Future Energy Sources 2.5.2.1 Personal Rapid Transport System

Great idea - in theory - but there is a great expense in the infrastructure and I'm sure that taxi drivers will not be impressed.

Getting goods from one place to another in large volumes needs dedicated vehicles - and professional operators for loading/unloading. Taxis take smaller volumes (eg shopping), go from A to B, whether they are on main routes or not, and are still going to be required as these proposed systems will not be affordable over the whole street network. Would they ever pay for themselves? I doubt it.

There have been many attempts at providing a hybrid bus/taxi, some of which are quite successful for niches of the population:

Pre-booking for a mini bus in rural areas, rather than a set bus service aids in getting the transport where it is required, as long as the user has flexibility in their schedule.

A similar system is used in cities for mobility-impaired.

This gives much more flexibility, is cheaper to set up and provides more employment. It is also easier to divert in case of accidents/roadworks/track maintenance.

Here in Mackay we have a service called Taxi Transit where Taxis pick up several people from their doors and deliver them to a variety of destinations at just over bus fare type of rates. It is great for students, but luggage is of course limited and some cabbies whinge about it. Since it is integrated with the bus and standard taxi system it actually works well. Provincial towns such as Mackay are unlikely to ever see mass transit systems such as rail (the corridors have been sold and built on) installed and therefore surface streets will remain the main infrastructure. One complicating modern design feature is the seperation of residential and industrial areas, often by large distances and river crossings. An instance of this is Mackay, where most industry is gravitating to the South side of the Pioneer River and most residential areas are on the Northside. More and more bridges are required to move the workers back and forth.

Hi GM1964

• "Great idea - in theory - but there is a great expense in the infrastructure and I'm sure that taxi drivers will not be impressed."

It is true that such a system would be expensive to set up initially, however, many major population centers Sydney, Australia for example, have road and transport infrastructures that are either near or at maximum capacity. The costs involved in upgrading the existing roads and transport infrastructure is astronomical and you nearly always end up with a system that is still at or near capacity.

By constructing a Personal Rapid Transport PRT system such as this it should be possible to reduce the traffic density considerably and therefore remove the necessity for the upgrading of the existing infrastructure. When you take into the account the savings that are realized by not having to upgrade existing infrastructure then the real cost of implementing PRT systems is considerably reduced and may in the long run even be negative..

As for the taxi drivers, since humans stopped being nomadic and settled down in fixed locations where people could specialize the work they did there have been jobs that have come and gone. Nothing is forever and taxi drivers may well go the way of the dodo, but humans are adaptable and can be retrained to carry out other work. To penalize an entire community just because a small minority don't want to change with the times is just plain selfishness

• "Getting goods from one place to another in large volumes needs dedicated vehicles - and professional operators for loading/unloading. Taxis take smaller volumes (eg shopping), go from A to B, whether they are on main routes or not, and are still going to be required as these proposed systems will not be affordable over the whole street network. Would they ever pay for themselves? I doubt it."

RPT systems are not meant to replace all road vehicles but rather to act as a supplemental system that reduces the current demand on the existing infrastructure. There would still be cars, trucks etcetera for those people and goods that could not be transported by such a system. As for the cost, if you manage to replace much of the existing public transport infrastructure like buses, light rail, trams etcetera as remove the necessity for the upgrading of roads and other infrastructure then it more than likely could be economical.

You need to look at the problem as a whole and not just as numerous separate individual problems. A modern city is a complex socio political system hat requires a complex infrastructure that is highly interactive. This complex interaction means that you can't simply look it form the point of the profitability of a single component. This is a problem that has been creeping into business and society as a whole and it partly responsible for many of the problems we face as a developed society. There is too much short term narrow viewed financial accounting going on and as a result many long term projects that are essential are not taking place because this micro accounting says they are not profitable.

Many of the engineers on CR4 will tell you horror stories where highly profitable companies with reputations for being professional and supplying high quality services and products, have been destroyed by managers with little or no understanding of the problems as a whole and only look at short term profits. I myself watched a company that had a nearly century old reputation for quality and excellence nearly destroyed because the decided to not carry sufficient spare parts to service the equipment they sold.

If the human race is going to get itself out of the mess we are getting ourselves into the way we view the profitability of things is going to need to change.

In my view, these systems are just glorified, expensive machine-operated replacements for taxis. They will never be able to cope with the numbers of people wanting to travel at peak times, and although they might provide an interesting tourist perspective on the city, they are not flexible enough on routes to be a viable system unless it is possible to incorporate them into new-build suburbs.

Here in Edinburgh, there is a tram line proposed to run from the airport to Leith, via Princes St in the city centre. During the festivals this road is closed frequently for parades, and the trams would have no alternative route to avoid this.

As you can see, £600million would not give much coverage for the whole city, and frequent curtailment of services would be guaranteed. As PRTs run on dedicated tracks, and only on those tracks, they are not flexible enough for most applications.

My preferred alternative?

The biggest transport problem - as was stated by Emjay4119 - is the continued separation of housing from work places (perhaps a discussion in its own right). This does not just apply to industrial complexes, but also shopping and offices which tend to form in groups.

Perhaps the New Lanark principle needs to be looked at again?

Re Edinburgh,

Pity the cult of the numpty cannot use the existing railway lines we already have, whilst the lines may not go preciely where we want them to they go near enough plus the routes already exist.

Yes, it amazes me that polititians cannot agree on a course of action yet can run their own lives quite the thing.

CERT seems a dead duck right from the start, why does a bus have a steering wheel? A guided busway is simply a narrow road,,, or am I missing something?

Edinburgh has circumstances that are difficult but not impossible. A little fresh thought may be all thats needed, perhaps a design competition for children?

Or go back to the times when there were fully circular routes, taking in the suburbs AND the out-of-town shopping AND the indusrtial areas AND the office areas without the need to change bus or travel via the city centre.

There are currently about 50 routes in Edinburgh, only 3 of which are not directly affected by a closure of Princes Street. But at least they CAN be diverted.

Do you work for a transport organisation?

No.

I just see the system in my home town...........and think that it could be a lot better if the investment is put where the whole population can benefit, rather that just a few.

Same here, the circular went right past where I was brought up, I still remember huge black steam trains going by, the driver would some time throw lumps of coal into his friends garden as he went past.

I cant see why if we are going to have trams we cant make them smaller and lighter, that way we could maybe get away from expensive train type technology and into cheap automotive type technology. In Germany they run them through parks etc at about 20 mph, no separation nessesary, much simpler and cheaper. Maybe we could use a combination of rail network and special tram networks. I'm thinking of how the lines used to snake all round places like leith to service individual factories.

Unfortunatly we have health and safety nanny regs instead of common sense.

Our local councillor at the time said the main reason for not proceeding with reopening the South Suburban was that passenger and goods trains would need to share the same track. I asked if this did not happen on main lines, where speeds are much greater, but did not get an answer.

I think, the problems with local government is the councilors that have the power to make the decisions are even less appropriately qualified to make those decisions, than the account driven dimwitted manages, that have destroyed so many companies over the past couple of decades.

Trying to get people like councilors to even know what questions need to be asked let alone comprehending the complexities of technical answers is just never going to work. The other hassle is that they are going to try and pleas all the minority groups and end up with a compromise that achieves nothing and gets everybody peeved.

Council forward planning is one of those all time great oxymorons like "airline food" and "military intelligence".

Masu,

Look at the State and Federal level, and it is the same for larger councils, politics is controlled by lawyers. Howard is a lawyer, Beattie is a lawyer. What about the "Labour Lawyers" faction? Since when were lawyers workers? Yet they control the workers party.

I reckon Lawyer is a fancy way to spell liar, if they are too useless to make a living as a liar they get paid to be judges and if they are too useless for that they can always become a politician.

The sad thing though is even when engineers and the like get elected they don't get to make a difference. Look at Dee-Anne Kelly she is an Electrical Engineer.

Hi Emjay4119,

I know what you mean, you can tell when a lawyer is lying because his/ her lips are moving.

This litigious attitude that we seem to have adopted from America is a real negative for the development of new technology and scares developers off many good and practical ideas.

I was watching a program some time back where a Boeing 767 crashed due to the flight computers giving faulty information to the pilots and they flew it into the water killing everybody on board. The problem was traced back to when the aircraft was washed immediately prior to the flight. The static vents were covered up with silver coloured duct tape, something the manual specifically warns you not to do, and never removed. The engineer that signed it out didn't notice the tape nor did the captain who did the walk around immediately prior to the flight.

Even though the crash was due to the operators doing something contrary to the manufacturers instructions and at least 3 employees of the airline were negligent Boeing ended up getting sued and their lawyers told them to settle out of court.

There was nothing that Boeing could have possibly have done differently with the exception of not building the aeroplane in the first place, yet, they got blamed for the operators doing something the specifically said not to do.

It's crap like this that can really stall and in some cases destroy new technology and it's totally wrong. It also cost everybody because somebody needs to pay for these ridiculous lawsuits. Even if you win it can cost somebody like Boeing billions of dollars to prove they are innocent. I saw an estimate that these lawsuits are responsible for increasing the final cost of technology like aircraft by roughly 50%. You can only go so far protecting idiots from themselves and it seem that nobody wants to take responsibility for their actions, but would rather blame somebody else for their incompetence.

Frankly people are acting like spoilt 3 year old children that wont listen to warnings. Who do you blame when a child deliberately does something they have been specifically told not to do? The lawyers would have us believe that it is not the fault of the disobedient child but rather the person issuing the warning, because they failed to remove any chance of the child being involved in trouble. We have become so protective of children that when they grow up they have no comprehension of danger and consequently get themselves it trouble.

Well done, that sounds like a good healthy rant and I totally agree. I would add to that the insidious influence of accountants who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

The problem is that the law is becoming an entitiy based on words and not backed up by the common sense of the real world.

Have you ever noticed how many lawyers and accountants play at rebels on their Harley Davidsons at the weekends, 'risking' life and limb on about the only machine you cant sue the manufacturer for anything!

Good to hear from you GM1964,

I was thinking about this earlier this morning in terms of how things have changed through the generations. In the late 19th century when my grandfather migrated to Australia he lived in Irvinebank within walking distance of the Vulcan Mine where he worked. Now mining towns are a minimum of 25km from the mine site. It is how we have progressed largely due to the flexibility given to us by the internal comdustion engine.

We don't live in squallor on mine sites any more and the sites themselves are too big for people to live safely on anyway.

Hi, Emjay4119,

There are obvious safety concerns with mining, but the continued centralisation of workplaces is unsustainable. There is no reason why smaller offices and shops could not be incorporated into housing areas. There are mainly two types of office here - that for a small, independant company with <30 employees, and the grand estates for the large/multinationals employing thousands, and requiring major amounts of commuting.

Here the previous (Labour) administration approved the reduction of Accident & Emergency services - a move designed to save the health boards money - but which will increase the number and length of journeys by the general public, thus increasing congestion even more. While some of these are too far advanced to halt, there are some which have been rejected by the new (SNP) administration.

A lot of the re-organisation which is taking place does not reduce the overall cost/carbon footprint, just that for the specific organisation.

I used to think that the reason for politicians was to look at the overall picture, and chose the best option for the country.