[sustran] Re: monorails and other low capacity systems

[bruun at seas.upenn.edu]

I want to add that some of the aerial systems have substantial capacity.
Metro Cable in Medellin, Columbia is equal to a heavy bus route
or moderate LRT route in the US. Eric Bruun

Quoting Lee Schipper <schipper at wri.org>:

> Let me weigh in on Eric Britton's side here. There are all kinds of
> high-flying ideas, called Pods or personal taxis or rail taxis or
> personal rapid transit or what-you-have. They are all interesting, but
> as Eric says their scale is tiny compared to the access needs of two
> billion people in cities around the world.  I remember taking the
> Monorail from the Disneyland Hotel into Disneyland in S. California in
> the 1950s.  I rode the Schwebebahn in Wuppertal in 1999 and recently
> rode the experimental, low-speed Maglev in Nagoya near the site of Expo
> 2005. There are serious studies underway in Sweden and elsewhere because
> these things have some merit. But so far that's as far as it goes.
>
>
>
> They are fine for those who want to build them and don't care who rides
> them, particularly if they are built to shuttle small numbers of people
> around fairgrounds, parking lots, etc.  But please let's not waste even
> precious OPM (Other peoples' money, i.e., bilateral or multilateral
> assistance  funds) or our own funds when a huge need for access for
> ordinary folks goes unmet.  For Asian and Latin America cities, we are
> looking at corridors requiring over 1 million trips per day and cities
> with 20-30 million trips/day at the beginning of development, i.e., less
> than 2 trips/day/person.  How will Shanghai provide 50 million trips/day
> in 2020? I don't see any evidence that these small systems can provide
> much relief except where an aerial tramway or other small system has to
> climb a hill for a few hundred people/hour.  The "nostalgic,
> semi-underground cog-railway  in Istanbul is a  good example here. But
> we have to focus what limited funds we have on moving the masses
> cleanly, smoothly, reliably, equitably, and above all rapidly.
>
>
>
> Lee
>
>
>
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