A plug for trnasit...well for AGT and Larry Fabian

A plug for Larry

Automated Guideway Transport (AGT) is interesting in that it recognizes the deficiencies of both current highways (the lack of system guidance, hence 300,000 or so deaths annually worldwide) and of current transit (ridiculous staffing levels and costs, and system inaccessibility) and attempts to use technology to get the best of each. Many of the automated people movers which are now well known to travellers changing terminals at major airports and which are being introduced by more imaginative transit operators (as in Lille France) make use of the auto/highway system’s pneumatic tire for its superior traction, ride and quietness. They also attempt to provide improved service by having a vehicle arrive quickly. Once you have a system do the ‘driving’ there’s no need to spread the costs of a driver over a large number of passengers in a train of vehicles, and systems can organize vehicles at closer headways than the triangular vision and eye-hand coordination of a driver. The most ambitious attempt to reproduce the automobile’s strengths (going directly to your destination and without strangers in the vehicle) is so-called Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), an automobile or at least mini-van sized vehicle and a guideway with offline stations so your vehicle can bypass unwanted ones. Conventional transit’s army of costly drivers and attendants makes bus or rail a certain route to municipal bankruptcy or perpetual crippling tax levels. So we dead are against it. Abolish it! Defund it! Don’t build any more of it! Denounce it as inherently unsuited to modern lifestyles and urban layout which have dispersed and personalized trips over time and space! Transit as currently constituted is a liability for most communities, not an asset. It serves a small and decreasing minority at the expense of the many. Okay, okay we concede that in a few very dense places where people live such as central London, Hong Kong, New York City, Shanghai, Paris and here and there on small scale it may still make sense for a while. But most places most people live and the way urban life is evolving current transit is elitist, parastitical, nostaglic nonsense. It would be one thing if investors voluntarily invested in this stuff. What warrants indignation, and strong words about transit is that it is built on state coercion (taxes) and fraud (diversion of motorists user fees -- gas taxes, toll revenues etc). It cannot stand on its own two feet in the marketplace of voluntary transactions and self-sufficient players.

APM/PRT/AGT, we think, represents a recognition of this critique of current transit and an attempt to apply imagination to making quantum leaps away from it to something that is useful and positive for the mobility of modern mankind. We cannot rely exclusively on motor vehicles and highways or live with their current technology either. The present automobile/highway system isn’t nearly good enough either. It needs to evolve and overcome its current costs and deficiencies. And it will benefit from real competition. APMs can usefully supplement motor vehicles and roads (from parking buildings for example), compete with them (especially in densely developed areas) and perhaps merge technologies (in dual mode guideways). Highway/vehicle researchers are working on the Automated Highway System (AHS) to try and take a lot of the danger out of present highways, and the drudgery out of driving, with an electronic guideway for cars and other motor vehicles. AHS is a kind of automated guideway transport (AGT) and tolling can help finance it. In Essen Germany and Adelaide Australia they already run a dual mode system for buses with system control and a guideway in the busier linehaul corridor through denser areas and the freedom to operate the buses in conventional driven fashion flexibly on roads at either end. Maybe PRT can develop some similar dual-mode capability for a kind of car? Raytheon and the Chicago metro transport authority (MTA) deserve recognition and support for their efforts to implement a 30 year old concept of PRT, Matra for its superb bus-sized VAL system, Westinghouse/AEG/Adtranz for their great airport people movers that have a potential as a kind of paying transit too, Poma/Otis, Soule and Yantrak for their pioneering use of cable systems, Bombardier of Canada and others who are working to provide self-sufficient modern AGT technologies.

Anyone interested in this absolutely must know about Trans21, a niche publisher that we’d love to be able to emulate. Run by Lawrence J. Fabian in Boston MA it is devoted to automated people movers (APM), personal rapid transit (PRT) and other automated guideway transport (AGT) systems. Trans21 publishes a bimonthly newsletter TransitPulse, a biweekly faxed advisory service TP PLUS, and various manuals, reference works and one-off studies. He also publishes conference proceedings. The perspective is global, recognizing that no country has a monopoly of expertise (though France is the present leader in APMs.) Fabian’s breadth and depth of knowledge of the field is unmatched and his stuff is written in a succinct fashion (a bit over-succinct for our taste sometimes) but is the absolutely best that is available on cutting edge surface transport technology. Contactable at PO Box 249 Fields Corner Station Boston MA 02122-0022, tel 617 825 2318, fax 617 482 7417, email 73122.1405@compuserve.com