For many skeptics of public transportation, small is the next big thing. Elon Musk, who once said that “public transport is painful, it sucks,” unveiled a concept for an autonomous “Cybercab” in October — the Tesla CEO’s latest take on what he’s called “individualized mass transit.” Each vehicle will have just two seats. The Vegas Loop, an earlier Musk-inspired, transit-like venture built by the Boring Company, deploys a fleet of human-driven Tesla cars (maximum passengers: three) in an underground tunnel beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. Meanwhile, leaders of US cities like Atlanta and Arlington, Virginia, have envisioned fleets of little vehicles — typically autonomous shuttles or aerial gondolas — that whisk people to and from major destinations in near-privacy, without a moment lost to gridlock.
The idea of shrinking mass transportation is tantalizing, particularly to those who bemoan the crowds involved with riding a bus or train. Mark Seeger, the CEO of Gldwys, a venture-backed startup building a network of autonomous pods in San Jose, California, has said that the Bay Area’s transit system is mired in “an economic death spiral because people don’t want to use it because the experience is terrible.”
Terrible or not, there are reasons that public transportation revolves around vehicles that can simultaneously transport dozens if not hundreds of passengers. Enticing though downsized conveyances might seem, they sacrifice immutable and substantial advantages — in efficiency as well as practicality — that result from going big.
Aerial ropeways (call them what you will, e.g. Dangleway in London) are usually also, in effect, PRT, at least if they are detachable gondola type of vehicle.
In niche circumstances these can be very effective, 3 seemingly useful systems in South America covering areas that would be difficult to address using buses (and very expensive to address using light or heavy rail).
PRT is generally a case of “Elite Projection”
Can and should we make buses and trains more comfortable and improve the overall user experience? Hell yes.
But the elite’s continual desire to isolate themselves in some sort of tin bubble to avoid contact with the hoi polloi is toxic entitlement that we need to reject. And as the article alludes, the big challenge with small shared autonomous vehicles, apart from costs and lack of scale, is that sealing small numbers of strangers alone together inside a moving vehicle provides far too easy an opportunity for criminal elements to prey on innocent passengers. And CCTV won’t be enough to stop them.
@MilesT A few years ago, we did a short series on urban gondolas, starting with this one. There are dozens around the world, and more being constructed & developped.