BIKE: Re: Monorail, Transit, rails-with-trails

[Patrick Goetz]

Nick Dalton wrote:
> I agree with Eric on this one.  Personal Rapid Transit is the only thing
> with even faintly offers a service which can break even from the ticket 
> cost. The more miles of cheap transit we can build the more space on the 
> ground for everyone else.
> 

PRT suffers from the same problem that the use of private automobiles 
does:  Use of a (relatively) large container to transport a small number 
of people.  Consider what would happen at rush hour - would hundreds of 
people just line up waiting for their turn to get into a PRT vehicle? 
In some ways this is actually even worse than the use of automobiles, as 
there is only "1 lane" and everyone is trying to get in their "cars" at 
roughly the same location.  Also, consider the logistics of stopping at 
stations.  Does every PRT vehicle stop at every station?  If not, how 
would the switching be handled, especially with hundreds of such 
vehicles on the track all at the same time?  The switching thing seems 
like it would be a big problem for this technology, at least give the 
state of the art.  And if every vehicle stops at every station, why not 
just clump groups of users together into larger vehicles for the sake of 
efficiency?  Oops, we're back to monorail.

For people who haven't seen it, this is a still relevant page from a few 
years ago which demonstrates how incredibly space inefficient private 
vehicles can be:

       http://bikeforpeace.org/packing_pavement.html

This isn't the original source, but the formatting on this page is 
better than the original, not to mention that I personally like the URL.  :)