Has anyone heard of this? The system they use at Heathrow is a good example but seems a bit limited.

I was reading about the emergence of busways which are touted as a more viable local alternative railways because unlike trains, the buses can of course be driven on roads once they reach the end of the busways.

Why don't they apply the same principle to these personal rapid transit systems? I.e.- make them bigger and use them to transport cars as well as people. It may sound like a crazy idea over short distances but over long distances, it would be worth doing imo.

Thoughts?

 

[WiselinePRT]

The PRT or Pod transit concept is intended to 1) use small light vehicles providing on-demand service like an elevator -- therefore having less vehicle weight per seat and expending less energy per passenger; 2) small lower profile infrastructure is sufficient for small light vehicles, leading to lower capital cost per mile/km.

System ridership is measured by (number of pods) x (avg number of riders per trip) x (avg number of trips pods make per hour). So, for a 100 pod fleet, each pod making 10 hourly trips of 2 people per trip, the ridership is 2,000.

The primary PRT service niche is the provision of fixed-guideway rapid transit to areas without sufficient density/ridership to make light rail or metros financially viable. The idea is that a city could have a multimodal rail network serving more places, through a mix of traditional trains and pod rail.

The ability to carry cars on pod guideway is not contemplated. Assuming you mean specially adapted automobiles, they would quickly congest the guideways and create traffic jams at the entry & exit locations. Such a system is called Dual Mode, and is a different type of technology. There are no examples of Dual Mode currently in operation and I believe it problematic -- most of all it because it is an extension of the road system, not transit.

I cover pod transit development and implementation at my page, The PRT NewsCenter.