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.

ARCHIVAL VISUALS

Trans.21 -- the clearinghouse of information on automated people movers established in 1983 -- is cleaning house. Several dozen video cassettes on various kinds of advanced, automated transit as well as scores of slides and other material are available. They can be useful to researchers, historians and podcar fans and useful to publicists.

Ford Motor Co.'s 1970s APM

The cassettes should work, but cannot be guaranteed. These are pre-digital relics from last century, They include system descriptions of Aerorail, Apogee, Austrans, Otis, nd Taxi 2000. An interview with Franzen who launched the Chicago RTA's PRT program with Raytheon. A plan for Denver's Auraria district. These are rare finds. A tribute to the artwork in the stations of the Detroit DPM. And more.

You can obtain all of these slides and cassettes by making a $1000 tax-deductible donation to the Advanced Transit Association, known as ATRA, which since 1976 has been pushing the agenda of modern mobility forward, ATRA wants to become more active and aggressive in 2015. Your purchase will not only get you a set of rich and valuable visual material, it will boost ATRA's coffers.

Questions, email lfabian21@gmail.com.

PARLEZ-VOUS ‘PODCAR’?

The world of advanced mobility spoke a Swedish-accented English early this month at PCC8 at Arlanda Airport.  Where are the metro-loving, transit-exporting French in these exchanges?

  

The 8th Podcar City conference in Stockholm (Sept 3-5) emitted strong signs that PRT (aka ATN, podcars, GRT and perhaps dual-mode systems) is now a serious contender for urban transit implementations. As ride-sharing start-ups garner big buck investments from even larger global Silicon Valley dynamos, it seems that PRT is on the verge of getting long overdue public support and private funds.  

Magnus Hunhammar is in the center of the sun-kissed Icebreaker

As evident in plans for a huge Green activist march in New York City Sept 21--  timed  just before aUN Summit on Climate Change -- heightened interest in PRT is coming from an urgent world search for ways to reduce carbon emissions. Themed as To the next level!, PCC8 in Stockholm took podcar discussions to higher operational, financial and political levels. Bravo to chairman Magnus Hunhammar, director of the Institute for Sustainable Transportation and to Hans Lindqvist, chair of the association of Swedish municipalities moving to embrace PRT solutions, known as Kompass!

Modest Implementations Within Reach

Discussions at PCC8 excited many. One session previewed the newly released assessment of the Automated Transit Network industry by San Jose State University’s Mineta Transportation Institute. The USDOT report was internally and externally reviewed, and includes a significant recommendation that ten-station PRT projects are within technological reach. A live hook-up to San Jose with three of the research team who were at PCC8 made this clear. The report is available at  http://transweb.sjsu.edu/project/1227.html.

PRT developers Ultra and Vectus were also actively present in Stockholm in early September, along with several new Chinese entrepreneurs. The team from Tubenet impressed all with their future-embracing outlook and Asia-scoped action plans. Swedish consultant Ingmar Andreasson wowed the largely Swedish-US gathering with quantitative analysis indicating that PRT capacities can be boosted to levels more comfortable for transit officials.

A Venue near Arlanda Airport

Tubenet’s podcar design uses quite small vehicles that can operate at three “tiers” -- 40, 60 and 80 km/hr -- coming from a country where transit is in boom mode. Vehicles running within a tube have overhead power rail and solar collectors atop the tube. This Chinese R&D program is working on a 4km, 12-station test network running in 3 years based on existing vehicle and guideway prototypes. A metro-wide 446km network has been simulated for the ancient city of Xian (population. 4m).

No one from France participated in PCC8.  Podcar visionary Christer Lindstrom, whose French mother taught him la belle langue, was perhaps the closest thing. France prides itself on innovative transport and earns lots of foreign currency planning, building and operation metros and bus systems. How triste that no one from France or Germany seems to be paying attention to PRT potentialities

.

Political Questions and Challenges

The Swedish Transportation Administration’s Chief Strategist Bo Olsson is not and cannot be a podcar “fan”. He must take an objective standpoint. At PCC8 he advised that taxi-sized vehicles as typically envisioned for PRT are not necessarily optimal for all urban mobility needs. Larger vehicles make good sense in thinking out future modal priorities. Olsson also cautioned that PRT guideways are a negative due to their costs and aesthetics.

The mainstream transit world - engineers, planners, contractors and operators - is still largely dismissive of PRT. None of them were at PCC8. They are busy with the worldwide metro boom which is increasingly driverless. By and large, Swedish civic leaders think of PRT as “science fiction”. Their European and American counterparts do too. The big difference is that in Sweden, officials have a qualitative and quantitative grasp of PRT. In the US, they hardly know what it is.

Crystallizing Interest

Sweden’s sophistication with PRT is based on analysis and simulations that offer dimensions to public discussions. Goran Tegner is a major leader in these debates and pointed out that Stockholm transit ridership is stagnant. Andreasson’s new research indicates that PRT capacities can be boosted by use of coupled, larger vehicles, each trip scheduled to 2 or 3 stations during peak hours. For a California city, a 48 km, 50-station network can distribute 13,400 in an hour from a regional rail station (link capacity 6000pphpd).

Ron Swenson in a Pod

Dozens of Swedish municipalities and institutions are working to advance PRT visions. Two new ones popped in at PCC8 -- from Stockholm suburbs Sundbyberg and Botkyrka. Plans for Uppsala were “frozen” last year, but are not dead. EU officials have asked why an application for funds has not been submitted. Meanwhile this university town of 200,000 residents is studying streetcar options.

Four development nodes envisioned outside Stockholm’s growing Arlanda Airport are showing broader and, in the long run, more financeable podcar ambitions. Major office expansion of the airport’s Airport City, a successful segment of retail, hotel and meeting facilities wedged between the main passenger terminals, is underway. A PRT network connecting all this and the town of Marsta is widely understood by airport and local officials to be a sustainable option that will reduce carbon emissions and make the area more efficient and prosperous. This has been drafted into a report, and a panel of four political candidates from different parties at PCC8 agreed that it is worth pursuing.

Based on these discussions, the maturation of the many aspects of PRT technologies made over the last decade and the new USDOT report, PCC8 ended with a clear statement: public officials can plan and implement better mobility options with confidence. And next year -- in San Jose?

MARKET BASICS

A significant report by the Mineta Transportation Institute on the status and prospects of the podcar “industry” is to be released this fall as a peer-reviewed USDOT document that will be freely and widely disseminated. It advises that a 5-10 station Automated Transit Network (ATN) project is within confident technological reach and with supportive public policies can be brought to passenger service in two or three years.

Does ATN have the potential to restructure
life in cities such as Cleveland?

ATN State-of-the-Industry in 2013  is intended to be an informative tool for planners, urban designers, and others involved in public policy, especially for urban transit and redevelopment. Despite the international nature of ATN supply companies, the MTI study focuses on prospects in the USA. Implications for the rest of the world are not explored.

A Silicon Valley Outlook

 Dr. Burford Furman, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at San Jose State University, led the team that included, Sam Ellis (SJSU), Lawrence Fabian (Trans.21), Peter Muller (PRT Consulting), and Ron Swenson (INIST).

Automated Transit Network (ATN) is defined as a passenger system consisting of automated vehicles on exclusive, grade-separated guideways that provides on-demand, non-stop, origin-to-destination service over a service area as opposed to a corridor, as with LRT and metros. ATN is not today ‘on the radar’ nor taken seriously by urban planners, transit professionals, or policy makers. The City of San Jose recently looked seriously at ATN as an airport connector, but found reasons to pause.

Over the years there have been ATN or PRT proposals in Sunnvvale,  Stanford/Palo Alto, Milpitas, Mountainview and Santa Cruz. The MTI report discusses how ATN could expand the coverage of existing transit systems and presents parameters for planning an installation. It touches on options for project financing and identifies the opportunities and challenges in planning and funding ATN systems.

California-Swedish Dialog: September 5

Furman and new MTI director Karen Philbrick will discuss these findings from California via satellite connections during in a session with Fabian, Muller and Swenson at the 8^th Podcar City conference near Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport on Friday, September 5.

The edge of future urban mobility is being cut with Swedish design excellence and Silicon Valley genius.