Marshall Brain's Blog

---

Cutting Edge Transportation Systems

A friend who read about the transportation system in Manna sent in a link to SkyWeb Express:





The opening sentence is: "Taxi 2000 Corporation introduces SkyWeb Express, a system that will be faster, safer, more flexible and less expensive than any other mode of transportation." There's a nice video explaining the system architecture and its advantages at the bottom of the home page.

A quick search of the web offers a similar idea called SkyTran:



It's opening sentence is: "SkyTran is non-stop, 100 mph personal transit that can totally eliminate commuter congestion in any city, for the same costs of one linear line of light rail."

Here in the RTP area where I live, we have been hearing for years about a light rail system that will install something like 35 miles of track and 16 or so stations for $725 million. Therefore, this sentence on the SkyTran web site is of interest: "People are still being conned into voting yes to be taxed to have archaic, hideously poor performing light rail systems built. Time to properly utilize the microprocessors, sensors and controllers that didn't exist in 1950 to cut costs and move people fast anywhere in a city."

The site goes on:

In many cities all over the USA, the bureaucrats are trying to get the area residents to vote to tax themselves an additional billions of dollars to build Light Rail systems. All of these systems would consume millions in studies before construction would begin. When eventually completed in typically 6 to 10 years, the bureaucrats typically claim Light Rail will carry 30,000 to 60,000 people per day. (They never mention that auto traffic will have grown by 10 times those daily amounts in the same period of time.)

Phoenix, Arizona is an interesting example. They want to build a 35 mile Light Rail system at a cost of $1.35 billion ($38.6 million dollars per mile). If the average trip in Phoenix was 10 miles long this would represent 600,000 passenger miles per day. This number is 2.4% of the current (not the year 2010) Greater Phoenix Area's daily commuter traffic of 25 million passenger miles (600,000/25,000,000 = 2.4%).

Newspaper articles brag that even with stops every mile that the Light Rail would average "almost 20" miles per hour (17 mph in reality). This is barely a healthy bicyclist's cruise speed. Definitely not something to brag about.

Sounds pretty useless, doesn't it? Can we use our brains to come up with a simpler, much lower cost, faster system?

SkyTran is the result of that thinking. Read the whole thing - It sounds a lot cooler than light rail...