Denny's Free Grand Slam Breakfast Day Tuesday
Marina Yoga Studio Donates Old Mats for Haitian Relief
Muni Bus Nails a Fire Hydrant
Prop 8 Trial Judge Is Gay; Should This Matter?
One Dead in Fisherman's Wharf Nightclub Shooting
Artist rendering of the proposed Skytran design in Seattle.
by Chris Jones
So, you remember that old 1970’s movie, Logan’s Run, where Logan and Jessica 6 take a space shaped monorail pod thing to the bad part of the dome where they’re promptly assaulted by sassy gang members speaking the hip lingo of tomorrow’s youth? Well, according to today’s Examiner, it looks like everyone’s favorite public agency, the MTA, may be considering ripping out all the Muni buses in town and finally moving public transportation into the “Space Age” with our own Logan’s Run style public transit system just like we deserve. OK, not really. Apparently, the MTA recently entertained a pitch from Mountain View based Unimodal, Inc., proposing the installation of their SkyTran personal rapid transit (PRT) system as a total solution to the never ending problem of dragging people up and down Geary Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue.
The SkyTran system consists of the above mentioned pod thingies, just big enough to fit two people (i.e., you and your sweetie, a prostitute and her john, Gavin and his hair, etc.), that are propelled along a fixed guideway using newfangled maglev technology from deepest space. Theoretically, the pods can reach speeds of over 100 miles per hour and, unlike buses, will show up to cart you and your plus one to dinner and a show whenever you please. Just ride the elevator to the PRT platform, press a button, and presto! Your own PRT pod arrives, free of smelly poor people and words like “jive turkey” scrawled all over the walls with a black magic marker.
Of course, the wee problem with such a system is that a real PRT system has never been built anywhere on Planet Earth. The closest they’ve come to constructing one of these things is a rickety old go-cart version at some university in West Virginia. This, however, has not stopped plenty of visionary politicians up and down the state from promoting this thing as an alternative to practical transportation projects. For example, noted Sonoma-Marin Area Rapid Transit (SMART) train skeptic, Supervisor Judy Arnold, has been pushing the SkyTran PRT system in Marin County for a few years now.
Oh, and sorry, you are not allowed to point out that this PRT looks like an overglorified ski gondola. That automatically sucks all the futuristic vision out of this idea, which, as you are all aware, must be 95 percent of any idea ever entertained in San Francisco ever. No futuristic vision, no project. Sorry for you.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
This is the nuttiest thing I have seen in some time.
I'd hate to see the penalty for fare evasion in our Logan's Run-inspired future.
Walt Disney would approve.
Were you sent here by the devil?
No, good sir, I'm on the level!
That "rickety" system in West Virginia, one of four PRT systems that have or are now being built on this planet (but apparently not yours), has been successfully operating for over 30 years, providing for multiple millions of accident-free passenger miles. You need to do your homework, pal, instead of trying to impress us with your self-absorbed quick wit and glib commentary -- accurate and factual, you're not.
@rallenr: Some one is a bit touchy about the PRT! Frankly, I would rather read glib whit than whiney complaints. In any case, if these thing has been around for 30 years yet not widely adopted, there probably is a reason.
@ rallenr --- good point. Now whether or not the local MTA could implement within, say, a 5-8 year time frame is questionable.
but, ponder this point from the Wiki entry online:
"In the 2006 fiscal year, the PRT system broke down a total of 259 times for a total of 65 hours and 42 minutes, out of a total of 3,640 hours and 15 minutes scheduled running time, which equates to about 98% availability."
that's still not bad - right?
I think this is a good idea - getting MUNI dedicated pathways is the answer to this clusterf##k transpo situation we have in the city. It's seriously in need of revamping. Its downright pathetic to take 50+ minutes to go not even 10 miles, when people on BART go 30+ miles in the same amount of time.
can I just have a Jessica 6 and a blinking red jewel in my hand instead?
PRT on Geary? That'll get costly.
I was looking at a product called "Sky Trolley" that takes advantage of a suspended monorail system, but instead of building ugly platform stations in the middle of streets and "darkening" areas, their idea is to build elevator stations that you wait in a type of waiting room at a curbside station and the platform lifts up to the train level and allows boarding and exiting the vehicle.
see the "people stuck on roller-coaster" two stories up the list.
It's nutty, yeah. But think of the views they could charge for.
We'll be able to take this right to the Better Place battery changing stations.
The problem with PRT is that it sucks for volume of passengers. It's essentially the same as a freeway driven entirely by NASCAR drivers drafting eachother. Higher throughput than a regular freeway where normal human reaction times, but a huge mess of poor space-to-passenger ratio, single-occupant vehicles can never hope to carry as many people as a packed train.
Such a system WOULD be useful at night, when there aren't as many people. The normal response to such situations is to run infrequent service (like the Muni OWL buses), but that discourages people due to all the waiting, and many people would rather take a cab instead.
A good solution would be a compromise, where during high volume hours there are large vehicles on the track that work like a regular train, and during low-volume hours on-demand pods are used instead.
This defeats one of the major talking points of SkyTran however -- the argument that they can build lightweight support structures because you're never running heavyweight standing-room-only vehicles. You'd have to build the structures strong enough to support the peak-load heavyweight trains.
Well, in the short term, one of the best options is to reevaluate the way we run OWL lines. Shouldn't there be far more of them running to popular nightlife areas on times when they will see the most use (e.g. Friday and Saturday nights until approx. 3 AM)? People typically want to go out on weekends or weekend evenings, but our transit system seems to persist in the belief that it should only devote resources to carrying commuters and weekend and evening hours are a dead zone because they're not carrying tons of people to roughly the same location.
This won't fully solve the problem, but it does move things a bit more in the right direction. Clearly there are a lot of people going to general areas (e.g. the Mission, the Castro, the Haight, North Beach, etc.) where there are a large concentration of bars, clubs, or other nightlife which tend to see peak business when they are poorly served by Muni. Add into this the lost revenue going to cab companies and the public interest in having a safe way for drunk people to get home without driving and we really ought to get on top of this.
I'm not even a drinker myself and I don't go clubbing. It's just an apparent blind spot that really needs to be fixed.