Point to point automated personal transit on high speed electric and/or magnetic levitation rail network.
Unfortunately , I am not aware of any effort in this direction, although I think it is the only valid direction for research to make transport relevant in very large cities.
The current debate on transport is a sterile argument between traditional transit and individual cars. The objective should be to combine the mobility provided by individual transport with rapid transit.
Current cars are too bulky for large dense cities. Current transit solutions are far too slow and inconveneint for the users.
any clue on your side?
Here is a web site that is monitoring world wide activity for Personal Rapid Transit
http://www.prtconsulting.com/news.html
High speed rail will be a significant part of personal rapid commuting in the near future. However, its role will be limited to certain distances. What that certain distance will be determined by the exact purpose. If this is needed for going to a particular place of work or center of a city from another busy location or area of human concentration. Anyway, at this point in time high speed rail will not be for short distances, it will not make a lot of sense accelerating to a great speed just to stop and pick up passengers. It will be one of the integral parts of the rapid human transit system.
High speed railway stations need a huge feeder zone, therefore you have passengers traveling in different directions. That means that to serve a high speed line you need to have a transportation network. At least a vast majority, if not all, of PRT are singular lines without junctions, or with one or two spurs, therefore I suppose PRT technology is not ready to serve clients of a high speed line.
The idea of having a PRT vehicle suitable for both low and high speeds while being fully automated at the same time eventually brings up the concept of linear motors. They allow all energy consuming parts of the propulsion system to be built into the trackside (i.e. non-moving) part of the system. Vehicles would thus come fairly cheap, require little maintenance and are externally (automatically) controllable by design. Furthermore can the "motor", respectively its trackside part, be designed to meet different speed / performance demands, making the vehicle itself very universal. However, in practice there are still many problems with this concept particularly concerning the required constant (narrow) distance between the trackside part of the motor and the vehicle, preventing it from broader use. Nevertheless the idea still sounds very promising to me. Especially since it reflects our current habit of using the same vehicle (our personal car) for different speed and distance demands very well.
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