What about a pod car system?

trap4

Why must we always follow in this country instead of leading?

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/10/personal-pod--1.html

donvito99

One word:

Slick

Irish and Proud

trap4 wrote: »

Why must we always follow in this country instead of leading?

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/10/personal-pod--1.html

Now, it obviously won't completely replace cars, but it seems to have huge potential, especially around urban centres etc. Many short routine car journeys could become a thing of the past. New towns could be modelled on such infrastructure, and if pilot schemes prove successful, taking the car down to the local shops could be so unheard of in the future.

Adamstown, Clongriffan, Cherrywood... are you listening???

Another innovation which seemed great is the covered wind assisted cycleway modelled like freeways - an American idea (or so I think) which as it seems, has not taken off - would be far cheaper to build than roads, railways etc, and would be a great solution for independent urban travel at up to 30kph without the problems of wind, traffic etc. However unlike the pod cars, safety would be an issue, as well as controlling bike parking etc.

Anyway, when oil does become scarce (either by rising demand or falling production), something will have to give!

Regards!

antoinolachtnai

These systems are quite different from mass transport systems. To make them work, they have to be fairly ubiquitous. You have to plan for them being on pretty much every street.

The cost of building and maintaining tracks on this scale is just too much. Rail systems are also failure prone. A single relatively small failure on any pod on an outlying spur will cause the whole neighbourhood to snarl up if it is all running on rails.

I think the ultimate solution is going to be a system of pods like this that runs on rubber wheels on regular roads. There are big practical problems to be overcome to do this, obviously, although I think the technology is workable enough.

A system like this could carry a lot more people a lot more quickly and a lot more safely than the road system as it is currently operated.

IIMII

It runs on tyres though rather than rails looking at the pictures. Not that I expect to see one here anytime soon!

antoinolachtnai

OK, it runs on rubber, true enough, but what I reall mean is that it runs on a rail or guideway. I think you need a system that runs on a fairly standard road without needing a guideway.

crocro

antoinolachtnai wrote: »

OK, it runs on rubber, true enough, but what I reall mean is that it runs on a rail or guideway. I think you need a system that runs on a fairly standard road without needing a guideway.

but they are driverless so you have the problem of robots running down kids if you let them on the streets.

We'd be better off just building a Park & ride car park where every major road enters into the city and providing a large number of electric scooters to ride the final few kms to work.

Any point to point, personal transit system that relys on additional infrastructure is doomed to failure.

Stark

Didn't see the point of it until I saw the last paragraph:

It costs some $25 to $40 million per mile to build a PRT system, and in today's economic climate that's a price most cities or even states are not willing to spend. But compared to the $100 to $300 million per mile it costs to build a light-rail system, pod-car advocates counter, and suddenly pods look reasonable.

That would be cool. Didn't say what the capacities were though. Probably a lot less if someone can take a whole pod for themselves. Funny how that seems shockingly rude when people think nothing of taking a car's worth of roadspace for themselves

antoinolachtnai

Well, estimating it up, it looks like the capacity would be about 1000 or 2000 per hour per direction. 4 cars per minute max, 6 people per car average, which is optimistic. 6 x 4 x 60 = 1440. It would be hard to achieve 4 cars per minute without very elaborate stations, in order to make sure the cars didn't get in each other's way, and to make sure cars were loaded quickly enough. It's a bit like a ski-lift.

It might work well in a situation where there were a lot of people going in different directions to different meetings at all times of the day.

It would be easy to make automated cars a lot safer around children than current cars are. You could have ultrasonic detectors and radar systems and these would see a lot more than human drivers. Passengers and drivers would only need to be able to alight on the kerb side. Reaction times to incidents on the road would also be faster. Cars could travel in convoys with a short distance between vehicles, rather than roaming around individually, and this would allow long gaps in traffic, rather than a series of very short gaps. Also, drink-driving, speeding and signal-breaking would be things that just didn't happen any more.

The big theoretical problem with the scooter system is that there is no way to automatically get the scooters back to the park-n-ride to cater for the next commuter. That means that you need an awful lot of scooters, and you need an awful lot of scooter parking space in the city centre.

The theory of using scooters is that they only take up a fraction of the road space of a car, you should be able to park at least six in the space of a car and they would all return to the park & ride site at the end of each day to charge up over night.You would have the use if the scooter for the day and return it at the end of the day.

LoLth

while the systems sound great, ireland seems to suffer a lot worse from random vandalism than anywhere else I have been (I havent been everywhere though). Unmanned pay stations in the middle of the country at toll road exits in portugal would be demolished and robbed in no time.

I have to say I'm quite suprised at how well the luas is holding up! pods imho would be destroyed in no time and scooters stolen by knackers for nothing more than the joy of depriving someone else.....

sorry, in a bad mood today ...

back on topic, pod cars look very cool indeed. and I very much like the idea of covered "bike paths" for electric scooters

antoinolachtnai

You are right about random vandalism in Ireland, in general. The Luas works because they manage it so tightly. It might look like a casual operation, but I don't think there is anything casual about it at all (just from observation, I have no inside information).

You would vandalise a pod that you were occupying at your peril. If you were spotted, the doors could lock and your pod could be rolled around to the nearest police station for you to await the opportunity to explain yourself.

For these electric scooters, why not just get people to buy them, if they are using them 5 days a week? The P+R's would have to be quite far out, and it would cost around 2 euros/day/car to provide the park and ride at the fringe. It would also cost 3 or 4 euro to provide the city centre parking. The scooter would cost an extra fiver or tenner a day to pay for, to maintain, insure and power. Still cheaper than a lot of mass-transit projects, I grant you.

antoinolachtnai

antoinolachtnai wrote: »

For these electric scooters, why not just get people to buy them, if they are using them 5 days a week? The P+R's would have to be quite far out, and it would cost around 2 euros/day/car to provide the park and ride at the fringe. It would also cost 3 or 4 euro to provide the city centre parking. The scooter would cost an extra fiver or tenner a day to pay for, to maintain, insure and power. Still cheaper than a lot of mass-transit projects, I grant you.

That's more or less what I was thinking, buy the use of a scooter plus a maintenance charge & charge charge then using a key card or similar just collect the next available one, parking should be free, otherwise the benefit is dimished.

antoinolachtnai

Well, there are two things - the cost and the price. The parking costs money to provide, and needs to come from somewhere, even if it doesn't come from the punter.

Zoney

It would cost a fortune to build and administrate and yet not even carry as much people as buses. Maybe cheaper to lay a route than for light rail, but the benefits of the latter are huge, whereas the former would be a drop in the ocean on a single route.

Nothing more than a catchy idea that can be used to potentially get research funding (despite it really being a flawed premise). That said, I guess I'd be happy to work on researching it, so I can't fault the proponents too much.

Del2005

antoinolachtnai wrote: »

It would be easy to make automated cars a lot safer around children than current cars are. You could have ultrasonic detectors and radar systems and these would see a lot more than human drivers. Passengers and drivers would only need to be able to alight on the kerb side. Reaction times to incidents on the road would also be faster. Cars could travel in convoys with a short distance between vehicles, rather than roaming around individually, and this would allow long gaps in traffic, rather than a series of very short gaps. Also, drink-driving, speeding and signal-breaking would be things that just didn't happen any more.

This already exsists and has for several years. Cars can follow wires or magnets in the road. It's just no-one is willing to except liability it in case it does go wrong.

antoinolachtnai

mmm ... yes, part of this is there. But the traffic management parts of it are a long way from being there. You won't find a commercial system that does all this for quite some time.

the liability is certainly a big issue. Ultimately, it involves changing the way the transport network is structured, owned and taken responsibility for.

But what other choice is there? Mass transport only solves part of the problem, and car use has begun to reach its limit all over the developed world.