Self-balancing commuter pods ride old railway lines on demand
Self-balancing commuter pods ride old railway lines on demand
Country folk tend to like the independence offered by their cars, so how do you get them to use public transit? The Monocab system may be the answer, as it utilizes individual on-demand pods that travel on existing abandoned railways.
Great, now we can have traffic but on these old rails.
How about, and I know this is a radical idea, actually fixing up the old rail lines and putting trains on them instead of this gimmick?
This wouldnwork better on smaller scale, less traveled rural routes. Maintaining a whole ass train for a few dozen people is overkill. I kinda like this.
Would it though? It's just vans on tracks instead of roads.
It's not going to be more energy efficient with individually powered cabs. It's not going to be more convenient unless your origin and destination are near a station. It's not going to be more time efficient because of the extra distance getting to and from tracks and because you aren't going to drive highway speeds in tiny self-balancing cars on old rails, especially when passing cars going the opposite direction. It's not going to be more cost efficient because it's more total moving parts requiring maintenance per person per trip.
It sounds like they are solving the problem of turning around only for terminal stations. This might make sense for trains that carry many people, but if you're making cars on tracks there is no good solution. If you need to spend money on a system that turns the cabs around, then you either spend more money installing those systems at most stations or you spend money maintaining cabs that are driving around empty. Either way, cars on roads are cheaper.
They say it's good for people who don't want to wait for public transit, but they don't say how this solves that problem. With public transit, you know when the train will be there. With this, unless they have a way for the cabs to wait at the station without blocking other cabs going the same direction, you have to wait for a cab to come and you can't time your trip to the station around when the cab will be there. Maybe they have one? It would be a disaster if you wanted to get on from near the middle and needed to wait for either a cab that has already been vacated to come or for a cab to come all the way from the start of the track.
I know it's kinda cheating to bring them up in this context, but the Swiss manage to run trains to very small towns just fine
Yeah those small southern towns of 50,000 people. Train service to so few people would never make sense! ^/s
Old railway lines in Europe often aren't complete anymore and only cover relatively small distances.
There simply isn't enough infrastructure to handle a full train network and fixing them up would probably require existing infrastructure and buildings to be disowned and destroyed.
Yes Louis Brennan designed a gyroscopic monorail in the early 1900's but there's a reason it didn't work out. Every car needs its own gyroscope which is a lot of dynamic components that need maintenance. A regular two rail train is much simpler and cheaper to operate. The idea these techbros have that everything is made better with individual pods is pretty wasteful when we already have better and cheaper solutions to virtually every problem they have tried to invent for us. Are we even super concerned about rural folks taking transit? By definition they are a small portion of the population and have the greatest need for personal transport. Where we need transit adoption is in urban areas with large populations who all want to drive their personal 2 tonnes of plastic and steel right into town and park it (for free obviously) in their own little parking space.
A gadgetbahn like this will only serve a limited population and won't be able to tie into the existing transit network. There might be niche situations where it's not a terrible idea but it is not a good generalized solution.
I could see those as an option for rural areas without much traffic. A full train might not be economical, but a small pod is. It could transport people to the closest proper train station where they can hop off.
But that would mean you'd have to maintain a ton of tracks for a handful of people.
Just fund trains.
Trains suck if you don't have frequency, and because of the population density with a good frequency more than half of the trains will be completely empty and the rest almost empty.
Looking forward to the Adam Something video about this.
I immediately thought about connecting multiple of these together to make a train haha
Connect them together for efficiency, and maybe use both rails for stability and to reduce design conplexity. (you dont even need any additional infrastructure!) Also, have them arrive regularly, so that users don't need to bother with an app! Brilliant!
Seriously though, it's really amazing how people keep inventing trains but worse. I guess this idea makes some sense if there aren't enough riders for regular train service, but still...
Ahah, I just told myself: cannot wait for Adam Something to debunk this
JUST PUT A FUCKING TRAIN ON IT WTF ARE WE DOING
Read the article, that's literally the first thing they explain
Besides which, it's very obviously a train if you just look at it. It's a small monorail train specifically designed for this purpose using existing infrastructure.
People are never fucking happy.
A train is a collection of rolling railcars propelled by one or more locomotives. These are individual self-powered railcars.
So no, there’s no train here. Just monorail pods that will get congested as density increases.
The whole concept of a train is that all the cars move together and the only congestion is at the switching yards, where it can be optimized.
FUCKING DOING OUR JOB AS TRANSPORT MODELLERS AND DOING A FUCKING COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS THAT SHOWS YOU'RE NEVER GOING TO GET FUCKING MODE SHIFT FROM RURAL USERS UNLESS YOU RUN A FUCKING METRO STYLE 10 MINUTELY SERVICE WHICH IS FUCKING UNFEASIBLE WITH THE FUCKING RESOURCES WE HAVE AVAILABLE.
IN THE FUCKING UK WE HAVE A LARGE NUMBER OF FUCKING ABANDONED RAILWAYS FROM THE PERIOD OF FUCKING COAL MINING THAT WOULDN'T HAVE ANYWHERE NEAR THE FUCKING DEMAND NECESSARY TO JUSTIFY SETTING UP AN EXPENSIVE AS FUCK SIGNALLING SYSTEM TO BRING THEM UP TO MODERN FUCKING SAFETY STANDARDS, ALONGSIDE REPLACING THE FUCKING RAILS, SLEEPERS AND BEDS.
IF INSTEAD YOU CAN HAVE A FUCKING PUBLICALLY OWNED FLEET OF FUCKING ELECTRIC 'MINI TRAINS' THAT PEOPLE COULD USE FOR INFREQUENT BUT NECESSARY TRIPS, THAT COULD REMOVE A FUCKING SIGNIFICANT BARRIER TO MODE SHIFT, WHICH WOULD BE PRETTY FUCKING RAD
Trains are expensive to run if you don't have enough passengers (like in small villages).
Mobile fuck shack.
Why is it always fucking pods!? (Fucking-pods?)
I would love a mini rail system like this in my community.
Actually, I’ll take most any public transportation at this point.
Seems over-complicated…
I could imagine an autonomous, on-demand rural train service. Due to the low expected traffic, it seems like you could just build some additional sidings and use a more conventional design.
The Brennan monorail rides again!
Some of this technology may sound a bit "over-ambitious," but keep in mind the project was inspired by a fully functional self-balancing monorail that mechanical engineer Louis Brennan designed and demonstrated back in the early 1900s.
Self balancing with an Outrigger wheel
Fucking cowards
The wheel is just there during the testing phase as a backup, seems the final pods don't have it, as it would make the idea useless.
That was my thought. and those pedal bikes with outrigger to run abandoned rail lines is already a thing
However, what if it were possible to hail a small electric vehicle right when you needed it – via a taxi- or Uber-style app
Uber style app. Seriously, fuck no. Send trains or don’t, fuck Uber and their business model.
I'm cautiously optimistic about this, it seems like an okay idea and the fact that they have vehicles working on a test track IRL means it's at least not an obvious scam like hyperloop.
Also the fact that they have a specific use case in mind, don't say it's going to revolutionize all transportation, and are reusing existing infrastructure, all bode well.
The crane is the part I don't get. Is it a stationary crane? Is that not more work than just putting a track switch in place instead?
It's only for the alpha-test vehicles. The crane does not touch the rails, it's a security issue for testing e.g. min power gyro
The problem is that the wheels have flanges on both sides, so I don't think switches work.
The best solution would be a loop connecting the rails at each end, but that's obviously not compatible with running regular freight trains since it would need to be switchless.
Thus presumably they need to be externally flipped around and moved, for which I'd guess a crane like those used for moving containers on and off trains is ideal.
With a crane they could also easily move the vehicles to a storage area so freight trains can pass through.
Why is it always "pods"?
How else are they going to win the rail pod challenge?
Project founder Thorsten Försterling tells us that the team is working on a track-installed machine that will be able to lift individual pods off of one rail and place them on the other (without passengers in them at the time), keeping them from all collecting at either end of the route.
What the heck, can't you just have a Y at the end?
on-demand pods that travel on existing abandoned railways.
They're reusing existing tracks.
Fahr'n, fahr'n, fahr'n mit ein Gadgetbahn 🎶
That looks horrible. Cramped, the giant windows means it's hot and the sun is always in your eyes.... Any reason they need to only use one rail? We already have road & rail buses, trucks, etc...just use those.
I think "Draisy" is faster on the track and a much more realistic project. But "Monocab" is a University project, so it's ok for me that a few millions are invested there.
Yes, this looks much better. My other thought would be road-rail buses, but getting on/off the tracks might be too much work to be worth the extra flexibility.
I've seen one of those in Japan. Even they admit that the only reason they continue to run it is for the novelty factor, it's apparently quite expensive to keep going and not really that efficient.
It takes a good while to convert between the two modes since you have to be really careful you don't misalign the thing and result in a derail. So it's done, very, very, slowly.
Exactly what we need! More pods! SMH!
Well, I think they look cute.
Looks like walking speed in their testing.
Anything faster would be a safety issue.
