CyberTran: Ultra-light rail for cities and suburbs
Public transit that would work in Houston 29
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Posted 8:55 AM on 14 Nov 2006
by Gar Lipow -
Posted in
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Gar Lipow, a long time environmental activist and journalist with a strong technical background has spent years immersed in the subject of efficiency and renewable energy. He has written extensively on the economics of solving the global warming, and why pricing externalities (though important) cannot be the main driver of such solutions.
His on-line reference book compiling information on technology available today, “No Hair Shirt Solutions to Global Warming”, is available at http://www.nohairshirts.com.
His articles on the economics and politics of solving the climate crisis have been published in Z magazine and a number of small journals.
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Tom Philpott Posted 2:16 am
14 Nov 2006
Seriously, this needs to happen now. Gar, how much would it cost to set up ultra-light rail in a mid-sized city (eg, Austin, Tx.)
Victual Reality
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David Roberts Posted 3:09 am
14 Nov 2006
Perhaps a follow-up post ...?
www.grist.org
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MrGrant Posted 3:15 am
14 Nov 2006
This article seems to make much of the privacy/personal safety aspects of proposed small-vehicle mass transit. However, it would be incorrect to assume that such considerations are a reason behind Group Rapid Transit systems like CyberTran as well as PRT.
Rather, privacy or group selection is a byproduct of GRT and PRT operating characteristics. When a vehicle has fewer seats, it increases the odds that you will be riding by yourself. The odds increase when you add on-demand service that is direct-to-destination--the chances are usually very small that another person is going to need to go from the same station A to the same station B at exactly the same time as you.
To sum up: you will ride by yourself or with few strangers on GRT and PRT because it is more efficient, not because it is thought people are anti-social.
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swampthing Posted 3:33 am
14 Nov 2006
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Laurence Aurbach Posted 3:49 am
14 Nov 2006
The status of CyberTran is similar to other PRT proposals: It is seeking investment funds to construct a test track.
Automated transit systems are working quite well in numerous airports around the world. However, difficulties arise when transferring the concept to urban environments. Because the system is automated, guideways must be completely separated from surface traffic and intersections -- in other words, elevated or underground. Elevated tracks are less costly, but still have expensive ancillary requirements in the form of elevated stations and elevator access.
Outside of the controlled airport context, automated systems are likely to have higher costs from littering and vandalism. Computer controlled vehicles and routing, with large numbers of vehicles and extremely short headways, are unproven on the neighborhood or municipal scale. Government safety rules may require much heavier vehicles and infrastructure, thus decreasing some of the cost advantage. Also, many people object to the aesthetic/economic impacts of installing elevated guideways throughout a city.
These are some of the concerns that have slowed investment in automated transit systems to date.
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Gar Lipow Posted 4:00 am
14 Nov 2006
If you go to their website
cybertran.com wait for their silly flash based menu to load, select the really dark email icon that is hard to tell means contact, and you will get to the page with contact numbers and e-mail. You would have to provide them some numbers. What you might do is contact your Austin city bus company. See if you can get the lengths of their routes from them, trips per day on each route and number of stops.
If you want to calculate it yourself, to $15,000 per seat. A quick look on line gives us the figures to use the latter method:
You have ~42,000 riders daily who average 2.7 trips (including transfers and people who get rides one way I would guess.) So seats needed at 100 utilization (which will never get is 21,000. (Cause with CyberTran, we don't need no stinkin tranfers.) But of course 40% is a more reasonable utilization (much higher than a conventional system, but we have on demand routes computed on the fly.) So 52,000 seats is more reasonable to handle peak ridership. So capital costs are more like 788 million dollars. Amortized over 20 years at 5% interest, this will cost you around $63.2 million per year. Add 10% for operating expenses (remember capital costs represent 90% of the dollars in running this railroad) and your price comes to well under $70 million per year.
Operating expenses for CapMet in 2006 were budgeted at $142.3 million. Depreciation and amortization were budgeted to run another $23 million.
This is an immense savings, but it is also a super-rough estimate. Also I'm adding in Van-pool costs and such. If you separated out expenses for fixed route buses and trolleys only, you would probably end up with a cost closer to the CyberTran estimate.
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Gar Lipow Posted 4:09 am
14 Nov 2006
But automated systems are no longer experimental. BART has been driverless since 1972.
It has been extensively run on test beds over a two year period. It is being ignored for the usual chicken egg reasons; no one wants to be the first to try something new. Also Federal rail funds specifically have a provision excluding their use for experimental systems.
And to the person who asked me, I have no financial relationship with CyberTran.
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Gar Lipow Posted 4:13 am
14 Nov 2006
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Lloyd Wright Posted 4:17 am
14 Nov 2006
Even more boldly the article goes on to say: "To replace buses with a form of transit that is less expensive, more convenient, and more comfortable would be a kindness to city and commuter bus riders, and to the cars that currently share the streets with them."
If CyberTran is less expensive than bus system, then it would have to be less than US$ 1 million per km.
These statements are very difficult to believe. An automated system such as CyberTran will have to be grade-separated (elevated or underground). An automated surface-level system would create safety problems for pedestrians and other vehicles.
The lowest cost grade-separated system in the world right now is the Kuala Lumpur monorail and it costs in the range of US$ 25 million to US$ 30 million per km.
I hope the numbers implied in the article are correct since it would be quite an impressive accomplishment. On the other hand, making outlandish claims merely to gain investors will ultimately harm the project's credibility. One should be careful in not being too reckless with the possible costs.
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geosynchronous Posted 4:45 am
14 Nov 2006
As other posters have said, driverless trains are viable in contain areas (e.g. airports) and otherwise in urban areas they need to be grade-separated. The idea of ANY grade-separated system being infrastructure-cost-competitive with bus lines is hard for me to believe.
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ac5p Posted 5:20 am
14 Nov 2006
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Laurence Aurbach Posted 6:59 am
14 Nov 2006
I repeat, computer controlled vehicles and routing, with large numbers of vehicles and extremely short headways, are unproven on the neighborhood or municipal scale. CyberTran and similar systems propose to operate on complex, interconnected networks of tracks, not simple straight lines or isolated loops. CyberTran and similar systems propose to operate vehicles just a few feet or yards apart, with headways of a few seconds or fractions of seconds. Systems like that are unproven. That's why it's hard to find first adopters.
As for BART, DC Metro and similar metropolitan-scale computer-assisted systems -- the computers have been known to fail on numerous occasions. That's why human backup is always required.
To ac5p: I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but we are facing shortages of fuel for our cars. Some people say we are facing shortfalls now, some people say it will be later. But even optimists say it'll happen within our lifetime, 30-40 years. The U.S. Energy Secretary summed it up quite well:
If we look two or three or four decades into the future, we know that hydrocarbons alone will not meet the needs of a growing world economy. Even with all the technical expertise the world could offer and all the political will it could muster, eventually, we will run out of oil. And, even before then, the price of a dwindling supply will be prohibitive. At present, our world is overly focused on, and overly dependent upon, one source of energy. And that path is unsustainable.
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Gar Lipow Posted 7:04 am
14 Nov 2006
No, that is one of the points! Because of light track and light cars, switches are only ~$6,000. So every stop is offline on a siding! Your train only has to stop at a stop where someone is exiting or entering. Not at a stop where some other train is letting someone off!
>The lowest cost grade-separated system in the world right now is the Kuala Lumpur monorail and it costs in the range of US$ 25 million to US$ 30 million per km.
The estimate for CyberTran is $4 million per mile, which is ~2.5 million per kilometer. The reason it is so much cheaper is that with lighter cars you use much lighter rail. No cross ties, and the steel is such a light grade. A muscular man can pick up a three meter length of it in one hand. (Try that with conventional railway ties.) That means elevation is very close in cost to running it on the ground. Much of the cost of rail is leveling and site preparation. Because of the lower weight, you normally don't have to level or grade the sites the elevated rail runs on.
And no, you do NOT have to get down to 1 million per kilometer to compete with most (highly inefficient) U.S. bus systems.
For example in the Austin example I gave, routes in Austin total around 210 miles. At 4 million per mile, this is around an 820 million dollar capital cost. (And yes, the 4 million per mile is for both ways, not a one way trip.)
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Payton Chung Posted 2:44 pm
14 Nov 2006
Seriously, though, PRT (not to be confused with driverless transit, which works well in, say, Vancouver) has never progressed beyond the pipe dream stage, despite literally billions of dollars of tax dollars thrown at it from all kinds of directions (usually from government). What has changed this time? Who calculated these cost estimates? The same people who claim that monorails cost 50% less, since they have just one rail?
The cheapest, most sustainable way of getting around is walking, which, incidentally, is also good for you and often fun. Instead of waiting for some pie in the sky technological fix, we could just build our cities around walking, a solution that existed before we ever realized that we had a "congestion problem."
BTW, I voted "no." Simple logic dictates that, in a dense urban area with very high peak hour flows, individuals occupying large amounts of personal space will result in congestion. It does on today's highway system and on today's transit system, and it would on any PRT system as well.
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Gar Lipow Posted 1:09 am
15 Nov 2006
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Delay And Deny Posted 9:19 am
15 Nov 2006
In 1993, King County here in Washington held public debates on their proposed mass transit systems.
Metro, the regional transit agency, offered three plans, all involving some mix of busways and rail. They did not come up with these plans proactivity, but were pressed by voters, hoping for a miracle solution.
There was a 3 Billion dollar plan, a 6 billion dollar plan and an 11 billion dollar plan. When pressed, they said at the meeting that the 3B and 6B plans would alleviate traffic by -- zero percent. And the 11B plan would alliviate traffic from 0 to 3 percent, at best.
Hmm...the problem here is that there is no area dense enough to support mass transit.
I proposed to them a different idea: make taxi service cheaper and more computerized. I would basically take all the software of CyberTrans, but not build any of the hardware and instead use existing roadways and high milage vehicles. The cost of the taxis would be subsidized at the same rates as the "mass" projects. It would provide numerous jobs for drivers. The computer systems would optimize the taxis to allow multiple pickups without delaying people by more than a few minutes.
People who don't want cars would not have to have them. It would reduce cars for commuters by at least 1/3rd (three people per car, plus driver, assuming we didn't use Suburbans or minivans).
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Payton Chung Posted 5:05 pm
15 Nov 2006
Even ULTra PRT's spokespeople don't make such a claim.
On principle, I very, very seriously doubt any single solution, particularly any technological solution like PRT, that claims to be a panacea. Everything has a downside, and PRT is by no means an exception to that rule.
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bookerly Posted 6:14 pm
15 Nov 2006
It seems to me that the emptier the cars, the higher the cost per passenger mile.
So, if people often ride alone, how cheap can it be?
If the cars and rail are so light, what happens during a heavy wind?
The claim that bus riders often suffer harrassment (and the suggestion that cyber train riders somehow won't) is specious at best. This should be obvious.
The big problem, even if all the other claims are true, is where will you lay the tracks? The sheer amount of land required to replicate bus service is tremendous, and seems to make this a non-starter for existing cities.
patrick
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scatter Posted 7:41 pm
15 Nov 2006
I think they have a far better solution because you get your own personal vehicle so you choose where you go. This differentiates it from the CyberTran system in that you don't have to wait for other people or be sorted into groups and put on one train. Essentially it's somewhere between a taxi and a bus - you get your own vehicle which takes you almost all of the way to your destination by the most direct route. It also removes the harrassment problem suggested above.
Check out the ULTra website. It's got some video simulations and a lot more background information. CyberTran isn't the only game in town people!
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Whiskerfish Posted 9:03 pm
15 Nov 2006
Think about it...
Cheers
Whiskerfish
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Gar Lipow Posted 2:33 am
16 Nov 2006
That not an insignificant problem. I ride public transit. You get teenangers who like shout insults at the rest of the passenger. You can end with the only seat being next to a mumbling drunk. I'm not a women, but many of my friends tell me that sexual harrassment is sometimes a problem on transit as well. I've also had my pocket picked on a standing room only bus. Being able to skip a train that looks like your experience will be miserable is not a small problem.
And not CyberTran is not the only solution out there. I linked to PRT. PRT is more expensive though, because you are multiplying cars and motors. Most of the proposals also use rubber tires, which reduces energy efficiency a bit.
And in terms of still having congestion - with no on-line stops, and all the vehicles moving at the same speed you can get very crowed indeed without congestion or slowing. It is an advantage of computer control. (It better not run on Windows though.) That is the experimental part, and is a reason it does need testing in a real world case, before considering widespread deployment. I think what we really need is a beta test program for CyberTran, and the PRT systems too. Fund one small system in each of a number of small towns. System maker to supply the system on a turnkey basis. Fixed price (no overruns). No progress payments, payment only after delivery, passing of all tests, and successful operation for a month.
And of course it is not a panacea. It is not door-to-door. You still have to get from your home to the CyberTran stop, and from the CyberTran stop to your desitination.
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MrGrant Posted 5:33 am
17 Nov 2006
Furthermore, I am 99.999% sure that no first-stage PRT implementation will be given the theoretical burden you pose. I hope PRT is allowed to grow into high capacity as the technology is refined, rather than being set up to fail.
Indeed, the serious PRT companies, engineering consultants, advocacy groups, and governments like the EU and Swedes are at present proposing PRT for niche applications such as airport shuttles and collector-feeders to train stations.
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Hey, you got your talking points on my peanut butter...
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MrGrant Posted 5:40 am
17 Nov 2006
a. at the station. Train: You have to wait for the scheduled train; at night you may have to wait a while, and during that time you are vulnerable. PRT: on-demand travel, so you board immediately or almost immediately. This applies to everyone, so people loitering in the station late at night is suspicious. PRT station would be remotely monitored to discourage crime.
b. in the vehicle. Train: you have noted the dynamics. PRT: persons boarding would be alone or in a party of acquaintances traveling together. Once in motion there is no opportunity for others to board and make trouble.
Is there another situation you can think of?
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Hey, you got your talking points on my peanut butter...
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Gar Lipow Posted 6:24 am
17 Nov 2006
Public transit suffers in three ways in comparison to automobiles. One is the inconvenience that it is generally a slower way to get where you are going than automobile. (DOT statistics confirm that it takes about twice as long to get somewhere as by car. The second is the chance you will be subjected to petty harassment, name calling, rudeness, minor sexual harassment, possibly petty crime such as pickpocketing. The third is the chance you will have to stand, and that in general your bus or train will be uncomfortable crowed.
In terms of stations, you can get mugged in a parking lot with a car too.
Perfection what would be nice, but the big thing is to reduce the ways in which transit is less comfortable than automobile. PRT (or CyberTran which though a form of utlralight rail really is not quite PRT - both in terms of some of the advantages and some of the disadvantage) reducds many of the negative differences between mass transit and auto travel. Not all of them - but once you are guaranteed a comfortable seat, the ability to sit back and relax , read if you want to chat if you want to, whatever on your trip will make up for any minor difference is journey length. Hopefully time difference will be much smaller than the two to one ratio you currently run.
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Gar Lipow Posted 6:27 am
17 Nov 2006
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atreyger Posted 7:25 am
17 Nov 2006
I'm not down on the idea, it just really smacks of the Lanley Institute of monorail conducting with an eventual MCAT certification (Monorail Conductors Aptitude Test).
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Neil Posted 2:19 am
21 Nov 2006
Capacity - a highway lane carries peak around 2500 cars per hour. CyberTran can carry between 5-10,000 passengers per hour per direction, or 2-4 lane miles. One outside report suggests that we will be able to carry up to 16,000 pphpd in the future.
How it's done is a combination of vehicle control and scheduling, and 20 passenger vehicles. The key is to invest in the US in innovative transit systems. We are one of the last industrial nations not to do so.
The environmental and foreign policy effects of the current auto-centric society do not make us in any sense secure, to say nothing of global warming. CybeTran is a much more energy efficient way to move people, with electricity that can be made from any source including solar. Bottom line folks is, where there is a will there is a way.
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Gar Lipow Posted 3:50 am
21 Nov 2006
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Neil Posted 11:37 am
21 Nov 2006
The best way to keep the numbers low is to achieve high volume modular construction. We estimate a potential for 30,000 miles in the US along major arterials. Once scales of economy have been achieved, we can build .25 miles of guideway from a single construction point per day, and we can build the track off the end of itself. Then we will find out how low costs can go.
For now, while our commodity prices have gone up over time, since there is much more material in other systems, their costs have gone up even more. Soft cost reductions can also be achieved through private-public partnerships.
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