PRT Consulting

There were 15 papers focused on personal rapid transit (PRT) at the 12^th International Conference on Automated People Movers held in Atlanta May 31 – June 3, 2009. The proceedings are bound in a 600-page book that can be obtained from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

 In her paper titled Sustainability, PRT and Parking, Shannon Sanders McDonald presented options for parking garages linked to PRT to provide fully sustainable approaches to integrating transit into the urban fabric.

I presented a paper on station options for open-guideway PRT systems. http://www.prtconsulting.com/docs/PRTStationsMullerAPM09.pdf These types of systems are typically more flexible than captive-bogey or suspended systems and a variety of ways of incorporating stations into existing or new developments were illustrated and explained. I presented a suggestion (not included in my paper) to consider grade-separated overpasses in place of merge/diverge figure-of-eight guideway layouts for reasons of capacity, time, capital and operational costs savings. This paper shared a $500 Best Paper award with Shannon’s.

  

 Robbert Lohman presented a paper based on the PRT system being deployed in the zero-carbon, zero-emission City of Masdar in the UAE. It answered such questions as “How would you build a city if you could start from scratch? With sustainability in the back of your mind, would you still allow access to cars? If not, how would you accommodate mobility of people and goods? Would you be able to with today’s technology?” He concluded that the advantages of including PRT in the transportation mix include energy savings, environmental friendliness and the huge reduction in space required for transit systems – allowing the space to be used for other purposes. The initial PRT system is scheduled for passenger service later this year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jörgen Gustafsson discussed the Vectus PRT concept and test track experience. The Vectus test program in Sweden has included two full winter seasons and has proven the system’s capability to cope with various snow and ice conditions. They have successfully proven the control concept using distributed asynchronous control based on a dynamic moving –block vehicle protection system along with receiving safety approval for all other aspects of the PRT system at a 3-second headway and speeds of 45 km/h.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Göran Tegnér presented a paper summarizing a Swedish research project examining how a doubled transit ridership by podcars could be financed. He showed that it would be possible to double the transit ridership in cities with bus or LRT traffic when shifting to podcars. The cost per trip was shown to be lower by podcar than LRT and – in some cases – than bus.

David Holdcroft presented a very well attended paper updating the progress on the Heathrow PRT system. This system is now up and running under test. It has about 2 miles of guideway, three stations and 18 T-Pods. Passenger service will be phased in starting with BAA employees, then adding business car park users and finally the general public. Full public service is anticipated to be in place late this year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Stan Young presented a paper (which I co-authored) about a case study we are undertaking at Village West Development in Kansas City, Kansas. The study found that the Kansas DOT did not approve of the ULTra guideway structural design but an acceptable precast concrete alternative was developed that had similar costs. Potential funding mechanisms for a PRT system do exist in the area but the viability of a PRT retrofit has yet to be explored. It does appear that numerous benefits would have derived had the PRT system been incorporated into the design from the beginning.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My paper, Personal Rapid Transit’s Impact on Army Base Sustainability http://www.prtconsulting.com/docs/PRTArmyBaseSustainabilityFinal21909.pdf was based on a study we did for the U.S. Army Post at Fort Carson, Colorado Springs. The results were remarkably positive considering the sprawling layout of the Post. We found a benefit/cost ratio of 2.75 and that a fare of under $2.00 per ride would cover both operating costs and annualized capital costs. The following table compares our findings with those of two recently-announced conventional transit projects.

 

	Mid-Jordan LRT Extension	Dulles Rail Project	Fort Carson PRT Project
Miles of track	11 (two-way)	23 (two-way)	23 (one-way)
Stations	9	11	35
Daily passengers	9,500	60,000	53,500
Capital cost	$428M	$5,200M	$522M
Cost per mile	$19M	$113M	$23M
Cost per station	$48M	$473M	$15M
Cost per annual passenger	$150	$290	$33

 

Steve Raney presented concepts for a PRT Circulator for Pleasanton and Perimeter Center. Both locations are edge cities associated with larger cities. In both cases PRT could increase transit ridership and reduce single occupant vehicle use. PRT provides a good last-mile solution and also helps prevent employees who don’t use cars for their commute from being stuck at their desks in the lunch hour. After the conference, Steve and I presented these concepts to Perimeter Center stakeholders where they were very well received.

Tony Kerr discussed lessons learned on the Heathrow PRT Guideway. The paper is very useful because it addresses elevated as well as at-grade guideways and covers a range of issues such as modular design, guardrail requirements and tolerances required for ride comfort. He indicated that PRT guideways require tighter tolerances than usual in civil engineering works and that provisions for fine adjustments to the running surface should be made.

J. Edward Anderson presented a paper titled “How to Design a PRT Guideway”. He argued that in most cases, the design of the guideway has been more or less an afterthought. The purpose of his paper was to stress the importance of adequate consideration of guideway design requirements and criteria. He listed 33 PRT guideway design requirements, discussed issues and tradeoffs and presented 19 PRT guideway design criteria before drawing detailed conclusions.

Ray MacDonald argued for high capacity PRT standardization. He was concerned that the technology is becoming divided into low capacity PRT following APM criteria (e.g. brick wall stopping requirements) and high capacity PRT rejecting these requirements. He considered low capacity PRT to not be financially feasible and urged standardization around high capacity PRT, even if used initially for low capacity applications.

John Lees-Miller presented a well-illustrated discussion of the potential for ride sharing in PRT. He stated that, in order to promote ride sharing it is very important to generate an environment that encourages it. He also showed that ride sharing becomes less effective as the number of potential destinations increases.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ingmar Andreasson presented a paper titled “Extending PRT Capabilities” in which he examined various ways of increasing PRT capacity without reducing headway. He discussed three different ways of increasing capacity – ride-sharing, platooning of empties (since there is no safety reason not to run empties at very short headways) and pair-coupling (trains of two occupied vehicles). His results are tabulated below:

Feature	Capacity Improvement Factor
Ride-sharing	1.5 – 2.1
Platooning of empties	1.15 – 1.25
Pair-coupling	1.5 – 1.9

 

He suggested that combining all three features could increase capacity by a factor of 3 above the basic 1,200 passengers per hour per direction for a system with a 3-second headway.

Finally Jun-Ho Lee presented a paper on PRT computer simulation. He proposed an apparatus making it possible to directly evaluate vehicle operation characteristics on the guideway using real hardware. This could reduce the time for the development, implementation and evaluation of the operational control algorithm for PRT.

 

 

 

Tags: APM, automated people mover, green, Heathrow, personal rapid transit, podcar, podcarguru, PRT, prtguru, sustainable, transport

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