Walls and roof protect you from excessive heat, excessive cold, wind, rain, snow, and the sound the mechanisms make.
Seats allow you (or people more tired than you) to sit and work, read, or rest, especially when you ride for an hour.
Also, train infrastructure is vastly narrower than such a collection of moving bands, and is readily available for maintenance when no trains are going.
The downside is that trains have to have stations. But the moving band will have to have a "station" all along it.
I liked the belt idea until i read about bubble cars. have a zillion cars with room for 3 people that are constantly circulating around a track, with roll on roll offs all over the place. hit a button, next empty car rolls off and stops for you. hit a button inside for your destination, accelerate back to the main track speed and you're on your way.
it's kind of like a people mover, but has the ability to actually stop, thanks to the split/merge at the stops.
Why not integrate a "bubble car" into building lift/elevator systems? The capsule brings you 20 km from home, switches to the rails within the lift well and zips up, depositing you directly on your floor.
Thirty years ago lots of people were talking about mass transit systems with small individual capsules. According to one of my engineering lecturers at the time, a limitation was that there simply isn't enough room on the ground to have all those capsules loading and unloading people in a CBD with lots of skyscrapers.
I think the point about how much space is needed for high density loading and unloading is excellent. if you're willing to slow down the main line in specific areas, you can use a lot more of the siding rail for loading.
I have no doubt your lecturer is far more informed than i will ever be. I will assert that it's not really 1990 any more, and far more employers would be willing for employees to show up and leave at different times. Car congestion alone has made a lot of employers willing to have start time anywhere from 7 to 10. Which might alleviate some of that burden.
I also think, being able to take the whole trip without stopping - even if you occasionally have to go slower in high congestion areas - is much faster overall for each passenger. Which, in my humble opinion is a huge feature.
If the cars are reversible, you can also have Y junctions and stack up loads of cars perpendicular to the main rail, and fill those cars like a normal train.
It's not quite as clear cut as you make it sound, imo.
A belt system would run continuously, which means no waiting for the next train, and you don't have to slow down at every intermediate stop, which should improve average speeds.
At the cost of much decreased capacity, because a lot of the system moves pretty slowly; you cannot make the bands narrower than what it takes to stand with two feet, and likely wider for some safety.
Also, the amount of area and mass to move per passenger grows quite a lot, because most passengers will want to be on the fastest band, and all the gradual bands will be much less occupied.
The system can work reasonably when the moving bands are very lightweight, thin layers moved by a motor without many (or any) moving parts (the way maglev moves). It also should have absurdly low friction: unlike a train, it has a lot of contact surface.
To say nothing about turns.
Not that it's impossible, but technology-wise we're totally not there yet to make such a thing practical.
No need for stations next to the moving band. The outer bands move slowly enough that you can step on and off at any point. The center bands could have seats, and you could wall the whole thing in to protect from the weather.
Moving slowly enough for whom to step off? The 90 year old lady with a walker? The toddler? Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair?
How slow is it going to accommodate every single person's movement capacity? How small is the gradient between each belt to allow them to move between belts? How wide does this whole thing end up needing to be?
> Moving slowly enough for whom to step off? The 90 year old lady with a walker? The toddler? Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair?
Why not? Don't they use moving floors on airports already? (Also, do toddlers walk alone on the busy streets?)
Here's a design I just sketched in Factorio for a belt system with 3 speed levels, and an entry/exit for moving onto the belt system, and then between speed levels.
Why not? Don't they use moving floors on airports already?
Yes, but they also have non-moving floors, and they also have -- in the US, at least -- a small fleet of carts, driven by airport staff, that can carry people who have difficulty walking.
Any moving-walkway mass-transit system would have to include accessible alternatives.
I just happen to ride a lot of above-ground trains. E.g. much of the New York City subway goes above ground, sometimes pretty high, in Brooklyn and Queens. Same applies to quite a few cities (e.g. London and Moscow, off the top of my head).
But okay, let's imagine out underground walkway. Since it's underground, you can't walk on and off where you want; you only walk off where there's way up to the ground. This eliminates much of the allure of the system. Now you want to plan ahead and be ready to get off when you're next to the exit. If you missed your exit, you have to move to the next exit, or maybe cross the tunnel and go to the band of the opposite direction, and walk back a bit.
Please notice how the low-speed bands then need to run the whole length of the tunnel, adding little to the carrying capacity: few people want to travel at the speed of walking when traveling at the speed of a train is a few meters across.
If we let only the faster band(s) through the length of the tunnel, and limit the slower bands to the exit areas (pretty long and wide), we'll face the problem of walls: our band is moving fast, and nothing separates it from the walls. So we sort of need inner walls on the band. But they need doors to allow people in and out in the exit areas. And the doors need to be shut when the band is in the tunnel. It starts to look like a... train? Only an endless train with a peculiar way of boarding.
This endless train also has a downside: if anything goes wrong, the whole band/train has to stop, it cannot be re-routed. What if we segment the band into individually routable parts? Only then they'll have to stop at exit areas to allow safe getting on / off them.
"I just happen to ride a lot of above-ground trains" implies trains being exposed to wind, rain, snow, cold, and heat. Same would apply directly to passengers if the moving walk bands were above-ground.
To imply that nine_k's non sequitur comment doesn't deserve the term "response", in that it doesn't actually respond to anything I said. Why is it posted under my comment?
>Being underground won't protect you from the noise of the mechanisms, but neither do the walls and roof of a train. Being on a train is loud.
More recent trains can be quite protected from mechanism noises. The line I'm taking more often has received brand-new trains and I usually don't hear the noise.
Tight curves tend to be loud, as is old track, or track that isn't welded into very long lengths. Locomotives are quieter than having motors on each carriage.
In much of Europe that makes trains quiet, except metro trains with tight curve.
People excluded, I think non -metro trains are usually quieter than cars.
I've only used one train in the US, which ran on jointed (not welded) track so made the 'clickety clack' noise, but presumably that varies and the North East is better.
Walls and roof protect you from excessive heat, excessive cold, wind, rain, snow, and the sound the mechanisms make.
Seats allow you (or people more tired than you) to sit and work, read, or rest, especially when you ride for an hour.
Also, train infrastructure is vastly narrower than such a collection of moving bands, and is readily available for maintenance when no trains are going.
The downside is that trains have to have stations. But the moving band will have to have a "station" all along it.