I am in KC today helping the Show-Me Institute educate people about the benefits and costs of light rail. Long-time readers will recall that Kansas City voters approved a light-rail plan after having rejected such plans six times. The Show-Me Institute is releasing a report on the subject by the Antiplanner which you can no doubt find on their web site.
In a nutshell, the voter-approved plan is totally infeasible, as it calls for taking money from the bus system to build rail and presumes that the federal government will pay half the cost — which, the FTA says, it won’t if it means reducing bus service. Plus the current cost projections are 50 percent more than the costs initially projected by the line’s backers.
Long-term medication is not the only way to cure erectile dysfunction- If we talk about the most effective among them and is recommended by a number of men to save their relationship and life is an oral medicine for men only. sildenafil generic uk Typically, tadalafil india http://www.midwayfire.com/documents/Application%20for%20Fire%20Sprinkler%20Permit.pdf it truly is labeled because secondary along with substitute remedies which has many credit of health and fitness companies suppliers. Stay away from too much self-stimulation Stop smoking and drinking while taking tadalafil buy cheap dose for erectile dysfunction treatment. No label reading, no swallowing vitamins, just lotion and go! It is as simple as that to be soft pill cialis on safer side and avail a genuine product to deal with erection problems in men. The Kansas City Council is allowed to repeal voter-approved ordinances a year after they are passed, and it did so. But the city is still under pressure to build a “starter” light-rail system or at least a streetcar line. One plan calls for a 10- to 14-mile line using modern streetcars but with fewer stops.
The big question is: why? Why spend all the money on light rail or streetcars when Kansas City’s bus-rapid transit line has been so successful at a fraction of the cost? The answer appears to be ego: Kansas City has to keep up with its peer cities.
When I used to say I wanted something because other kids had one, my mother would say, “If other kids jumped off a cliff, would you?” This was before bungee jumping or freebasing, but you get the point. Just because other cities have acted foolish doesn’t mean Kansas City should join them.
Aw, come on Randall, we both know it is the money. Which of those council members got big money, either publically, or under the table from toy train hucksters like Portland’s Charlie Hales’ employer, a streetcar sales company and/or other snakes?
Thanks
JK
I just wish people would get it out of their heads the perverse notion that building LRT, a 19th century technology, is somehow keeping up with the Jones in the 21st century. The least they could do is piss away the money on PRT or something new and fancy. Then again, PRT is really just 19th century technology with a computer trying to manage all the individual cars going to different stations.
Yes, but producing a transportation system that NPR-listening yuppies can use for one out of every ten trips they take during the warm months from the time they get out of school until they begin having kids will put KC on the route to becoming a “sustainable” city.
The first question the bus transit dependent need to ask the bureaucrats is, if you slash bus service, how in blazes will the pro-urban rail lemmings get to the Utopian tram?
prk166 is partly correct about PRT – it does have some 19th century technology. There were electric motors and elevated monorail tracks in factories in the 19th century. And PRT does require computers.
Most new automobiles now have more computer power than the Apollo program used to navigate spacecraft to the moon and back and new PRT systems will have many computers. Besides computers, a few more technology advances such as permanent magnet brushless DC motors, magnetic levitation, fiber reinforced plastics, aluminum and stainless steel materials, global positioning systems, fiber optics, television, radio frequency identificaton devices, optical bar codes, roll forming and hydraulic bending sheet metal, Kevlar reinforced tubeless tires, radar, lidar, etc.
The important point however, is that all this technology enables a transport mode which will take a significant market share of people and cargo where and when they want to go quicker, cheaper, safer and more reliably than any other transport choice they may have. It also has the potential to make a profit for the PRT system owners so they can keep expanding the system without government subsidies.
There are millions of ways to do things wrong and maybe only hundreds of ways to do them correctly, so it is very important to start with the best requirements and make sure the projects are not diverted onto unprofitable paths.
Tad said:
“The important point however, is that all this technology enables a transport mode which will take a significant market share of people and cargo where and when they want to go quicker, cheaper, safer and more reliably than any other transport choice they may have.”
PRT isn’t really that good a deal. Just as people on this website are busily scraping the gloss off LRT, we should do the same for PRT. Although I should say that, PRT can be made to work, and it probably has more of a future.
Quicker – PRT doesn’t start off where I am, and doesn’t go where I want to go. It has stops, like any form of transit. This is fundamentally limiting.
One neat thing about cars – shared with other forms of private transport – is going door-to-door. This is a very desirable characteristic, and any transport technology that is going to compete with cars has got to do this. Two examples – mobile phones and two-wheeled vehicles. Both go straight from where you are to where you want to go, one physically, one ‘virtually’. In my opinion, we should do more with both sets of technologies.
PRT is usually sold under the following tag line, or the equivalent:
“The roads are really congested these days. Doesn’t it take a long time to get anywhere? Well, float past it all by using these little pods”.
What’s wrong with just fixing the roads, and allowing the traffic to flow freely?
Cheaper – ever new gadget is portrayed as being cheaper, smarter, more environmentally friendly than anything else around. Maybe I’m a cynical transport engineer, but not only does every sales executive have the same sales patter, everytime I hear about PRT the details change. E.g. one day the service interval is 0.1 seconds, the next day the service interval is 2 seconds. That’s over an order of magnitude. It doesn’t inspire confidence within the engineering community. Yet, all too often, the PRT enthusiasts state with confidence that transport engineers aren’t building PRT because they are too stuck in their ways. Ahem. Perhaps if the PRT crowd got their facts sorted out, this would help.
When I am providing consultancy to a client, I have got to be certain that what I am advocating will work. I don’t know that about PRT.
Heathrow is going to have a new PRT system, to take people from the car park to the terminal building. Please note, from the car park to the terminal building, not from elsewhere to the terminal building. Like park & ride, PRT has found its niche, but is not in a position to compete with cars. The positioning of the system implies an understanding and acceptance of this point.
Safer – that’s a matter of debate. Most PRT systems don’t seem to provide an emergency exit route. In some countries this is mandatory, and for a good reason. Funiculars are a special form of train which are winched up and down an angled track, and having no engine in them, cannot catch fire. Or so it was supposed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaprun_disaster
What happens if one of the pods catches fire, for reasons foreseeable or unforeseeable? How do people get out? If a walkway is provided, what does this do to the already intrusive trackway, and the cost?
Comparing PRT to cars, what is the fatality rate per billion km? In the UK, it is currently 10 per billion km. The average UK car driver drives 15,000 km per year. So we’re looking at, on average, a car driver killing someone once every 67,000 years, or 1000 life times.
More reliably – the doors on the pods will be opening and closing many times a day. What is the failure rate? Only a small failure rate is enough to trap someone in a pod. I mention this because trains are a well-known technology, yet suffer from exactly these problems.
I’m watching the Heathrow development with interest. Like most transport engineers, I’m curious to see if it works or not – and maybe I’ll get to have a ride on it too!
Thank you, Francis King, for pointing out design challenges for PRT. I have been studying and designing ways to overcome these challenges for more than a decade.
Every transport mode serves a niche market; each has its place. For example, the market share for cars on the Long Beach, CA, to Honolulu route is near zero, while the share for airplanes is quite high.
The most widely used present mode similar to PRT is lifts (elevators) which have been automated for over fifty years. When first implemented lifts had a bad safety record. People would fall down the shafts, cables would break and the cabins would fall down. Now lifts have an excellent safety record, one of the safest except for monorails which are safer. The last time you were on a lift did you read carefully the emergency evacuation instructions? Probably not, since I have never seen any. I have only seen movie stunt guys climbing up through hatches in cabins and climbing ladders in the shaft. The standard evacuation procedure for failed lifts and other elevated systems such as most monorails and ski lifts is to have emergency personnel rescue the passengers.
Safety and reliabilty have to be designed in and then each process stage has to be controlled to assure success. Failures can result from many causes; we need to learn from past failures and prevent them in the future.
Design features such as walkways and operational constraints such as brick wall stopping distance headways are good for trains but not for boats, airplanes, lifts, and PRT. Air bags, passenger restraints, and an exit door for every three passengers may be good requirements for PRT cabins and automobiles but not buses and trains.
Some PRT stops could be located on balconies outside apartment, hospital, stores, schools and office buildings. If one lived in an apartment building with a stop and worked in a building with a stop you could have a non-stop commute without even walking through the rain from the parking lot to your workplace.
The cheaper claim is dependent on reduced need for real estate than the alternatives (fewer parking spaces, utility easements instead of right of way for new or wider roads), higher load factors and more vehicle miles per day due to higher speed and longer service hours, shorter trip times compared to fixed schedule mass transit systems.
Saying the numbers you are getting for PRT differ by more than an order of magnitude is normal at this stage of PRT implementation. You could also say the same for boat and airplane fuel consumption. A sailboat may have very small fuel consumption compared to a supertanker, and a motorglider may consume much less than a jet airliner. In the case of PRT systems, a pressurized six -passenger maglev PRT cabin travelling at 5000 km/hour in a vacuum pipeline will use less energy than ULTra at 50 km/hour. The safe headways will depend on the characteristics of the propulsion, control and braking systems.
If one doesn’t want to wait for the Heathrow PRT system you may go to Morgantown, West Virginia, and ride the Boeing system which has been operating for the last 30 years.
Many people and groups around the world are working on automated transport and there will be a variety of new systems implemented in the next two decades. Some of these will operate on city streets and some will operate above the streets on guideways. Some will travel between cities in vacuum pipelines.
See Prof. Jerry Schneider’s excellent website for more info http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/
prk166 wrote about:
“19th century technology”
Are you talking about automobiles?