Friday, Sep 5, 2008
How those eerily beautiful bubble cars in "The Incredibles" may well appear in our not-too-distant future.
Nov 19, 2004 | In "The Incredibles," the eponymous superhero family spends much of the movie trying to either escape or infiltrate the villain's high-tech island lair. Among the creepy sci-fi elements -- parrots with camera eyes, a destructive robot that can strategize -- is the beautifully eerie monorail that silently glides around the volcano, transporting the villain's henchmen in small round cars. The heroes occasionally hitch a ride on one of these moving pods while battling the forces of evil.
In real life, we may not have superheroes, but soon we will have those little monorail cars, zipping commuters and shoppers (and maybe an occasional henchman) from point A to point B. They're part of a system called Personal Rapid Transit, or PRT, which is poised to replace the more expensive, less environmentally friendly and frequently less convenient mass transit systems of old.
What really makes PRT different from mass transit is that it combines the convenience and luxury of a taxi with the efficiency of subway and bus travel: Rather than packing into a large carriage with a hundred smelly strangers, with PRT you get a private car. Instead of stopping at every station on the line, you zip straight to your final destination. And the visual impact -- replacing the bulky steel trains and buses with sleek bubbles that look like mid-century creations from the designer Arne Jacobsen -- appeals to any kid who dreamt of being a Jetson, or now, an Incredible.
Leading the way in the PRT revolution is the Minnesota-based Taxi 2000 Corporation, founded in 1983 by Dr. J. Edward Anderson, a former NASA engineer who turned his attention to transit in 1968. After studying the problems with conventional mass transit, he developed SkyWeb Express, which is poised to be the first commercial PRT system in the world.
Anderson claims SkyWeb Express beats mass transit in every way: It's greener, more convenient, safer and visually more acceptable, since the cars and rail are streamlined and small (observe this comparison between the New York subway and a SkyWeb system). The cars, unlike the round pods in "The Incredibles," are egg-shaped, and allow enough room for three to four people plus their shopping bags, luggage and wheelchair or bicycle. They run on synthetic rubber tires, which reduce noise pollution, along a monorail guideway that's 3 feet wide by 3 feet deep. And because the system is powered by 600-volt DC electricity, it produces no emissions.
As Taxi 2000 imagines the scenario, commuters would enter the station, purchase a fare card and head to the platform -- just as one does now with most rail systems. But instead of waiting for a train to come by, passengers would hop into one of the empty cars that are idling in the station, swipe their card and enter a destination code. Because stations are positioned "offline" -- that is, the rail runs next to the station, not through it -- cars can pull into stops without slowing down traffic.
SkyWeb Express may also be the answer to the seemingly impossible quandary that every environmental advocate faces: how to make green technologies cost-effective. Taxi 2000 estimates that installation of SkyWeb Express would cost $10 million per mile -- nearly five times less than the cost of light rail and 10 times less than heavy rail. And operating costs at 38 cents per passenger mile (compared to $3.43 for heavy rail and $1.42 for light rail) mean that SkyWeb Express could operate on a break-even basis -- and therefore without the government subsidies that mass transit, which operates at a loss, relies on. The guideway also weighs less and is easier to assemble than light or heavy rail, and in fact the guideway can be installed by an ordinary fork-lift truck, only minimally disrupting regular traffic and therefore reducing the incidental costs of major construction.
Public transit, obviously, is already a huge environmental improvement over automobiles. According to the American Public Transportation Association, mass transit uses one half of the fuel consumed by automobiles for every passenger mile, and one third of that used by SUVs and light trucks. But buses and rail are far from independent of oil. In 2002, buses consumed more than 660 million gallons of fuel nationally, 80 percent of which was diesel. Light rail consumed 8,000 gallons of diesel gas and more than 500 millions kilowatt hours of electricity, and heavy rail, though not reliant on gasoline, consumed more than three and a half billion kilowatt hours of electricity. Depending on what region you live in, that electricity could come from coal and gas plants, rather than from a renewable source. Comparatively, SkyWeb fares better. No fuel is needed other than electricity, and it uses less electricity than other rail systems.
Get Salon in your mailbox!
