SkyTran offers Detroit new idea for mass transit

[Detroitnerd]

Great explanation of how it would most likely work out Detroitnerd. We should stick with the light rail system that has already proven to work and leave this high tech looking gizmo for Disneyland or some other theme park where it most likely belongs.

I think PRT is fine for an amusement park or an airport; both are places where it at least makes some sense to pour staggering resources into low-to-zero ridership.

[Gsgeorge]

If that is the worry why not preclude any public funding from being used on the system? These types of systems usually have some time limited charter that would allow us to include any provisions we wish. Let them build up Gratiot & Grand River [[or on the freeways) while we build up Woodward. The systems could provide different yet complimentary service.

This is just silly. When we complete the Light Rail, we'll already have two types of rail systems in this city [[LRT and the DPM). Why add another entirely different system to it? The benefit of mass transit is that you can expand and create transfer points for people to reach different lines, not just one line. Adding the Pods to an already-expanding transit system would be akin to building an escalator in a mall that reaches halfway up to the second floor, then making people take the stairs for the rest of the way.

[BrushStart]

No pods!
...

[Vox]

I like pods!

That having been said, what the heck is with all the royal "we" usage here? It's not as if any of you are actually directly involved in the creation of this system.

[DetroitDad]

Credibility is earned.

A legitimate and viable company would probably have the foresight to hire a credible spokesman, and get credible organisations on board to make monetary and technological contributions.

[Joseph C. Krause]

A system like this, should it prove to be viable and desirable, can still be built here. But let's not be the petri dish again. Give me a goddamn streetcar.

I had one of the first iPods and it had all kinds of problems and later crashed. Still great technology, but not really viable until the third or fourth iteration. Let's not be first. We've reaped the benefits and deficits of being first already, and we just need the thing that works and is proven.

[canuck]

Great explanation of how it would most likely work out Detroitnerd. We should stick with the light rail system that has already proven to work and leave this high tech looking gizmo for Disneyland or some other theme park where it most likely belongs.

Yup!

What Detroit needs is mass transit not puny transit. People Mover is great for short runs in the CBD and a touristic advantage for the future. Serious talk of mass transit options should include plans for the best and most advanced schemes out there. But Detroit should not foot the bill for nonsensical auto-centric minded stuff that goes nowhere. Streetrail and burban trains are the most advantageous for the size of Detroit and its satellite cities. I cant see how the planning can exclude suburban extensions because the city's population depletion and the outlying cities' growth. The good news is that if the region were to act on this, it would mean getting the latest systems available. That is the single most effective way of curbing exurbia's growth because property developers will favor density around nodes and terminals.

[davewindsor]

You are trying to design a resource-intensive system for low ridership. We already have a system like that: It's called the personal vehicle.

Nowhere do you get the gains in efficiency of an intelligent mass transit system, especially during peak hours.

No system like this has ever been applied to an American city, but debates over PRT have effectively derailed other systems [[light rail, etc.) that have proven track records.

You are talking about a system of four-people cars. To move 12,000 people along Gratiot at peak hour, this will require 3,000 vehicles. What happens when one breaks down? You have to get up on the guideway, fix the car, and let it go on again. This is an intensive operation that can take an hour. What happens to the other 10,000 people waiting in the pods? How can they escape in case of disaster? There are a lot of very important unanswered questions here.

What's more, we HAD a system that transported more than 100 million riders per year. It was called a network of streetcars. The modern version, light rail, is working in hundreds of cities across the world. We are preparing to implement it right now. Naturally, these hornswogglers want to step in and make their pitch now, before we see what light rail can do. They never pitch it to cities that have already begun building light rail because light rail networks bring a certain transit sophistication to a city, and enough knowledgable people get into positions of authority to laugh down PRT.

But if you want to listen to these flim-flam men, at least watch this first:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF_yLodI1CQ

Did you actually bother to google some of your questions? They have an FAQ website http://www.skytran.net/15Faq/faq01.htm

The skytran is moving at 100-150mph non-stop and then they separate on an offramp to their destination stop. They are not hindered by cross traffic. It can brake from 100mph to 0 within 55 feet. How fast is your light rail transit going to go? Light rail is constantly losing time at intersections if there's a red light, they are at a stop loading/unloading, or if a vehicle is blocking the rail lines. And what happens if a light rail vehicle breaks down? Then the whole system is jammed. It's top speed is no where close to what the skytran can do. So, even though each car cannot carry the amount a light rail car can. The sheer speed wouldn't require 3,000 vehicles to move that many people that light rail would require. In fact, the website says that they can move 14,000 people per hour during peak hours with a grid of 100 vehicles in a major city, not 3,000 vehicles. Did you make up your number?

If you bothered to watch the some of the other videos, the cars can join with one another if they are going on the same route. If one breaks down then another car can push it to the nearest off ramp. It's on a magnetically levitated grid, so it requires little power to move. Plus they have emergency wheels that kick in if the magnetic grid malfunctions.

In addition, it costs a fraction of what light rail does and they'll build it on their own dime. It's a reputable company that signed a partnership with NASA. I think this would be great for a city that wants to show its leading the way as a hub for technology and innovation like it had in its glorious past.

[Magnatomicflux]

The skytran is moving at 100-150mph non-stop and then they separate on an offramp to their destination stop. .............. In fact, the website says that they can move 14,000 people per hour during peak hours with a grid of 100 vehicles in a major city, not 3,000 vehicles. Did you make up your number?
If one breaks down then another car can push it to the nearest off ramp. .............

Where the hell is anyone going here anywhere close to downtown at 150 mph? Is this purly interurban?

If they had 100 pods, which according to the website only carry 2 people, leaving at 1 minute intervals.....don't they only carry 12,000 people p/hour? I'm no good at math so you'll have to figure out how they do it. Every 40 seconds? Are we missing an equation here? Like distance travelled?

If mine breaks I get shoved to a siding? Then what? I just hang there until someone gets around to me??? No thanks.

[davewindsor]

Where the hell is anyone going here anywhere close to downtown at 150 mph? Is this purly interurban?

If they had 100 pods, which according to the website only carry 2 people, leaving at 1 minute intervals.....don't they only carry 12,000 people p/hour? I'm no good at math so you'll have to figure out how they do it. Every 40 seconds? Are we missing an equation here? Like distance travelled?

If mine breaks I get shoved to a siding? Then what? I just hang there until someone gets around to me??? No thanks.

I'm guessing the one minute is an approximation, not a literal minute.

You're assuming these pods will break down a lot. I doubt that's going to be the case. For the most part, you're you're just levitating on a magnetic grid. These pods weigh about 200lbs a piece. It doesn't have 10,000 moving parts on it like a car.

[Jason]

Maybe we need to have a competition between these guys and interstate traveler? http://www.interstatetraveler.us/

[DetroitDad]

Maybe we need to have a competition between these guys and interstate traveler? http://www.interstatetraveler.us/

The future dependence on nuclear energy has opened up a new possibility. My understanding is that Detroit has some partially completed subway tunnels. Once those Asian carp make it into our water supply, it is only a matter of time before some bright Detroit capitalist harbors the power of giant subway fish trains.

[[Happy April Fool's Day. Now extended for the entire month of April)

[professorscott]

I'm amazed people continue to give credibility to this snake-oil and its salespeople [[especially people like the columnists of the Free Press, who ought to be able to fact check).

Sky Tran, and things of its type, only exist in the form of Internet videos, and can only ever exist in that form. It has been studied to death and pretty nearly proven that this technology can't work. Proponents point to an overhead rail system in Morgantown, West Virginia, which is no more or less "personal rapid transit" than the Detroit People Mover [[only even older).

There are lots of technologies around to move people which do work and other technologies, not yet tried, which might work, but in a region like Metro Detroit, where we don't even have enough money to run the bus system on the schedules we claim to run, it's ludicrous to be propping up pie-in-the-sky ventures like this, especially from someone who claims to have been in the business for a great many years and has never built one inch of a transit system anywhere.

Antitransit people love things like Sky Tran because they move the discussion away from proven transit technologies and onto unicorns.

[ghettopalmetto]

Did you actually bother to google some of your questions? They have an FAQ website http://www.skytran.net/15Faq/faq01.htm

The skytran is moving at 100-150mph non-stop and then they separate on an offramp to their destination stop. They are not hindered by cross traffic. It can brake from 100mph to 0 within 55 feet.

And they know this from the prototype they've constructed, yes?

I don't know about you, but I don't want to be on ANY vehicle that decelerates from 100mph to 0mph in only 55 feet.

[HazenPingree]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF_yL...eature=related

[davewindsor]

And they know this from the prototype they've constructed, yes?

I don't know about you, but I don't want to be on ANY vehicle that decelerates from 100mph to 0mph in only 55 feet.

Yes, they know this from millions of dollars of R&D partnering and testing their proprietary technology with half a dozen large companies including NASA.

I doubt you'd use Light Rail either when your car can get you from point A to B 10X faster than a mule like LTR.

[davewindsor]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF_yL...eature=related

You're a decade late. The People Mover was already built.

Sky Tran is not a monorail. They also won't be using public funds like LTR or the People Mover.

[Sandhouse]

This is so laughable as to pound another nail into the coffin of the Free Press. Maybe when you're an associate editor you're above fact-checking, but most of us know the McNamara Terminal "train" isn't a maglev, but rather a horizontal elevator. Built by the Otis Elevator Company, in fact. Dzwonkowski should get out more.

A trip to the Skytran web site discloses few facts, except that it has the capacity of a six-lane freeway. At a conservative 2,200 cars/hour/lane with 1.2 persons/auto, that's 16,000 persons/hour, or equivalent to 33 full pods/minute each way in a given corridor.

It also shows an elevated station reached only by stairs. No wheelchair or crutch users in the brave new world!

And how well will the touch screen work after a wino barfs on it?

[Detroitnerd]

Did you actually bother to google some of your questions? They have an FAQ website http://www.skytran.net/15Faq/faq01.htm

Dave, we've been over this several times already on this board. The pod people's science is ... junk science. They simply pull numbers out of thin air. They promise, essentially, the impossible: That you can build a resource intensive network for a low-ridership system and that it will all be done without subsidies. Does this sound too good to be true? That's because it is. And I hate the lying-ass people who put this system out there precisely because it takes normally sensible people such as yourself and gets them credulous and excited about a system that's nonsense.

Where is the peer-reviewed literature on PRT?

Where has a PRT system been built for a city so we can examine:

1) Financials?
2) Empirical operating information?
3) Breakdown statistics?

We can't, because the system has never been built.

So all those "videos" and "FAQs" are just a bunch of made-up fantasizing about super-high tech concept vehicles that were already starting to look outdated and silly by the 1980s.

And, as profscott pointed out, "Antitransit people love things like Sky Tran because they move the discussion away from proven transit technologies and onto unicorns."

[davewindsor]

Dave, we've been over this several times already on this board. The pod people's science is ... junk science. They simply pull numbers out of thin air. They promise, essentially, the impossible: That you can build a resource intensive network for a low-ridership system and that it will all be done without subsidies. Does this sound too good to be true? That's because it is. And I hate the lying-ass people who put this system out there precisely because it takes normally sensible people such as yourself and gets them credulous and excited about a system that's nonsense.

Where is the peer-reviewed literature on PRT?

Where has a PRT system been built for a city so we can examine:

1) Financials?
2) Empirical operating information?
3) Breakdown statistics?

We can't, because the system has never been built....

It's NASA science, not junk science. Unless you think the whole NASA system is a joke.

You wonder why the city looses 25% of it's population every decade since 1950. It's because the people of this city lost their vision and desire for leading the way in innovation. If we wait for another city to become a prototype, it'll never come here. Another city will get the glory and this city will continue to decline.

People thought Henry Ford was crazy when he introduced the rolling assembly line and made the cheapest car and paid twice what other automakers were paying. He did it and the city skyrocketed from 150,000 people to millions. If you had a new idea or invention you wanted to try, you came to Detroit to make it happen. That's been the vision that made this city great. In the last 60 years, what happened to that vision? People basically said we don't want leaders of innovation here anymore. They're opposing everything like you're doing now. And guess what? They moved to Chicago, New York or any other great city that embraced their innovative ideas.

What do they ask? Rights of way. That's it. What does the city have to loose by embracing innnovation? Nope, we're just going to opposing any new idea because we don't want to see the city turn around. How about exploring the idea some more? Nope, we want this city to decline more in a sea of negativity.

Let's put up light rail instead. We ripped the lines out decades ago. Watch in the next decade where another mayor decides to rip out the rail lines again because it's congesting the roads and too slow to be practical.

[ghettopalmetto]

It's NASA science, not junk science. Unless you think the whole NASA system is a joke.

The "NASA science" is the proposed propulsion technology. That's it. The systems engineering portion [[i.e. how the network behaves and performs)--which has been debunked decades ago by PhDs who study systems engineering for a living-- is completely manufactured by the "company".

Don't be fooled. This isn't "mass transit"--each vehicle proposes to carry only 2 people. Operationally, it's nothing more than a replication of the existing automobile-based transportation system, but without the redundancy of a roadway network.

Henry Ford's assembly line worked because it introduced cost-saving efficiencies into the manufacturing marketplace. Prior to Ford, each car was "custom-built". From a systems engineering standpoint, this SkyTran technology does not introduce anything that doesn't already exist, and does not improve upon the performance of known, reliable, and predictable models that we already have. Thus, there is no need to "embrace new ideas" when they are merely half-baked replications of more efficient means that already exist.

[professorscott]

With this particular piece of science fiction, I'm almost to the point of saying, let's give these guys the right of way they are asking for and see what they can do with it. There's a big difference between coming up with enough money to put up a web site with some videos and pseudoscience, and coming up with enough money to build a transportation network above the landscape in an urban area.

Best case scenario, eight or ten years from now, there are fifty or sixty concrete posts, 15' high, scattered around Detroit. Shit, man, this could be a tourist attraction, our own version of Stonehenge! A thousand years from now archaeologists will be marveling at these scattered concrete posts and wondering about their religious significance.

If you want to see a version of this, drive east on I-94 all the way to the end, just before you get to Port Huron look off to the northwest and beyond the outlet mall you will see Dr. Mostafa Afr's abortive attempt to build a hockey arena. Afr owned the Port Huron minor-league hockey franchise at the time. All that is on the site is steel arena substructure, and that's all that'll be there a hundred years from now, unless the urban miners can figure out how to dismantle it for scrap.

And the thing is, hockey arenas exist! We know how to build hockey arenas! But Dr. Afr was undercapitalized and so we have Arena Henge out there in Port Huron Township. Kids party on the site. That's about all Jerry Sanders and the Sky Tran camp will accomplish in Detroit, in the best case scenario. Kids partying under randomly dispersed concrete posts.

[Detroitnerd]

With this particular piece of science fiction, I'm almost to the point of saying, let's give these guys the right of way they are asking for and see what they can do with it. There's a big difference between coming up with enough money to put up a web site with some videos and pseudoscience, and coming up with enough money to build a transportation network above the landscape in an urban area.

I like your sense of humor. But seriously, stake-driving is how these kinds of schemesters hold the city hostage. [[See my earlier comments on stake-driving.)

What would I like to do? I would like to ride them out of town ... on a rail.

[1KielsonDrive]

I'm not sure what purpose any of this discussion serves while we have the US Taliban doing everything in their power to ensure that we're all riding donkeys in the near future.

[Joseph C. Krause]

Rejecting garbage ideas is not "lack of vision". I have a strong vision for the city. It is of a civilized, fine-grained, human-scaled urban organism connected by rail and waterways, full of engaged citizens. It's a vision I think most of us have, and which is actually a worthwhile pursuit. Rejecting elevated car-culture is resoundingly consistent with this vision.