In response to some discussion on this group of my robocar articles in
relation to PRT, I wrote an expanded section on why I make the rather
bold claim that a not-yet practical technology like robocars could
make us declare a never-really-implemented technology like PRT to be
on the verge of becoming obsolete.

It's at http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/prt.html

I started out as a fan of PRTs basic ideas -- personal vehicles,
little waiting and non-stop station to station transportation which
would give riders something much closer to what they get from cars,
while keeping many of the benefits of transit (no driving, no parking,
limited congestion.)  I even dreamed of hybrid PRTs that left the
track and were driven the last mile on city streets.   But then,
thanks to DARPA, robocars started moving from SF to reality and could
offer more than PRT ever promised without requiring any new
infrastructure.

So how to you compare a technology that's not here yet, with a
technology that's seemed possible for 40 years but never realized?

The answer for me came by looking at who pays for it.  Robocars can be
privately owned and funded, with very minimal government involvement.
As their abilities improve with Moore's law, they will be bought by
rich early adopters, then bought again next year by the same early
adopters.   This approach drives incredible, unbeatable innovation.
PRT, like all transit, has to be bought by risk-averse municipal
transit planners with decade long time horizons and huge budgets.  It
is almost a rule that what they buy will be obsolete by the time they
break ground, let alone by the time it's in operation.

Anything that brings Moore's law, individual purchase, early adopters
and highly competitive markets to transportation is sure to win.  I
don't think there's even a contest.   PRT's few remaining advantages
(better efficiency through electrified rails and less congestion on
custom-built ROW) barely blip the radar. Thus the bold statement.
Give it a read for more details.

Brad:

At your web site the last paragraph was:

a.. Finally, if traffic is very thick that this 20-fold increase in capacity is unable to handle it, we can have robo-buses, or trains using legacy rails. People wishing to travel a very heavily used route will have their robocar take them to an appointed place and time where they switch to a bus, which then travels nonstop along the route. At the end, it stops in a small lot where many single-person robotaxis are waiting to take them the rest of their way. This should allow a very large increase in the capacity of the roads, at the cost of having buses that are used only at these peak times -- still cheaper than building new right-of-way.

You didn't say much about public transit. This paragraph is sort of confusing. Can you expand a bit on how robocars or robobuses might help the 30% or so of the population that can't drive?

My knee jerk reaction is why not both PRT and robocars? So far as I can see there will always be two markets - private and public.

Dennis

"(better efficiency through electrified rails and less congestion on
custom-built ROW) barely blip the radar."

Brad

You mean $4.00 gasoline has not blipped the radar.

In a solar version we do not use* ANY FORIEGN OIL* or fossil fuel.  It is
through the guideway energy storage and sipping that this is even possible.
That *is* the radar.  Our system does not use rails but we do supply enough
energy to go fast under the solar energy budget.  Our system patents
describe how the robotic control is accomplished in the city.  How is the
trick.  If you heard the latest energy industry commercial they say we have
enough domestic oil for 60 years.  Do they even listen to their own noise?
What about year 61?  Then what? --- Robo cars?

What sand do you have your head stuck in?  Did you hear the angry chant,
"Drill Drill Drill" at the convention?  Robo cars are not going to build
more highway lanes alone so unless more lanes are built robo or hot-headed
drivers are still going to be congested.  What makes you think robo control
will increase the per lane capacity past say California highway drivers?  I
do like the bold approach but it is most likely misdirected.  Robotronics
can help the chicken drivers but it won't take the lumbering trucks out of
the way.  Any grade change on a highway through a city causes these trucks
to start the ripple effect in the traffic flow.  Individual robo cars will
have the exact same inductive control but with only a slightly faster
response time after the compute time of the expert software.  If the cars
are on a master control system then all cars will need to participate and
that will not happen.  You will need to count on a significant (till people
die off) overlap of robo and driver cars.  This requires that the robo car
be inductive in the response.  A robo car that does not have superior
braking like TriTrack and other guideway direct braking systems will crash
just like every other car with 1.1 Max G force brakes.  Rubber tires are a
problem that robo alone does not fix.  If you combine robo with guideway
then I can agree with some part of your assertion.  The Moore's law thing is
incorrect of course because it is not a law--- more of a guideline.  It
cannot predict the future any more than a rabbit's foot but the economic
driver is a valid point you make.  On a guideway robo driving is reduced to
--- stop or continue.  Any computer could pull off that control.  Even ones
from the 1970s.  Also being an electrical engineer I can tell you that the
control computers of the 1970s although not 9 digit accurate were faster at
computation than the fastest digital computer of today.  It was a different
approach but *very* fast.  I seem to remember we put men on the moon using
these fast computing electronic approaches to control.

The federal highway fund is bankrupt.  Do you mean that a fully bankrupt
highway system can supply the needs of the population in 2008+ when they
didn't supply the needs of 2001?  It is easy to take two data points and
extrapolate to infinity using X-cubed terms but reality is less exciting
usually.  I am sure we will have better video games/movies but the rest will
lag considerably.  We are neutral on how the hardware is operated.  If a
city wants to run the hardware pure PRT, half PRT or pure DM that is their
choice.  Robo cars will enhance the number and depth of the choices but I
doubt it will end any movement.  We think that robo cars are eventually
going to be part of the freight mix first but these cars need a path on
which to travel no matter what is actuating the steering wheel and pedal.

Jerry Roane

On Sep 6, 2:51 pm, "Jerry Roane" <jerry.ro...@gmail.com> wrote:

There is no such thing as "a solar version."   We have an electrical
grid
with a mix of sources.  Currently 50% coal, 20% natural gas, 20% nuke
and 10% hydro, with a little solar/renewable in the noise.    If you
build more
solar power, great, but you would be crazy if you didn't simply hook
it up to
the grid.   Solar powered transit is just plain silly.   Really,
really silly.

So by adding this solar power to the grid, you would be greening the
grid a little,
which is great, but it really says nothing about your transportation
system
per se,.   Mainly, electric transportation (electric car or train or
trolley) has
the grid's footprint, and gasoline powered transportation has that
footprint.

Do you have figures showing what efficiency you expect from a guideway
powered PRT pod compared to a battery powered ultralight electric
vehicle?
What about flywheel or compressed air?

Based on Tesla's figures, they show about a 15% loss due to charging
and battery issues.
Do you have some other figures?   Not that I want to lose 15% but it's
pretty minor,
especially when you consider that electric cars can charge "smart"
from the grid,
taking power at off-peak times when it is cheaper, while live-driven
vehicles must take
power when they move, including at afternoon rush hour which is
usually the grid peak.

Whoops.  That sort of talk ends any debate with me.  If you would care
to repost your
thoughts without this sort of statement in them, and pledge never to
make such statements
again in your apology, I will read them.

On Sep 6, 2:42 pm, "Dennis Manning" <john.manni...@comcast.net> wrote:

It is my expectation that robocars would replace public transit over
time, as they can be superior by every metric, including energy
efficiency.  I don't understand
your question about the population who can't drive -- they should love
robocars more than anybody, surely.

Brad,

  Below I have reposted my comments from eight days ago. I think you are
being too idealistic about Robocar. I don't think it will be safe at all
(are you aware of the problems with how difficult it was for the Honda Robot
to walk down a sidewalk...image the problems with cars). I don't understand
how vehicles are suppose to be readily available, fully charged yet your
energy numbers seem to be based on only trips when vehicles are occupied.
Where are these vehicles stored? Where are these vehicles charged? How does
Robocar handle large crowds...like 30,000 people exiting a city every
afternoon. Finally how much do these vehicles cost?
  It is interesting that you have looked at hybrid PRT and Robocars...I
think that has some potential.
  Below is my earlier post:

Robocar myths....

At first glance the idea of using robotic cars is appealing but there are
serious questions about it, that have been ignored...
  1) I'm not sure they will be safer...which appears to be the main
argument. When I think of most serious car accidents they are usually caused
by something going terribly wrong...usually between a truck and a car (the
last four people killed in car accidents in Cincinnati were killed by
trucks). In every situation the victims had no chance of avoidance...how is
Robotic Car (RC) solving that...absolutely nothing. I'm not sure RC will do
better with pedestrians. How many DARPA officials walked in front of the
vehicles? My guess....zero. Will (RC) be able to stop if a child on a
bicycle rides in front of it? Will RC come to a stop for every person on a
bike or change lanes creating a potential crash? Will RC steer around the
dog and hit the mother walking the child? Will RC be able to discern that
the pedestrian walking down the street is not looking in the direction of
the vehicle and may step out into the road? I think safety claims are
difficult with new technology (with dual mode for example we will prevent
all head-on crashes but what happens at 100 mph at a switch?)
  2) Vehicles that mysteriously appear out of nowhere within seconds (this
also applies to PRT) is a myth. Those vehicles had to be sitting or running
empty nearby. Where are the parking lots to store those waiting vehicles? If
I have 30,000 people exiting a major urban area at 4:30 pm where are all the
vehicles at 4:15 pm? If I have 80,000 people leaving a stadium, where are
the 50,000 vehicles suppose to be waiting? Some would argue that because
each vehicle can make multiple trips it would require fewer vehicles...that
is not going to cut it...people will not wait for the vehicle to return... a
wait of 30 minutes or more.
  3) The energy calculations are all wrong (and therefore the environmental
impact). There is a trade-off between robotic cars readily available and
energy. This is a serious flaw in Brad's argument for robotic cars...he only
includes the energy numbers based on travel when the passengers are in the
vehicle...yet these vehicles would have to be running almost constantly (and
burning fuel) to be as available as he claims. Also he says that they will
automatically go to recharging stations yet does not include any energy in
his calculations to get there. Where are all those robotic cars parked while
they are recharging? Not in my neighborhood.

  I think PRT with robotic cars makes more sense. It provides mass transit
type service in crowded urban areas and helps congestion by being separated
from regular traffic. The PRT rail can recharge batteries during transit.
The PRT rail does not have to go into every neighborhood since vehicles
would disconnect from the rail and travel automatically to a neighborhood
(for safety reasons I think that robotic cars when off the rail, would have
to run in designated lanes, perhaps in the middle of the street to keep them
away from pedestrians).  In heavily congested areas where it is necessary to
move people quickly, there is a track that can move people with only a few
second spacing. IMO a PRT system like ULTRA with robotic cars has great
appeal for an entire urban area (although my first choice will always be
Dual Mode)

Jay

A theoretical robocar will be nice in the future when the kinks are
all worked out and they become affordable, until then, Billions of
dollars are being wasted on public transit systems that could be so
much better and cheaper with PRT/DM solutions that can work now.

F.

On Sep 6, 6:31 pm, "Dennis Manning" <john.manni...@comcast.net> wrote:

On Sep 6, 3:39 pm, "Jay Andress" <andress....@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, you may think of this as a definitional argument, but of course
I don't believe they
will be deployed until we are convinced they are safe.  What I write
about is, given the
assumption that we can build a safe robocar, what does does that mean
for transportation.

If you don't think we can build such a car, then of course you will
say it means nothing.
However, evidence is building that it can be done, certainly with the
will.   Robocars have
a big leg up over humans at being safer.  80% of accidents are caused
by inattention, which
robocars would not suffer from.  They will always be looking in every
direction, something a
human can't do.  And they will react much more quickly.

That said, of course when they focus their attention they must
correctly identify what they
are looking at.  Nobody would pretend that this is not a hard
problem.  But it seems today to
be one that is within our grasp.  But as a future technology, we can't
prove that until we
do it.

The answers to these questions change over time.  They would probably
be
stored on the streets, and in existing parking spaces.  They can be
stored blocking
driveways, and packed at 2-3 times the density today's cars get in
parking lots.

They can charge (if electric) anywhere there is power.  They go to the
power, it
doesn't have to be everywhere.  I would predict simple cheap poles all
over the
city that a robocar can pull up next to, authorize payment, and tap
onto.  But there are
other methods -- including many that are not electricity.   New power
schemes can
be experimented with at will because the cars go to the where the fuel
is on their
own.

For the question of large crowds, did you follow the link in my main
post?

Cost?  Initially quite expensive and limited to the rich.  Then,
thanks to Moore's
law, cheaper then regular cars.   Then, once most of the HDVs are off
the road so
the cars don't need expensive safety systems, quite a bit cheaper than
regular cars.

Simple electric city cars should be quite cheap if mass produced.
It's just motors and
wheels, no drivetrains, transmissions,  etc.   The computer part
starts expensive and becomes
$100 like most other computer parts.   I could easily see a one
person, 3-wheeled, fiberglass
shelled vehicle with 1kwh of lead-acid battery costing under $2K.

Sort of.  If you don't have robocars, then PRT is only minimally
marketable.
In fact, based on past history, PRT on its own is a complete failure
-- nobody
has sold a real PRT system, just a couple of toy systems.

If you do have Robocars, why would you bother with PRT?

So I no longer think the hybrids are so interesting.

No, that's not correct.   Figures I have read cite that 80% of
accidents are caused
by the driver not paying attention (in many cases due to being tired
or drunk.)

Robocars will never not pay attention, at least.

With the first prototypes?  Why would you expect them to?  Of course
before
they are on the streets they will.

 My guess....zero. Will (RC) be able to stop if a child on a

Of course!  We would hardly accept them if they did not.  Though
probably not stop, but turn to avoid, stopping only if there is no
other option.

Why would it do something to create a potential crash?
That would be pretty stupid, I think.

That's a more interesting question.  My expectation is they will
always leave an escape gap, unless we decide that in very high usage
roads we want them to pack so densely there is no escape gap.   I
don't know if we want to do that right away.

But normally the vehicle would drive so as to always have a way out if
something unexpected happens, like a pedestrian stepping
on the road.  Of course robot reaction times are far better than
human.

You did read the bit about the school of fish?

 I think safety claims are

If vehicles are in use, then they are not parked.  If they are not in
use, they
inherently need less road, so more road can be allocated to parking.
Robocars
can park in front of driveways, can double and triple park.

If we should ever want so many vehicles that is.  Today there's 2 cars
in every
garage and a chicken in every pot.   On-demand vehicle within a minute
can be
done with vastly fewer vehicles than we have now, if we wish it.  It's
really a question
of what we want to pay for.

There are situations where we might use shared vehicles (bus/train/
van.)  That's always
available as a fallback to any challenge like this.   However, I
suspect we don't need to
go to that fallback.   It's an interesting challenge.   There is *so*
much parking available
if your challenge is to park robots that will move on command and
which are just 4' wide
and 10' long.   You can store 1,000 of them in an acre!  50,000 could
go into a 50 acre
which is I think just a small fraction of the typical parking lot
found at today's sports stadiums.

However, you don't need that as you can store them right on the roads
themselves.  When
the roads are busy, you don't need to store them.  When the roads are
not in use, you only need
to keep one or two lanes open.   (Most roads, including their current
parking lanes, are about 40 to 50 feet
wide.)

Why not?   If you want to summon them in your neighbourhood you have
to accept
them there.   You are correct, we do not yet have figures for how much
idle travel is
needed.   Note that I expect vacant energy use to be a fair bit below
occupied energy use, as
the vehicle may not weigh much more than the passenger in the final
all-robocar
world where ultralights are present.   But even with equal unoccupied
travel the numbers
are still pretty good, and I don't think we have to get close to that.

PRT has the same issue of course, but must build spur-lines for
storage.  Robocars can
store wherever there is pavement.

Again, once we have the robotic guiding, why have the PRT?   The truth
is "special lanes"
is a short-duration solution.   The period where a robocar can operate
safely in its
special lane but is not safe to operate outside it ...

read more »

Brad

I am sorry if my sand comment bent your feathers.  I can see from your web
presence you were promoting one of your web essays.  Just highlight the sand
sentence hit the del key and continue on.  I am interested in your ideas.
If solar version of TriTrack is fiction then robo cars are just as much
fiction hey?  The fact that steel wheels running on guideway combined with
cars with a wind tunnel tested Cd of .07 allows solar power generated and
stored in the battery mules will power the entire transportation grid.  It
is only the extreme energy efficiency of guideway that allows this to be.
Your stating "crazy" and "silly" just indicates that you have not run the
numbers yet.  If you want to learn I am sure you will like the consumer
level calculator on our web site.  It lets you input various Cds, frontal
areas and weights on street cars and steel wheeled cars and provides
mathematical answers for energy expenditure.  Using Sanyo panels at 17%
energy conversion efficiency provides 100% of the electrical power needed to
move 2.8 million people in Denver using Denver sunshine data averaged over
the year under the cars but above the crowd.  As you astutely point out that
same power could come from the power grid but by combining solar panel power
with extremely energy efficient guideway cars the cost is disguised and as
you must know getting the quantity of solar panels built up brings down the
unit price.  Unless someone moves first we are doomed to the biggest wealth
transfer in the history of wealth to butcher a slogan.

The percentage of energy we waste of the sunshine is easier to explain to
the public if we are solar-only.  Tesla is still working on their
motor/controller efficiency.  If you want hard data go to UQM for their
solar challenge motors and controllers.  They built many of the motors that
went across Australia at 40 mph using solar power.  The statement that
transportation is silly that is solar powered is disproved by the solar
challenge race series.  How do you gel this with the assertion?  If instead
of placing a million dollar solar panel on a few square feet of the roof of
the car you put 127 feet by 7 feet of panel under the guideway that is
instantly dedicated to that one car then you can see that solar can power
that one car faster than the solar challenge cars using UQM motors.

This is not a debate contest so you can put your feathers back down.  This
is an important discussion with our future in the balance.  I am not against
computer controls.  That is in my field.  My opinion is not to overstate
what controls can do in the general public till you have a working tested
system.  There are several on this list doing exactly that and some of them
will succeed.  When they have their testing done then robo things can be
shown in a working state.  If you want to control a system it is wise to
reduce the control complexity and degrees of freedom.  As you know from
software "bugs" AKA coding mistakes are a function of the programmer's skill
and the complexity of the task.  If the task is unnecessarily complex then
you need a better programmer and better programmer has the upper limit of
available humans trained in the art.  If Bill Gates can't find a programmer
who can write an email program then how can you find a programmer to entrust
the very lives of millions of people driving home?  Guideway provides a path
to robo cars if that is the ultimate goal.

Your energy assertions are currently close but we intend to rock that world
soon.  Stay tuned.

Jerry Roane
CEO Roane Inventions Inc.

snip

Brad:

<If you don't accept that, then you can keep talking about PRT, but you have
to answer the question, why is it that 40 years later there's <no PRT, if
it's really so good?

If I'm not mistaken the idea for a robocar goes back to the 30's. I think
it's you that should answer the question. Besides PRT is here or coming
soon: Morgantown, ULTra underconstruction, Vectus nearing test completion,
and Masdar looking promising.

One more question. How fast do you envision robocars? Have you ever checked
out Applied Levitation? or et3?

Dennis

No jest at all, have you read the main robocar articles?  Seen the
videos?

I forecast a very low price for robotaxi rides, with a base operating
cost under
10 cents a mile and falling.   (Under 1 cent/mile for electrical
energy, and a
depreciation cost highly dependent on the cost of the vehicles and
their lifetime and
maintenance costs.)   It seems reasonable that this could be sold
profitably at
30 cents/mile, which would be -- without any special subsidy other
than the existence of roads -- cheaper than the typical transit ticket
for most trips.

So yes, I think it can be very affordable.

There is a large section on the question of liability.

On Sep 6, 4:28 pm, "Jerry Roane" <jerry.ro...@gmail.com> wrote:

Solar isn't fiction, it just does not make sense to talk about solar
powered transportation.    Solar is a source of electricity, like
coal, NG, nuclear, hydro, wind etc.  What you are talking about (and
so am I) is electric powered transportation, which is indeed good.

One could, in theory, set up a transportation system (or a  house, or
a building, or a factory) that is powered by solar and not connected
to the grid, and call it "solar powered."  But that would be silly, if
your goal is to be green.   The proper thing to do with solar is to
grid-tie it, so that every kwh generated by the solar is put to use
(and indeed, put to use at the peak time.)   If you don't grid-tie
your solar, you get times when the power is just being discarded
because your system is not using it, and that's anti-green.

Since few who install solar want to be anti-green, it would not make
sense to build solar powered transportation.   You can build electric
transportation (good) and you can generate renewable energy for the
grid (good) where you will reduce the demand for coal (really good)
but these are orthogonal.

Off-grid solar makes sense only where there is no grid at all, which
is not usually the case in urban transport design.   Off-grid solar in
a city is, I will reiterate, worse than silly.

Or do you speak of some kind of solar-thermal driven car?   Where
thermal energy drives the wheels?  I had not heard of anything like
that before.

These are contest vehicles.  A solar panel on a moving car will,
again, often find itself throwing away its output because the car is
not moving and the batteries are not highly discharged.   That's
what's silly -- building expensive solar panels and then discarding
the power they produce in the name of "being pure solar."   If you
need a rural vehicle that can't recharge, or a contest vehicle which
will always run when there is sun, then solar can make sense, but
that's not what we are discussing here -- which is urban transport.
In a city you can readily charge batteries from the grid, or draw
power from a guideway if you have that.

 If instead

This would make sense -- if anybody had shown success at deploying a
large guideway infrastructure.   I wrote a paper on PRT for my urban
geography class in 1976.  I must say I'm tired of waiting, and I'm
sure I am not alone.   Watching how innovation works in the computer
industry, I have become more and more of the opinion that a chance for
transportation to follow that path is more likely to bring success.

I've seen many explanations about why there are no real PRTs (and just
a couple of toy PRTs at Heathrow and Dubai) but they have the smell,
to me, of "there's always an explanation, but never a success."

I believe the answer is that cities -- which are who buys transit --
are not innovators.   It is the exception rather than the rule.   Even
the toy PRTs at Heathrow and the UAE being built not by cities, but by
an airport with a larger budget, and a slightly crazy but visionary
dictator.  Morgantown is not PRT as I see it.

If this is correct -- that it is the resistance to innovation among
municipal transit agencies that blocks the adoption of PRT -- then it
has a long hill to climb.   Cities won't buy it until they see a large
working system.  But a large working system isn't anything like what
we see.  A large system has 100s of km of guideway, and 100s of
stations, because it needs to take a lot of people from where they are
to where they want to go, not be like traditional transit and take
them only between a few selected popular places.

On Sep 6, 6:17 pm, "Dennis Manning" <john.manni...@comcast.net> wrote:

Until last year, people thought of robocars as pure science fiction.
Then DARPA held their contests and we got to be astounded by what
could be done for a prize that is tiny in the world of transportation
($1M and $2M.)  And DARPA (and the war) demonstrated a need for early,
expensive tech for moving cargo in a war zone.   It is these contests
that started people talking seriously, after watching real robocars in
action, about what they might do and mean.

40 years from now, if they are still 10 years away, we can make the
same complaint.

You really call Morgantown with its single line, 5 stations and giant
cars PRT?  I call it a people mover.

What I thought people meant by PRT was a system with many lines, many
stations, and point to point non-stop transfer between stations for
individuals or small groups.

Is that not what PRT means?

My current suspicion is this.  If somebody can get a PRT system
underway, it won't be up and running as a full sized, many station PRT
for some time -- a decade at least.

And around the time it is, I think we will start seeing robocars ready
to take to ordinary streets.   And people will say, "Can we tear down
those annoying PRT lines?"  Or at least adapt them for the 3.5' wide
robocars as extra lanes.   But if they are blocking the sky, I think
people will ask to tear them down.

It was this timeline that led me to conclude PRT may become obsolete
before it gets to exist.    As soon as you attribute a significant
probability that robocars will deploy within about 12-15 years, you
should not build a PRT (unless you hope to make it be robocar track in
the future.)

For urban use, probably 35mph.  On highways, same as today's cars.
For fast intercity travel, I expect people to continue to use planes,
or trains where they are appropriate.

Brad:

Thanks for responding. I guess we will just have to watch the development of
PRT/DM/Robocar. You really should see et3 to see what's possible for PRT.

Goodluck.

Dennis

Brad

I am glad to see you engage.  I am sure when you think through the solar
concept you will see the showmanship and the value of the idea.  It is
showmanship to propose solar power for transportation but I do need to
correct some of your assumptions.  The main assumption is that we waste
energy.  We do not.  The massive number of batteries needed to energy sip
thoughout the system will store all the incoming energy.  On days when there
is more energy input that output the battery mules will feed the power grid
during peak energy use.  This means instead of selling electric power at
below wholesale to the monopoly like present solar installations we sell it
to the grid at peak daily price.  Since this is a network of cars with
history we know how much power to sell to the power grid on any one day.
Because this is a large amount of energy we will be getting market rates not
a discounted version.  You are correct that solar kilowatts are more
expensive this year than grid power but as pollution credits and carbon
offsets come along our system will be immune from these "sin taxes".  This
is a global concept that pits the US against the rest of the world and we *will
*be out voted.  The air pollution aspect of a grid powered transportation
system makes it muddy in the mind of the public.  By going full solar there
is no misunderstanding that the power to run the cars is from only
sunlight.  Again this is only possible to be solar only if the cars are very
energy efficient.  I saw where you were saying under 1 cent per mile energy
cost.  Those are some light weight cars with slippery tires and a small
frontal area.  Do you have such a car built?  Has it been tested in a wind
tunnel for total drag.  I can run the numbers for you if you have the basic
vehicle parameters.  At some slow speed a gasoline car can get 1000 mpg but
most people want faster cars than the supermileage competition.

"

I think this choice of expression is invalid.  If sunshine impinges on the
Earth and no one harvests that energy is that anti-green?   The incorrect
assumption is how much battery storage we intend to provide via the millions
of battery mules under the guideway end points.

"

What is silly is being afraid to convert to solar when the technology is
here.  We just need to apply it.  Germany has taken the lead in the field
and they are wisely buying up all the world solar panel production.  For the
next 25 years these panels will be producing wealth for their nation while
we atrophy.

Electric power is the middle transition method.   Once energy is in electric
form it is easy to move it to other forms like vehicle motion.  The thing to
come may be more of what you are asking about but my legal team is not
finished with the latest.  When it gets its date stamp it can be shared.
You will like it.

read ahead rather than ask just before the answer.

Que the choir!  That is what we propose.  I am not a Pure PRT type because
pure PRT is using the hardware only one way.  We will let the market
determine how the hardware is used.  We just provide the efficient
hardware.  Our third patent explains how to cheaply deploy guideway using an
automated system of guideway manufacture.  The funding is by individuals
mostly which is in line with your thinking about how a new system can come
to be financially.  The city only has to give permission. The guideway is so
inexpensive that it can be paid for with a light mileage fee in a short
time.  The key to large scale deployment is super low cost in my view.
These partents are newer than 1976 but they have their origins in the first
oil embargo.

"

I agree fully.  Once transportation goes computer age we will see miraculous
things.

We are working this with gusto.  We are making some headway believe it or
not.  Just by being part of the wall paper eventually they will hear the
message.  Understanding will be the next step of course.

Ours does not have stations only merge zones.

I agree fully on this point too.  Transportation can be more ideal than it
is with the help of automation.

Jerry Roane

 > Solar isn't fiction, it just does not make sense to talk about solar
 > powered transportation.    Solar is a source of electricity, like
 > coal, NG, nuclear, hydro, wind etc.  [snip]

I think everyone here gets that a mix of sources powers the grid, and
electric transport is and should be grid-tied. However, some believe
that "solar transport" is a political selling point, even if it involves
exploiting some incomplete understanding of elected officials of how
electricity works.

I agree with your point that cybercars can more easily jump the
introduction threshold than any new fixed rail mode can.

Along those lines, I've been thinking in the past year or so that the
most feasible leap in technology is a combination of BRT and
neighborhood cybercars. BRT with long station spacing and priority
signals is a practically instant, cheap and effective way to serve the
distance in metro transit, but it lacks any solution for the last mile.
Cybercars going 15 mph, which do NOT use arterials but only neighborhood
streets and urban core streets, would cost effectively serve the last
mile and could be put in service fairly soon it seems. I estimate that
these two companion technologies could move US cities from 1-5% transit
share to 10-25%, and lower overall transport costs.

 From that situation, two competing trends could occur: (1) cybercars'
speed limits could be relaxed and they could use arterials, thereby
providing end-to-end transport; and (2) the BRT lines could be upgraded
to a routable, sometimes elevated, fixed rail network for higher speeds
and less congestion. Both of those trends could occur and find an
equilibrium along with the existing modes; I don't see why one of them
has to necessarily win out over the other.

The step after THAT would be to upgrade cybercars to be able to use the
routable network. This sequence of trends almost eliminates the
introduction thresholds.

Brad,

So in 15 years robocars will be traveling at highway speed?
Coexisting with human controlled vehicles, no less?  I think my
approach of running at grade, on rails, and WITHOUT automobiles
(greatly simplifying the task) is possible in that timeframe, but I
think you're way too optimistic (assuming I understood you correctly).

On a related note, have you spoken with any of the DARPA vehicle
developers?  Do they share your accessment of the technology?

gary
www.PRTProject.com

on 9/6/08 11:49 PM, Ian Ford at i...@ianford.com wrote:

Ian,

    I hate to have to get into the sales mode for our systems, but all of
this fantasy dreams of robocars discussion makes it impossible for me to
refrain because I know how to accomplish most of the goals right now, so
please forgive me and it any of you are offended, just delete this post and
don't read further.

    The MicroRail  system of which we first road tested the first dualmode
vehicle on Labor Day can nicely solve that last mile problem with a
combination of core, main lines carrying a combination of passenger trains
and CarTrains  carrying compact automobiles that drive onto and off of the
CarTrain CarFerries  at special stations along the main lines.  If the small
cars are built with compatible automatic electrical connectors on the
underside, they can be low-speed, pure electric vehicles that nicely solve
that last mile problem.  Furthermore, this technology is here now and
initial systems could start operating within about three years.  Because the
main lines and trains carry both passengers, cargo, and small personal
automobiles, such systems should earn enough revenue to recover their
initial cost and pay all of the O&M costs, something that few conventional
mass transit systems have ever done.  Furthermore, we don't have to wait for
any more technology development such as robocar technology, that may or not
ever become a practical reality.  The guideway is low enough in cost, that
most cities could easily purchase and install these systems with revenue
bonds and probably never spend a dime of tax money.

    By the way, we have already found ourselves giving two different Fort
Worth city council members our presentation and shown them the vehicle and
they came to us without even before we were able to start any marketing
effort, an activity that we just started this last week.  I believe that
this indicates a real interest in some public transportation officials in
lightweight, elevated systems that do far more than conventional systems and
do it at far less cost.

    With such a system in place, I suspect that public transit share of
travellers within cities might rather rapidly grow to more than 50% and in
the process, greatly reduce the haze of heavily carbon product polluted air
in large cities.  It would also greatly decrease the trip times for most
users.  Use of such a system would also greatly decrease the travel cost for
most users.  With the combination of 95% efficiency motors and regenerative
braking from the motors, we were amazed that after about 30 minutes of
driving the car in the pure electric mode, the could not even detect any
drop in the battery voltage by the end of the driving test.

    I suggest that you all take a careful look at the following url:

http://megarail.com/pdf/MCPCAL-3.pdf

    By the way the above url may change within the next few days.  However,
the only change will be from a -3 to a -4.

Kirston Henderson
MegaRail®

So that's a grid tie.  I am not sure why the batteries though.   Many
people seek to allow the storage of excess off-peak power to use in
the grid during peak, and generally batteries are not considered a
workable method.  I would be curious what numbers you have that would
say otherwise.   If not, why would you have batteries?  It would be
disappointing to see people using batteries to store solar in a grid-
tie system just for the sake of saying they are solar, since batteries
have their own environmental costs, though they are not particularly
great, they are not zero.

Right now solar is not grid-competitive in most places (it is at high
tiers in California) without the rebates/tax breaks, and it's not yet
competitive with the rebates/breaks in many places, though this is
changing.   When it become competitive, I expect to see a lot more
solar.

However, this is a distraction, showmanship as you say.  What we're
talking about is electric driven transportation, it doesn't matter
where it comes from.

Electric cars are able to do better than 1 cent/mile today.  Indeed
electric
trikes can go over 30 miles on a kwh, which costs an average of 9
cents in the USA.

Because solar panels take energy to manufacture (about 1-2 years of
their output) the worst off-grid solar systems (ie for camping) use
more energy than they generate.  This would not be the case for
systems like this.  What's anti-green would be not doing grid-tie when
it's available, because any power you toss away rather than putting
into the grid means less coal is burned.   It is anti-green to burn
more coal just so you can say you're solar.

However, you are doing grid tie based on your descriptions, you just
have batteries, presumably because of pricing regulations.

Germany pays something like 40 cents/kwh.  Solar beats that, even at
today's prices.

On Sep 6, 10:20 pm, gary <garydst...@gmail.com> wrote:

Sure.  In 1995 a german experimental robocar traveled the autobahns of
Germany with human oversight, and occasional human intervention.
However the computers drove the car, not simply at highway speed, but
autobahn speed, 93% of the time.  12 years ago.   The Darpa grand
challenge 2 cars drove desert back roads at not quite highway speeds,
I think they could easily do it at that speed now.  Highway driving is
actually the easy part.  It's urban driving that will be the real
challenge.

Of course.   Pointless if they can't do that.   In the Urban challenge
they did do that, but not at highway speeds.

 I think my

We won't be rid of human driven automobiles at grade for a few
decades, at least one after the robocars are introduced.

Yes, some of them see 2020 as a target date.

This is one of my key points.  There is what we can design or build,
and there's what will actually get bought.  In particular there is
what cities will buy, and it's a tiny subset of what we can design,
dream or even prove.

This is why I predict robocars as the eventual winner.  Because they
will not be bought by cities, but by people.   Initially rich
technophiles with money to burn.   They buy stuff in a pattern so
different from how cities buy things it's night and day.

It's been possible to build basic PRTs for many years now -- for
decades if you believe PRT advocates.   Is the failure of cities to
buy them simply because the PRT advocates were wrong and the
technology is only now becoming possible?  Or is there something in
the way cities by transit that makes PRT hard to sell?  I think at
this point they feel like the citizens of Springfield being sold a
monorail.

I think the idea of robocars is very realistic. Especially considering
the fact that you see more and more Advanced Driver Assistance systems
being installed in cars. These developments include a couple that every
driver has gotten accustomed to: your navigation system, parking sensors
and now the sensor that automatically parks the car based on sensors.
Surely you'll see more of these systems introduced in the high-end
models first (e.g. the heads-up display) and trickling down to other
models eventually...

At the same time PRT is obviously gaining interest and ground. Basically
it's public transit becoming more private, like the car, in an automated
version. Seems to me these are two converging development lines,
ultimately ending at approximately the same point (depending on the
technology applied for the PRT systems...)

But I also believe they will have to co-exist. PRT will be the public
transit system, while robocars will the private system. The advantage
PRT has over robocars is significant in one aspect: parking. Robocars
would still require dedicated parking spaces everywhere, wasting
valuable space, while PRT vehicles would be re-used. That's why they
could co-exist, as do cars and public transit today. It would be great
if both systems could share the same infrastructure, not requiring
dedicated lanes for either one.

If you like PRT couldn't robocars be the next thing? If you like
robocars couldn't be PRT systems be the step-up to it? You can disagree
about the time-line (when does what get done), but this will not be
limited by technology, but rather by emotions (of users, customers and
decision makers...)

Robbert

gary schreef:

Brad

Can you elaborate on what they had to say?  I've had a couple of brief
email exchanges with a couple of the engineers, but didn't get
anything so concrete as this.

gary

Brad,
Back in 2000, there was a "heavy truck platooning" project which seems
to have been successfully demonstrated.  The idea was to have a series
(2 or more) trucks wirelessly connected and driven solely by a lead
driver - think of the potential savings!  Somehow, 8 years later,
nothing has come of it.
http://ivsource.net/archivep/2000/aug/a000831_chauffeur.html
I'd like to know what you think of this.

F.

On Sep 7, 4:38 am, Brad  Templeton <brad...@gmail.com> wrote: