Are you aware of what is destined to be one of the great transit solutions of the 21st Century?
THE REAL SOLUTION to UNACCEPTABLE WORLDWIDE URBAN TRANSPORTATION CONGESTION and RESULTING UNSUSTAINABLE COSTS
Building energy-efficient automobiles is a great idea, but it does nothing about:
- CONGESTION.
- The appalling number of DEATHS and INJURIES due to automobile accidents.
- The INEQUITY that results because there are so many people who cannot, should not, or prefer not to drive automobiles, and with the baby boomers reaching their senior years there will be more of them.
Building more buses and conventional rail systems contributes to the needed alternative, but there are inherent problems:
- Notwithstanding many attempts to improve service and lower costs to the rider, transit ridership in U. S. cities outside of New York is barely more than 3% of all of the urban trips and less than 1% of the passenger-miles of travel.
- To provide greater equity, some metropolitan planning organizations have proposed to spend over 60% of their entire transportation budget on transit, even when calculating that by so doing they will raise the number of transit passenger-miles by barely 1%.
- Conventional rail systems attract more riders than buses, but their capital costs are funded 100% out of taxes, and typically two thirds of the operating costs are funded out of taxes. These systems are not built without heavy federal subsidies. As increasing deficits in our national budget weigh more and more heavily, the need to economize becomes more evident.
With only these conventional systems available we will continue to be subject to more traffic jams, more pollution, and reduced accessibility. The future looks bleak indeed if we continue to think only of automobiles, busses, and trains. Society needs these systems, but we have needed also to apply the best of our technological capability to new solutions. The problem is difficult. But over many decades, a growing number of engineers and planners have been working on a much better way – a real breakthrough. The best of our systems engineering has synthesized a new system that is so superior to conventional modes of transportation that for many people it seems unbelievable. The new system will work in cooperation with existing systems and will augment them.
We call our version of the new system an Intelligent Transportation Network System (ITNS) because that is exactly what it is: a network of guideways on which fully automated (intelligent) vehicles operate in the most intelligent way possible – they carry people and goods nonstop between many stations.
A summary of the results of that systems engineering follows. A more detailed summary, with references to primary sources, is the subject of the DVD announced elsewhere on this website. To see a visualization of the new system see our DVD
Economics
- Beginning with no commitment to any prior system or technology, the new system has been optimized for minimum cost per passenger-mile.
- To minimize guideway cost it uses very small, light-weight vehicles.
- To minimize vehicle-fleet cost it uses off-line stations
- To minimize operating cost it is fully automated and provides on-demand service.
- To minimize life-cycle cost, optimal choices of the mean time between failures of each component are made.
- The result is profitability in many applications – no subsidies.
- The cost per daily trip is less than 1/12th that of a typical surface-level railway (light rail).
Environment
- The system releases no carbon dioxide or other air pollutants during its operations.
- It can operate on solar or wind energy when coupled with an energy storage system.
- It requires only 1/5000th of the surface land for its posts and stations.
- The land underneath the guideway can be used for hiking or biking trails and provides no impediment to cross traffic of animals, people, and vehicles.
- The system design minimizes material, land, and energy use.
- It uses less than a quarter of the total energy per passenger-mile of a typical light rail system.
- Its land savings plus high ridership permits safe, zero-pollution, energy-efficient, environmentally friendly, higher-density living to an extent not possible with conventional transportation.
Service
- The distance to a station is substantially shorter than possible with conventional rail.
- The system will be available to all at any time of day or night.
- It will operate in all weather conditions except for extremely strong winds.
- There is no need to wonder which bus to take or when it will come.
- The off-peak wait is zero. The average peak-period wait is one to two minutes.
- The vehicles wait for people rather than people for vehicles.
- The ride is smooth, quiet, enjoyable, and nonstop from origin to destination.
- Trip time is short and predictable.
- Everyone is comfortably seated.
- You ride alone or with your own travelling companions.
- No driver’s license is needed.
- You can make good use of your time while riding.
- Text messaging or cell-phone use in route is acceptable.
- The vehicles accommodate a wheelchair, bike, stroller, or luggage.
- The system will attract at least ten times the ridership of conventional transit.
People-Carrying Capacity
Greater than practical by conventional surface-level urban rail systems.
On-Time Performance
Less than 3 hours of delay in 10,000 hours of operation.
Safety
The accident rate per passenger-mile is less than one millionth that of automobiles.
Status
- Systems of this type are being built in England, Sweden, and the United Arab Emirates.
- A full-scale test version of ITNS can be built and operated in 15 months.
If there is a problem with ITNS it is that the above characteristics sound too good to be true. They result, though, from the rigorous application of late 20th Century systems engineering to the very foundations of a problem that people have struggled to solve using 19th Century possibilities.
The Intelligent Transportation Network System is an essential technology in a sustainable world!
