In this section I plan to discuss a whole array of what I hope are exciting concepts and directions for the future.
About a hundred years ago, when they started building cars, there were almost no cars and an awful lot of land. It made sense back then to make very complicated, autonomous vehicles. And ever since, we've been building increasingly clever-and-expensive cars and using them on stupid-and-cheap roads. That approach, however, only makes sense as long as you have very few cars and an awful lot of road. And we've tried to solve all of our automobile problems by piling more and more complicated and expensive systems into our cars. Meanwhile, we have greatly increased both the number of private passenger vehicles we have (probably 150 million of them in the USA alone), and the number of vehicles we have per mile of urban and suburban roadway. We've continued along this dead-end path, even though I contend that we LONG AGO passed the point where it's now cheaper and more intelligent to switch to the now-more-practical approach of instead building stupid-and-cheap cars and using them on clever-and-[relatively]-expensive guideways.
The current automobile-based system involves numerous major and minor problems, including among them:
A good replacement system for the automobile will reduce or eliminate not just some, but ALL of the above problems.
The system I propose as a replacement will involve passive vehicles, in which the maximum possible of the active components will be shifted instead to fixed locations in the guideway. This will greatly reduce the vehicle cost and weight and moving mass (thus resulting in huge savings of energy spent moving those vehicles), as well as increasing their reliability and anticipated service life.
By making passive vehicles that do not have to be driven, we can entirely eliminate from the vehicles all of the following major and minor components:
Whew!!! After a list like that, it's almost fair to ask, "Gee, what's left!!?". The answer is the body, seating, destination selection control panel and microprocessor, heating/ventilating/air conditioning system, and passenger entertainment and comfort systems (stereo/theater equipment, personal computer(s), communications gear, perhaps a refrigerator/freezer and/or microwave oven for preparing snacks enroute).
An outrageously wasteful aspect of our current automobile-based system is the waste of throwing into the nation's scrapyards something like our entire population of passenger vehicles (costing something significantly more then two TRILLION dollars to build, alone, and we're only talking about the USA here) every eight-to-ten years, where the great majority of the systems onboard those vehicles are in fine working condition. This "scrap and build" phenomenon represents waste on a positively colossal scale, unmatched by anything else in modern times.
Well, perhaps there is something more wasteful... having to constantly and needlessly accelerate, decelerate, and shuttle around (not to mention maintain) all of the above unnecessary and heavy equipment in some 150 million passenger vehicles (again, in the USA alone) on a daily basis.
This replacement of the automobile, designing and building the successor system, is THE business opportunity of our lifetimes. And one of my personal goals is to be one of the people who will help to create such a replacement system. You'll be seeing a lot more about these related ideas here in the future.
Meanwhile, one of the participants in the Transit-Alternatives mailing list here on Internet (see below), Jerry Schneider, has prepared a short summary of my concept for what we've started calling "UPRT", for "Ultimate Personal Rapid Transit" system. If you're interested, it's a good way to get a short introduction to the system framework I'm proposing.
Remember, it's not a question of if such a system will replace the automobile, only when. I want, and expect, to see it appear during my lifetime... and I'm 44 years old, as of this writing.
Your comments, of course, on these or any other topics you find as part of my Web homepage are always more than welcome. Please feel free to E-mail me at gep2@terabites.com.
A group of us on Internet have [had?] been actively discussing different strategies and ideas for such systems, with much of the discussion taking place in the Transit-Alternatives mailing list. To join the list, send an E-mail message to majordomo@bga.com where the first line of the message data is exactly "subscribe transit-alternatives" (no quotes).
You can also go to another Web site to read about other ideas regarding PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) systems, alternative PRT concepts, and a little of their history, by clicking here.
As of this writing, in mid-1997, I and my ideas have apparently been excluded from the Transit-Alternatives mailing list. Apparently my ideas were a bit too avant-garde and 'alternative' for, and upsetting to, some others there whose research projects and funding requests were based on more myopic short-term approaches to the problem. I cannot say I am hugely upset; my Internet participation time after all is limited, and the rightness of my basic UPRT concepts will be proven right eventually by the passage of time.
In June, 1997 I proposed the following brief article regarding recent advances in LIM technology to the ATRA newsletter.
There are at least two distinct directions possible for the future of high-performance personal transportation systems. One is to continue down the well-trodden century-old path of autonomous "automobile" type systems (where the vehicles continue to get more and more expensive and complicated and wasteful, and with all the well-known problems inevitably attendant), and the other is to bite the bullet and solve dozens of those otherwise-intractable problems immediately by going to a radically different approach: intelligent active guideways with low-cost, lightweight passive vehicles.
Of course, the general idea of implementing public transit using relatively lightweight passive vehicles driven by an active guideway is hardly new. The famous San Francisco cablecars have used the technique for ages, as have skilifts, aerial tramways and many other transportation systems used worldwide.
What is changing however is the relatively recent entry onto the scene of linear induction motors and their rapid development in other contexts. From their initial employment in Disney's PeopleMover in Florida, to non-theme-park uses at Houston Intercontinental Airport and the Senate Subway in Washington DC, LIM technology using passive vehicles is rapidly coming of age in a dramatic new generation of theme park rides which make a shambles of old assertions regarding LIMs' supposed inability to achieve high speeds and handle significant inclines.
Constructed last year and finally opened this year, the "Superman" attraction at Six Flags Magic Mountain near Los Angeles uses LIMs to accelerate ride vehicles to100mph before sending them up a 400-plus-foot-tall vertical tower.
During the next few months, not less than four major theme park attractions will be opening which use LIMs to provide spectacular accelerations (0-70mph in 3.78 seconds as an example, using 5000 horsepower worth of LIM technology) and to accelerate passive ride vehicles up significant slopes (in the case of at least two of these attractions, LIMs will boost 7-ton, 20-passenger trains some 23 stories up a VERTICAL track).
(The four I'm referring to are: )
But the story hardly ends there. Plans are on the drawing board for a new-generation LIM-powered passive-vehicle "bullet coaster" able to use terrain following techniques and vehicle speeds on the order of 150mph.
Agreed that these are basically roller coasters, not commuter vehicles. But the fact is that they use simple, low-cost, lightweight, passive vehicles which demonstrate the feasability of a rapidly developing peoplemover technology. This drive technology, using a scaleable distributed microprocessor network-based control and routing architecture and a different concept of track structure to support high-density intersections, has the potential to revolutionize high-and-medium-density urban and suburban personal transit within our lifetimes.
Certainly, developing and producing the successor system for the automobile represents THE BIGGEST single business opportunity for the coming century.
For a little more information about my concept, feel free to visit my Web page at: http://web2.airmail.net/gep2/phfuture.html [n.b. This is the page you are now reading.]
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This page and all linked contents originating with me are Copyright (C) 1995-2000 by Gordon E. Peterson II, all rights reserved worldwide. Last revised January 20th, 2000.