Good Prospects in Silicon Valley

Especially over the past three years, the spirits of Ron Swenson, California-based solar entrepreneur and director of the International Institute of Sustainable Transportation (INIST) have been lifted by the incredible dedication and hard work of many folks around the world who are raising the bar to create podcars as a new form of public transportation. He sees them as a safe, efficient, convenient, economical, and solar powered form of urban mobility in a way that only a California dreamer (and doer) can.

Ron Swenson sees mobility breakthroughs.

While technological developments and much media attention are focused on automation for private cars, there is a quiet revolution happening in public transit as well. This transformation may ultimately eclipse the excitement coming from an alliance of vehicle tech centers in Silicon Valley (e.g. Google's driverless cars)with Detroit and other automotive centers around the world. Swenson sees a happier integration of podcar technology and solar power collection. This may well be the driving force that leads to true innovation in urban transportation.

As technological hurdles and societal inertia are overcome, a bold podcar industry is being born. Here are links to the activities sponsored by the non-profit INIST to support this broad international initiative, including student work at San Jose State University. Swenson is working to bring university activities into the world of podcar development.

Swenson relates well to Swedish design visioning and capabilities.

TRIPLING MASS TRANSIT

Mass transit has a role to play in response to the growing consensus that mankind and its growing urban conglomerations must change course to prevent costly climate disruptions. The chant is:  BAU (business as usual) is dead.

Cybertrans creativity  may stir up
APTA's fuzzy visioning.

APTA’s Vision 2050 projects a compelling vision for an efficient, multi-modal future. An on-line video inspires, but offers little in the way of numbers for costs, benefits and, most importantly, the overall impact on mode split. There is no plan, only the plea for public funds and empowerment.

Why no numbers? And why isn’t “mode split” mentioned in ATRA’s propaganda?  The current 2.5% transit share in US cities is pretty anemic. Even tripling it will get us only to 7.5% -- a good bit more like European cities with their historic pedestrian cores..

Miami's driverless Metromover
 complements the line-haul Metro

Based in Europe, UITP -- the international version of APTA -- several years ago embraced a “bold” goal of doubling transit ridership by 2025. With new metros opening around the world, doubling is far too timid a goal in the context of reducing greenhouse gases (GHG).

Fleshing Out a Bold Future

Vision 2050 has no list of New Starts of BRT, LRT. Streetcars, rapid transit and commuter system. Nor is there talk of the significant benefits possible with a program of metro retros -- upgrading ‘classic’ rapid transit to driverless). Nor is there imagination for innovative modal projects -- despite Miami’s MetroMover success. Podcars are not pictured anywhere.

Neither APTA nor FTA has much to say about such matters despite the fact that environmentalists are calling for a major shift to GHG-free modes -- walking, biking, digitized mobility and mass transit.

Turn to Silicon Valley

Will APTA participate in the 9^th Podcar City conference in the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley? ATRA -- the Advanced Transit Association -- is fully involved in PCC9 and has just joined APTA.

Hopes for a breakthrough in Richmond

What contributions can BART make to PCC9 deliberations?  The Bay Area’s metropolitan planning organization is the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. What will MTC have to say about updates to its Plan Bay Area 2040?

At the northern end of the San Francisco Bay is the city of Richmond. Here in collaboration with Cybertran, the municipal government is quietly advancing a breakthrough. You will learn more at PCC9 -- November 4-6 in Mountain View -- home to many Silicon Valley successes.

METRO FEEDERS

           

The Sydney Monorail was conceived as a way to redevelop a waterfront district, not as an efficient transportation addition. It does not distribute from a heavily used regional rail line. After a few decades, it was demolished. Downown Miami's Metromover does interface with stations on the high-capacity Metro, Opened in 1986, it was expanded in the 1990s and is judged by most to be a success.


One of the biggest problems created by a metro station is the very result of its attractiveness. Its traffic exists because people want access to metro stations across the city. They then exit the “system” and walk to their final destination -- or take a bus, taxi, bike or zipcar, or retrieve their car and drive on.

New ways to get to Metro

Metro stations are busy hubs with lots of traffic. The public converges on and leaves them in many ways. There is competition for space that jams up if not regulated. Pedestrians and bikes need safe access and tamed traffic.  Buses, vans and taxis need easy access. Drivers need parking. Retailers need buildings. The busier the station, the more traffic needs to me managed.

Plug-in Strategies

One way to relieve metro-station traffic pressure is with APM or ATN plug-ins. For podcar plug-ins, we have good ideas especially in Sweden. Ultra at Heathrow is an airport-feeder: two parking lots linked to the edge of Terminal 5 at London’s largest airport. 

Several APMs -- fully automated and driverless, but with conventional online stations -- feed metros. The most notable is Miami’s “downtown people mover” now known as Metro-Mover. More than just a cute name, because it does just that. Miami Metro’s busiest station is happily integrated with the DPM, supplied by Westinghouse, now Bombardier. This sophisticated south Florida metropolis has a flare for names. They call the new airport APM MIA-Mover.

Metro stations can accommodate feedeers,

Toronto’s Scarborough line feeds the subway. Singapore has three APMs that feed into metro stations. London’s Docklands started as a metro extender and been flexibly expanded to a network with several metro interfaces.

Good podcar plug-in planning has been done in Sweden -- King’s Curve, Flemingsberg, Uppsala, etc. Come to PCC9 (Nov 4-6, Mountain View, CA) to learn more. 

MOBILITY HOT SPOTS

Potent regenerative impacts for our many urban districts, towns and hamlets can be expected from local policies and programs to designate and nurture “mobility hot spots" (MHS). These governmental actions do not need billions of dollars. A simple change in local attitude will suffice.

MHS is a proposed land use designation for walkable districts that offer public access to zipcars, bike racks and rentals, taxis (within or robocars), bus stops eg Bridj, gathering points for ride-sharing networks, etc. These are all co-located. Each mode of transportation has its own dynamic. Some require government financial support; others can come from existing public works (streets, sidewalks, etc.) budgets but redirected to reinforce MHS objectives. Other modes are profitable.

Government’s critical role is to coordinate and synchronize all this. For example, why not provide free wi-fi access to the public at MHSs?

Pedestrian Is Community-Friendly

The creation and maintenance of MHSs requires cooperation from highway and police authorities. This is not easy, for it challenges long-standing Eisenhower policies that highways are king and road vehicles go right up to and into every facet of our lives. Can local policy create pedestrian friendly, landscaped and maintained districts and tame the traffic therein? 

Swedish (Christer Lindstrom) and Swedish-American (Ron Swenson) thinking collaborated at
PCC8 last September at Stockholm Arlanda Airport.

Who better to help Americans at this re-orientation than Swedish designers -- architects, civic space creators and animators, district managers and transport officials? Dozens of them have already registered for PCC9 -- the 9^th Podcar City conference this fall (Nov 4-6) in Silicon Valley. Learn more at www.podcarcity.org/siliconvalley.

MOBILITY UPHEAVALS

The power of digital connectivity is disrupting old patterns of life midway into the second decade of the 21^st century. Individuals are in touch with the whole world with their increasingly smarter devices. The future of urban mobility doesn’t look much like the past. Uber is making waves.  Today plus ça change, plus ça s’accelère!

Here’s an early sign of upheaval in urban mobility. Taxi drivers fear their livelihoods are being undermined. They see Uber growing by leaps and bounds.  Some are counter-attacking, comparing Uber drivers and their cyberlord to infamous Chicago mobster Al Capone!  Boston’s Carriage News has called taxi owners and drivers to mobilize against Uber founder Travis Kalanick’s “arrogance and contempt” for common people. Uber is not just a bully: it’s a “$40 billion bully” operating “outside the law”!

Taxis. Taxis. Uber-where!

Such words don’t come lightly! Taxi interests are worried: taxi medallion prices are falling.

Long-Term Impacts

Beyond these immediate knee-jerk reactions, forward thinking may make taxi folks happy. John and Jane are getting car-free. That’s getting easier with Uber as another mobility option. If more people are car-free, there will be more demand for taxi trips. Taxi folks should welcome car-free life styles that Uber can bring, as transit operators and fans do.

Car-free voters will push for better mass and extensions into under-served areas.  Violà -- la grande ouverture for podcars. It’s enough to catch investor interest in Berlin, London and Paris as well as Asia. Smart new mobility models are getting serious attention because of identifiable new project where people live comfortably sans voiture.  

The highest density of moneyed digital innovation is in California Silicon Valley.  No coincidence that PCC9 -- the 9^th annual Podcar City conference -- is there. Mark your calendars -- Nov 2-4, 2015 -- somewhere in a cyber-cloud near San Jose!

THE AIR IS NOT FREE

- courtesy of ecowatch.org

According to UN sources, 49 gigatons of carbon dioxide were poured into the earth’s atmosphere in 2010.The volume is growing, and the forests and ocean cannot absorb it all. The sky’s response to this startling proliferation of the burning of fossil fuel since the Industrial Revolution in the 19^th century has been long in the making, and it knows that the behavior for billions of people on this planet is the problem.

The USDOT spent half a billion dollars in the 1970s (so about $1B in today’s terms) to demonstrate automated, elevated transit, supposedly to revive and sustain declining CBDs (downtown business districts).  None has been built since.

Singapore in the 1990s spent about the same amount to build three elevated automated circulators to distribute from and feed to outlying metro stations.  The concept has not been replicated at other stations.

The DPM is sunny Jacksonville has not stimulated downtown commerce and has not been extended.

Is my cousin on point when she reminds me that bad things often come in threes?

Elevated Guideways Cut the Sky

The non-success of the US DPM and Singapore Circulator programs is stinging evidence that elevated transport infrastructure (except for major bridges or ramps at airports and parking structures) doesn’t fly. Columns and their footings, guideway sidings and underbellies, and busy stations which will be big if the handle a lot of trips will not necessarily be welcomed in community and commercial streets.  Yes, they can be pretty, but they also age. They can too often be abused -- graffiti, vandalism, as ad hoc use as toilets, etc.

Aging guideways and columns of the Morgantown PRT.

To many, no matter how aesthetic and light in scale, elevated infrastructure is ugly and bulky. Even power lines raise objections. Transport infrastructure can be noisy. It blocks views and lets passengers peek into private spaces.  Birds do their droppings from it. Rains and ice gravitate down from it in usually random places.

Boston, New York, Seattle, San Francisco and other US cities have spent billions of dollars to get rid of elevated highways and rail transit. Infrastructure in the sky just doesn’t cut it in the long run. Nor in some districts does elevated PRT. Sure, some stretches of PRT can happily be elevated - through stretches of wide greenways, in utility easements, and over and alongside major arterials outside the city center.  But to argue that it is elevated is to abort further consideration.  Even public officials and civic leaders who can think outside the box don’t want “Spaghetti in the Sky”.

Caring for the Sky

The sky is not free. It is public space, but it is not empty. To the contrary, it can and should be full of community life. Invisibly it is also full of the air with breathe, the atmosphere so vital to life itself.  This same atmosphere takes away our waste, but it only so much. Otherwise, in the long run there are problems that economist call external diseconomies. We are feeling the pain in violent weather. Humankind has emitted and continues to emit huge volumes s of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day, year after year, decade after decade.

The skies are responding with extreme weather. Science is telling us it’s here. Insurers are paying out: it costs.

The sky ain’t free!

EAST COAST RISING

Solar Skyways

For the last several years, Silicon Valley was the main source of American news about podcars. This interest in next-gen mobility is shifting east in at least seven places.

Northern California has a Skytran prototype hanging in a NASA facility at the sourthern tip of San Francisco Bay. San Jose coined a new term for PRT and studied “Automated Transit Networks” --  ATN -- quite seriously for its airport. Over the last several years, Milpitas, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and Santa Cruz have all flirted with daring new podcar concepts. Off in the great Central Valley, Fresno has a growing pot of money for innovative transit. Several years ago, given the lack of comparable interest in other parts of the USA, I entitled an article California Rising! to describe Golden State interests. The 4^th Podcar City conference took place in San Jose in 2000. PCC9 will return to Silicon Valley.

The geography of US podcar interests.

Today new interest in podcars is palpable along the historic Eastern Seaboard, where cities are older and cultural gems are found amid the 20^th century infrastructure.. 

Seven in the East

Podcar projects have quietly advanced in different ways in seven Eastern Seaboard locations -- stretching from winter-hardy Boston all the down to genteel Atlanta. One of them is close to DC. USDOT is paying attention to the Rising Seven. Here is a rundown, north to south:

            Boston MA:  A coalition of green activists is pursuing solar-powered podcar implementations in several locations. Boston’s booming knowledge economy is driving growth and new construction, but also traffic. Harvard’s plans to expand south of the Charles River are moving forward, and the School of Public Health, which is 2-3km away in Boston’s Longwood complex, has received a huge grant from a Hong Kong developer.

            Secaucus NJ:   Jpods has already set up a demo section in this progressive and prosperous town just a short train ride west of Midtown Manhattan. Funding possibilities from real estate development and sponsorships tied to the MetLife Stadium and other regional destinations are great. Feet are already on the ground.

            Fort Monmouth NJ:  The state wants to establish itself as an R&D focus point for emerging driverless vehicle technologies for public transport, including buses, podcars and driverless taxis. Input from Princeton’s statewide PRTstudies are an excellent starting point, with expert guidance from ATRA Chair Alain Kornhauser.

            Montgomery Co. MD:  County land use and transportation officials have taken interest in ATN as a way to extend their BRTambitions, or to serve as a way to save costs by using podcars to serve off-corridor destinations. The University of Maryland needs better connections to the Washington Metro station -- the proverbial last-mile problem for transit users.

North Carolina students and entrepreneurs think small and dual-mode for ecoPRT.

            Raleigh NC:  In a region where PRT was studied in some detail near the airport before the 2008 crush and at an institution that looked at APMs in the 1990s, North Caroline State University (NCSU) engineering students, professors and entrepreneurial affiliates are advancing ecoPRT plans.

            Greenville SC:  Clemson and Bob Jones Universities are working on driverless carts in a progressive town where cars and construction are prominent.  PRT Consulting has analyzed and helped envision hiking trail and airport applications. Local executives at Fluor, Michelin and BMW look for growth opportunities in a region where senior communities are taking to car-free living.

            Clayton Co. GA:  This transit-less county on the other side of Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport has voted funds to immediately restart conventional on-street bus services with half the new sales tax revenues. The other half is to be dedicated to development of a 15-25km transit spine that would link into the MARTA airport station. Commuter rail and BRT have been studied, but there is interest in network solutions.

Between the Coasts

In the Heartland, there have been few such signs of PRT interest. In Chicago, plans looked serious in the 1990s but aborted. Minnesota with its rich involvements in PRT development has no project underway. Colorado always has dreamers, including some with podcar ideas. Nothing of the intensity of Silicon Valley nor of the fundamentals now rising in the East can be found in the Heartland or the Sunbelt from Florida across the Gulf of Mexico to Texas and beyond.

New winds of podcar interest are blowing in the East.