122 comments on Bumpy Crude Oil Plateau in the Rear View Mirror
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GAIA Host Collective
Hi Alan
I am not asking to spend "our" money. JPods will be privately funded.
If we followed your thoughts in 1984, we would not have the Internet or cell phones.
Our current infrastructure is the cause of Global Warming and Peak Oil. Our current infrastructure is not working.
We can reinforce current failure or we can change.
France is changing with mature, workable technology.
Velibs (rental bicycles), 1,500 km of new tram lines in a decade, 3 TGV lines under construction, electrify every meter of French railways.
We do not have the time or resources to spend on gadgetbahn and related debugging (if it every works properly for decades in the Real World).
I know that you are posting here to advertise your business. Those before you have done serious damage to REAL transit projects.
Alan
The reason I post here is hoping to find people looking for viable solutions to peak oil.
Peak Oil is a civilization killer. We have a relatively short time to solve the problem.
I do not understand why you are hostile to rail that is not yours? I think rail is a good idea.
Your argument that we should not invent new and better solution makes no sense. Do you think we should return to rotary phones and stone tablets?
Your argument that we should not invent new and better solution makes no sense
It takes quite a few years/decades to first debug and second optimize any new gadgetbahn technology. We do not have the time or resources to go down a potential dead, or even invest in a seriously sub-optimum technology.
Also, I have seen (did not fully understand) a mathematical proof that PRT "networks" are severely limited in their complexity and reasonable "flows" of pods. Once past a certain complexity, scheduling gets tied up (traffic jams) at rush hour.
A wide variety of things have been tried in the last 175 years of railroads. Funiculars, cog railroads, different gauges, 3rd rail, elevated, etc. A wide spectrum of possibilities, all proven.
There is no real need for jpods, a hypothetical solution looking for a problem.
I do not understand why you are hostile to rail that is not yours ?
I have seen gadgetbahn salespeople come into town as cities were voting on good, workable Light Rail systems, sell their snake oil, defeat the workable systems with over-wrought claims of "better, cheaper", and then pack their bags the day after the vote, never to return.
Thus I cannot tolerate unsubstantiated claims of "better, cheaper" gadgetbahn. Hostility, skepticism and "Prove it !" are the only correct responses IMHO.
In my considered judgment, jpods sales efforts will have a negative impact on moving forward with real solutions (and will never fulfill their promoters promises).
That is my honest opinion.
I do *NOT* know if you are a misguided idealist or a cynical con-man, but in either case I cannot support your efforts. In the first case, I feel compassion, but will still move to block your claims, etc.
Alan
I see your point Alan, re the simplest/most robust/existing engineering solutions [I'm an engineer myself], but since the hurdles to getting the public/gov mindset around to public transport are both huge [and paradoxically small - once its built and everyone tries the damn thing..] surely a new gadget idea in one or 2 locations could spark the public conciousness. Dumb humans love new gizmos - even when TSHTF in 2009.
I grew up in an area of joined up public transport with electric urban rail [not streetcars] and I know the advantages. It is a huge quality of life advantage for the majority of any community.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyne_and_Wear_Passenger_Transport_Executive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyne_and_Wear_Metro
Any public transport is OK with me.
Yes, Tyne & Wear, a KarlsRuhe type of operation (a mix of Urban Rail types) and with the unique "pretzel" line :-)
Consider if some town builds a jPod system. In the first couple of years, breakdowns (including wheelchair bound pax traveling alone) are common, and scheduling software "locks" up periodically.
Costs come out 12 times what was promised, and cracks appear in the lightweight supports (bad welding it turns out), Rust also appears after a few years and it looks like the whole lot will need to be junked in a few more years (Remember that it was all speced to be built for 1/10th the cost of a real transit system).
Has the public benefited ?
Alan
Personal attacks seem so unworthy. I would like an open debate on possible solutions. Emotional "gadgetbahn" seem like saying in 1989 the Internet will not work or PC are gadgetbahn, mainframes are proven. Both PC's and the Internet are like PRT, the application of distributed collaborative networks. PRT is nothing more than web browsers you get in, look up a web site and travel on a packet-switch network.
The need to find solutions is so great and time so short. I do not see the harm in trying to find niche solutions. Morgantown's PRT has delivered 110 million injury-free, oil-free passenger miles. Not a bad result from a beta version. We would not have the Macintosh computer without the Lisa. On the Internet, we would not have megabit transfers without 300 baud iterations.
Perhaps the big problem between us in talking about this is you want an answer and I think we need a process for testing and finding answers. I think if we had the answer, we would have solved the problem.
A great limitation of the the age of cheap oil in America is we made the car the answer to fill all niche needs. We built cities (long term investment) around cars/cheap oil (finite solution).
Just as background for anyone interested here are some comments:
European Union
Contract No. GMA2/2001/52046-S07.13187
The Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems Report
VR 2001:3
Booz, Allen, Hamilton Study for the New Jersey Legislature
This is the expected growth of these networks:
There are many more studies. There is current construction at Heathrow and Uppsala Sweden. In the process of iterating to find solutions.
Visit www.jpods.com/studies.html for more studies and notes on other efforts. The page starts with a quote about the car from a systems engineering perspective. Scroll down the page to see a significant amount of academic work.
I think if we had the answer, we would have solved the problem
WE DO HAVE THE ANSWER !
It is only the will to build it !
Gadgetbahn distract from that will.
I do not see the harm in trying to find niche solutions.
Austin Texas would have the first 20 miles of Light Rail operating TODAY ! and 50 more miles in planning if it were not for gadgetbahn salespeople.
Morgantown PRT is an economic failure, the costs per pax-mile are too high.
The computer analogies are valueless, we cannot shrink people like we did transistors. And the shrinking transistor is the underlying basis for advances in computers.
We have had 175 years to try alternatives, develop and debug the best operating system, we KNOW the solutions.
And it was not meant as a personal attack. I do have some compassion for you if you are a misguided idealist. But personal feelings of sympathy cannot sway me to support a self destructive course for society.
Best Hopes for Mature, Robust technology,
Alan
Lobbying for an ultimate solution to distract from an immediate improvement that competes with a current system is an intresting tactic.
Even if it has been used it do make sense to do research and development projects for new solutions, it is healthy for a technological society do do such RnD. But we should not mix RnD and starting solving problems today, we need to do both in parallell.
Even if "gadgethbahn" yet again turns out to be fairly useless good research programs will give new insights. You use to refer to Moscow metros 90 s headway, why do that work? What insights would a stressed "gadghetbahn" system give for such situations?
And it could have market niches. They could be good for saving the property value for current style Swedish external shopping centers if plug-in hybrids dont work out, but that would only be 10-20 systems. They could be a topographic solution inbetween streetcars and cableways for making some towns denser.
Sweden is in the enviable position of having a viable Non-Oil transportation system largely in place (yes it can and should be enlarged and improved).
The USA will have to strain every effort to get where Sweden is today in less than twenty years. We need tracks on the ground ASAP, and we are NOT doing that today. Diverting too small efforts and attention to gadgetbahn is the wrong strategy for the USA, but Sweden has that luxury.
If get them to work, we may buy some in 2026.
Best Hopes for Swedish R & D,
Alan
We act as a host for one such project and there are some RnD being done.
In RoI terms the situation is more or less the same in USA and Sweden. There is a very long list of reasonable rail investments and it tends to get longer with the growing traffic. There are efforts in finding ways to hurry up the development but it is not easy.
Collective traffic investments in towns and cities is slow planning that often is driven by other things then good economy. The fast moving part is changing to biofuels in the busses and adding more busses. Most tend to focus on commuting rail to other towns since that is a long term grow or die issue and road investments if there are any local bottlenecs since those give an immediate effect.
Car traffic is still growing with a petrol price of $8 per gallon and overall growth is centered around regions with a european style town in the center with a growing city center, external trade via car travel, a halo of suburban growth that often are an extension of old building structures and satellite towns connected via rail. We more or less got two trends running in parallell, one US and one "continental city". The loosers are deep rural areas and towns withouth good rail service to a growing center, they only survive if they have a key industry.
Quote from Swedish study:
Quote from you
Heavy and Light Rail, for all their great attributes are not personal transport. Your claim "We have the answer" seem to be unsupported by the places that already have extensive light/heavy rail systems.
That percentage will increase dramatically in an oil supply emergency. Ridership will climb quickly and total miles traveled (motorized) will fall dramatically.
Please note that the study excludes two vital modes, walking and bicycling, since they are not "motorized". A vital role for Urban Rail is to enable and encourage walking and bicycling (both forms of Non-Oil Transportation, and the supply of both modes can be easily doubled or tripled in an emergency *IF* the basics are in place).
Look at Sweden during WW II, when very little oil was imported.
Best Hopes for Sweden, walking and bicycling,
Alan
WW 2 gave an emergency electrification of the railways and a large part of that infrastructure is still in use.
There are still parts that are not electrified and there are suggestions for it but it is not a major win. The benefit is to a large degree in being able to use more unified wehicle fleets and get fewer diesel-under-wire freight trains. But it is at least somthing that is quick and easy to do for some added benefit, everything that is needed is anyway available for maintainance and reinvestment of electrified tracks.
What we got now is a reasonable electrified rail infrastructure between all large and most medim sized towns. But we lack high speed rail between the major cities and there are more initatives for additional freight and commuting then capacity. The freight demand is a free market demand, the commuting demand is subsidized with tax money.
During WW 2 we imported coal from nazi Germany in exchange for iron ore and machine parts. Trade and lick ass or get invaded, it were not our bravest moment.
There are more than 4 million miles of car roads in the US. By my best guess, we will need about 1.4 million miles of rail to build a sustainable infrastructure.
That rail will have to move both people and cargo.
From our perspective, we need to build a circulatory system for our economic community. Trains may provide some arteries but we need secondary and capillaries to survive.
The USA does not need 1.4 million miles of rail (OR PRT), unless you want to preserve Suburbia and Exurbia (and their associated energy use patterns).
The USA has about 178,000 miles of railroads today. Assuming most people can walk, bicycle or take a 25 mph GEM NEV (like a golf cart) a mile or two, I see little need for more than 300,000 miles of rail of all types (and that is pushing it).
For the next 25 years we should be focused on building the electrified arteries ! And in 2033 we can buy the debugged and improved PRTs from Sweden to fill in the gaps :-)
Walking is Good !
Alan
Walking is good. So it biking.
We have the cities we have. The 1.4 million miles is to get logistics and transport within a couple miles of most places in most cities.
We cannot build 1.4 million miles of sidewalks before significant effects of post-Peak Oil bite.
We have the cities we have, we have wasted trillions on Suburbia, Exurbia, McMansions, drive-in banks, strip shopping centers and shopping malls. We will not have the energy to heat and cool, light and support roads, water & sewer and police this overgrown mess.
Average homes have gone from 1,000 sq ft to 2,500 sq ft as average people/household size has shrunk. Average shopping sq ft/capita has increased ten fold since 1950.
Even absent personal transportation, we will not have the energy to support this Megapolis !
Urban Rail provide a nucleus for people to escape to.
Alan
The most advanced PRT project in Sweden in South Korean. They are here since our authorities are flexible enough to give a within EU ok for new kinds of rail technologies if they work out ok.
The effort at Uppsala is good. The general interest in Sweden is good. I have done a fair amount of business in Sweden and believe the Swedes will provide a significant jump to the industry.
POSCO has put an estimated $50 million.
I have seen perhaps half of the suggestions in media and otherwise. It is a mix of reasonable ideas, realy bad ones and some good.
I have personally adviced to not invest public money in PRT:s for my home town Linköping since we got good busses and a potential dual mode tram line that would be a nice combination with old railway lines.
But the "Kungens kurva" mall area and Arlanda airport suggestions are good ones that seems to make business sense. They could with a reasonably sized system connect multiple points of already present demand and some of the end points are on premises owned by interests with deep pockets.
Suggesting PRT:s anywhere is ok for the small number of people who live on selling studies but I realy hope the first systems are built at the best locations where they can add something unique that no other system can do. I would advice aginst PRT:s in my home town even if I loved them.
You are correct that networks need to be put where they fit their niche well. If properly placed, they should be a financial success.
I do not believe subsidized transport of any sort is sustainable in the time of peak oil. Transport will have to operate at a profit, add more value than the cost to compete.
It is likely that once put into operation, profitable solutions that achieve public policy objectives, will likely be refinanced under some bonding support. This will free the private capital to recycle and build more rail.
If a private company cannot build fast enough and operate profitably, the mode of transport they create, then they will fade away. The risk to choose well, build quickly and effectively needs to be a private responsibility.
I completley agree here, as although tradition is good in some forms of life, we should look for innovation when discussing peak oil, and technoligical advancements. Although this is the case, I do not think that we should consider it a civilization killer just yet. This is because most people dont face the problem until it is actually in front of us. It doesnt hurt to be technlogically prepared , but reality wont hit until its there.