Having taken MUNI (SF's light rail) underground in SF, I have some doubt about the efficiency of such a system. In my station (Church), in the morning, I can see trains coming in every 3-4 minutes or so; and about 40 people get on at once. With a PRT system, you'd have to first line up at the turnstile to punch in your destination. Assume 15 seconds each. Then, when a car comes in, you'd have line up to get in. A person gets in, swipes her card, punches in the destination, etc. Minimum time: 1 minute, if you're being fast. Suddenly, the bandwidth is just not there; the platform becomes the bottleneck. Same would happen at an elevated pathway too, I imagine.
So, a system like this would be infeasible in a dense city like SF. Above ground is another story altogether: the NIMBYs would block all construction.
What could work is a system of autonomous vehicles (taxis) the size of a Google self-driving car, running above ground, summoned via a smartphone app or a kiosk at every corner. So, instead of dedicated pathways and elevated tracks, use autonomous cars.
Also: very importantly, each car must have odor detectors / biohazard detectors in case someone has an 'accident' in the car.
You're thinking about it backwards. It's not a "better MUNI". There's no turnstiles or gates, just bays. Not 4 or 6 like a train station but 40 to 60. Boarding a few people or more likely 1 takes less than 30s. That's 2/second. Plenty of bandwidth. And these stations are smaller and more dense, not every 15 blocks in the city but every few blocks, maybe in a large building's lobby. There's no swiping, it's on your smartphone and automated ( Open app, click "go home", app says "bay 21, approx, 2 min, pod #123, 1 other passenger"). Doors close when all the passengers are present. Pod has "pad requires service" button on console if there is a cleanliness issue.
This is attractive to the NIMBY crowd, fewer cars, less non-resident parking, less noise ( electric motors ) less local pollution. Who wouldn't want local rapid transit? They're not putting in Walmarts.
> There's no swiping, it's on your smartphone and automated ( Open app, click "go home", app says "bay 21, approx, 2 min, pod #123, 1 other passenger").
And in this hypothetical world, absolutely everyone who uses public transit has a smartphone?
Let's imagine the system engineers are smarter than that: if you have a smart phone, you can use the app. If you don't, there'd be a terminal in the station you could use. I'd imagine the engineers for this could have thought of that.
Easy enough to just assume people have smart phones and only have it in cities where mostly people will have them even the poorer people. A cheap smart phone isn't that expensive any more.
It's not just the cost, really: I know I can have a second hand smartphone for peanuts. There'll probably always be some people who don't use smartphones, for whatevre reason.
For getting an intuitive sense of the kind of throughput here, I think it'd be useful to picture a rollercoaster. If anything, rollercoasters are even faster boarding than one-person pods would be, since the whole rollercoaster train shows up at once.
Now picture the line at Space Mountain in the afternoon, except in a subway station.
> you'd have to first line up at the turnstile to punch in your destination. Assume 15 seconds each. Then, when a car comes in, you'd have line up to get in
Why can't you load 15 people into 15 pods at once?
> very importantly, each car must have odor detectors / biohazard detectors in case someone has an 'accident' in the car.
The subway doesn't have this, and it works okay. People just use their built in odor detector, and if there's a problem, they avoid sitting in it and notify a conductor.
Subways dont offer much privacy. How many pods are you going to have to report for smelling like sex before you can find a clean one on Monday morning?
They'll likely have security cameras to prevent vandalism on the inside of the vehicle. I doubt most people want to be recorded having sex and have it watched by strangers when an "issue" is reported.
What if you required everyone to punch in their destination on a companion app, Uber-style, before even approaching the platform? Then all you have to do is wait until the app gives you the green light to approach the platform (your car is ready), get in, and maybe tap your phone to an NFC reader mounted in the car or something to confirm you're the passenger it thinks you are, and you're off. I imagine that the entire process from green-lighted to doors-closed-and-moving could be 15-30 seconds on average.
There could still be a phoneless kiosk/swipe system for people who don't have/don't want to use the app version, but with cheap Android phones available for $20-$50 (and that's today -- imagine where we'll be in 5 years) I figure 95% of throughput could use the streamlined flow.
---------
All that said, I think I agree with the article's sentiment that this system's time may have come and gone. It's hard to imagine what transport will look like 15 years from now, but I suspect that electric robot taxis as part of a multi-modal transport infrastructure with existing trains/subways could deliver most of the benefit of a personal pod system without the huge infrastructure investments of building a completely new set of tracks all over the city.
In the 4 minute / 40 people scenario, you're only talking about 10 people every minute. 10 pods stationed at that stop solves it.
Now, everyone doesn't wait 3-4 minutes. They just get on the next available pod. Remember, people coming into a typical station don't come 40 at a time. They come in clumps of 1-4.
All of which transforms a batch system (subway/light rail), to a continuous system.
There is an assumption that stations are off the main rail. Which, given the size of a typical pod, is feasible. It is certainly much smaller than your typical light rail system
===
btw. wrt to speed.
There's nothing stopping you pre-ordering a destination at a machine (or smartphone) before you get to a pod. Swipe your credit card, see your name on the pod you should go to. Walk in. Sit. And go.
And in the case of your daily commute, even easier. Have it pre-set. Jump in to a pod, face-recognition (or nfc/ble) and if it's your 'typical' time, you're off. No pressing/no swipes. Just go.
===
NIMBy's are always going to be an issue and off-grade (eg. above/below ground) is typically going to be required.
Self-driving cars.. are definitely -the- alternative. But only if there's actually enough road. Eg. it's not going to go any faster during rush hour. It just means you're not going to be driving.
All excellent points. This is why we should invest more heavily in proven mass transit systems rather than divert limited public funds into these inefficient pods or hyperloop systems.
Corollary: Is it really that bad to have to ride a bus or train with other people on-board?
Busses are the least-worst alternative to walking. People are noisy, they smell, they crowd you when you're holding groceries, they make a trip with friends or God forbid a date unpleasant, they're late when you're early and early when you're late, and chances are you'll still have to walk a few blocks to get where you want to go.
Obviously not every case, but I've taken a fair amount of Bay Area busses in my time and there was always at least one of the above complaints.
Agreed that it's not as pleasant as having a car to yourself (I ride the NYC buses and subways everyday), but I think we could solve a lot of the people issues with proper policing rather than outright isolation.
Chances are if you make more "quality of life" laws you'll either have some schmuck causing trouble when enforcement is nowhere to be found, or they'll be used as excuses for cops to pad their stats by arresting first and asking questions later, with most of the punishment hitting minorities, as tends to happen in the U.S.
The problem is cultural. Another poster here mentioned Japan, where busses are pleasant. After all, that is a place where "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down." If we really want public life on par with Japan or Europe, change has to start with each and every one of us. No government program or well-funded startup could ever do it alone.
I have ridden SF public transit of all kinds. MUNI buses are the worst, and it's not because of things that could be solved with policing. The worst part is the super high variance in door-to-door times, even if you try to plan your life around bus schedules it's bad.
If you have to take multiple forms of public transit to get where you are going, good luck. A 40 minute drive can easily be 2.5 hours on public transit if everything goes perfectly.
Also the average speed of SF MUNI buses is 8 mph, probably among the lowest in the nation. If I'm going any distance less than a 30 minute walk, it's probably going to be a better idea to walk than take the bus.
The problem with mass transit mostly isn't other people, it's the fact that it rarely goes from exactly where you start to exactly where you want to go. I take mass transit to and from work every day, but in order to get from my house to the commuter rail station, I have to drive a mile to a bus stop where there's parking (the commuter rail lot is small and fills up quickly) and take a bus 2 miles to the train station. Then on the other side of the train ride, I'm still 3 miles from my office, so I hop on a bike share bike and take that to the station nearest my work. Then I walk 2 blocks to my office. And then all of that back again in the afternoon. Lots of people tell me that they drive because they couldn't deal with my crazy routine.
A PRT system would possibly have a station much closer to my house, so there wouldn't need to be a single commuter rail station for a town of 20K people, and therefore no dealing with crowded parking lots. It would likely have a stop at or near my office, as it's a very busy business district (Kendall Sq, Cambridge.)
If you are in Japan, then no, trains are clean and people are mostly sane. In the US here, esp Portland, they are filled with interesting individuals, smells and acts. I have rode the Max train for years, but now drive since it is more pleasant and shortens my overall trip considerably.
A hybrid pod could act as an autonomous car, picking you up at your house, then merge onto and "mount" a shared electrified rail for the speedy middle part of the journey—the inside-a-city equivalent of a freeway system. Effectively, the flow would look similar to bicycle commuters biking to the subway and then getting on, but without the need for the subway train to encapsulate the pod.
So, a system like this would be infeasible in a dense city like SF. Above ground is another story altogether: the NIMBYs would block all construction.
What could work is a system of autonomous vehicles (taxis) the size of a Google self-driving car, running above ground, summoned via a smartphone app or a kiosk at every corner. So, instead of dedicated pathways and elevated tracks, use autonomous cars.
Also: very importantly, each car must have odor detectors / biohazard detectors in case someone has an 'accident' in the car.