Comments 4
Hi! It's me again! Wanted to notice that this idea is least to say not new. In fact, there is one real world example from 1975 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Transit
TL;DR there are reasons why it is THE only example of this system and it is more like tourist attraction now than actual transportation system. And while it is much less fancy than one described here, it showed weaknesses of idea: it is barely useful until it covers whole city, transition is prohibitory expensive and it doomed to die in the beginning.
Hello, I'm glad to see you again!
Can the vehicle in your example be called a flexible route vehicle?
Dynamically changing route is one of the highlights of my solution.
Well, they wanted to make something similar to your idea, but cost was too high. You can argue that suspended railroad is super expensive (which is true), but small electric vehicles with very expensive batteries, motors and electronics as by now is not very cheap either. And if long term goal is to remove cars from roads, who actually pays most of the cost of the road maintenance through road tax and petrol taxes, as by now long term costs of rail transport can be even lower.
On other hand more and more cities switches to electric busses, maybe they are not that bad. Amsterdam, for example, has tons of them (though they least to say overcrowded). Coincidentally on my last trip there week ago best way to get to the airport turned out to be a train, because it was fast, specious, comfortable and exactly by time (also no fear of instant setting on fire). So, don’t know, maybe with modern technologies idea has a chance
Affordable as a Bus, Comfortable as a Taxi: A Promising Type of Public Transport for Large and Medium-Sized Cities.Part3