Interesting idea. I have a feeling I won't see this functioning in my lifetime, but perhaps in the not too distant future. Article from the Ithaca Times on-line.
An artist’s rendering of what one style of podcar would look like on a track. (Image Provided
Connecting Ithaca
Taryn Thompson
Reporter
Unless we solve the problem of transportation, then nothing else really falls into place. You can pursue sustainable farming practices, you can dump money into alternative energy research, and you can set up organizations that support low-income families. But the biggest issue? It's public transit.
This is what Connect Ithaca decided upon when the group first met: a handful of folks - regular old taxpayers - wary of the ways in which city living has contributed to environmental degradation. They came together as concerned citizens and talked about climate mitigation, oil independence, energy efficiency, food security - even land and wildlife preservation.
But the discussion started to focus on urban planning and transportation infrastructure, and so was born Connect Ithaca.
This collaborative company is committed to reclaiming the magic of the pedestrian street as central to the life of cities, and restoring the urban quality of life that has been jeopardized by the continual intrusion of cars into urban neighborhoods.
"This is about ecological cities that are in balance with nature," said Joan Bokaer, one of the leading founders of CI. "The problem is that the car, no matter how efficient, requires the same infrastructure. Unless we address the infrastructure, we'll keep going on the path we're on. The real problem isn't the cars, it's the infrastructure."
Bokaer said that every year, cars kill 1.2 million people and injure 50 million. She noted the amount of space required for roads and highways and intersections, a reality that begins to define a countryside and the view from kitchen windows. And it keeps growing.
"The better cars get, the more people will have cars, the more congested cities will be, and the more frantic our streets will be," she said. "Cars have a major impact on the quality of our cities."
And so, CI teamed up with C&S Engineers, based in Syracuse, to look into options that would help begin to wean the system away from cars. C&S specializes in infrastructure planning, design, construction, and inspection, and is heavily oriented in transportation and rail.
The team received a grant from the New York State Energy Research and Development Agency to study sustainable transport and the feasibility of implementing a system that would reduce miles vehicles traveled. The system: personal rapid transit.
"The feasibility study will look into transportation patterns, travel behavior, existing traffic conditions, and the likelihood of people to use personal rapid transit," said Paul Wilke, the principal investigator for the study and the manager of transportation at C&S.
The PRT uses small, lightweight, driverless vehicles to carry individuals or small groups non-stop from the origin station to the destination station. These vehicles - known as pod cars - are tracked by a network of lightweight guideways.
The birth of the PRT concept can be traced back to the 1950s, when research was first conducted into alternative public transportation methods - a new, innovative transport system using advanced automation to address the needs of urban transportation.
The system is comparable to public rail transportation since it's on a fixed route and functions like a horizontal elevator. PRT is different, however, because vehicles are personal and will travel individually selected routes, depending on what the rider needs. Stations are located off-line on a sidetrack, waiting for passengers to come aboard without blocking the traffic flow on the main track.
To top it off, the electric system operates on demand, using energy only upon transportation requests. How is an electric pod different from an electric car? It has to do with weight, speed and non-stop operation.
"The pod has no transmission, no engine, and you don't need safety cages," said Robert Morache, a local architect and the brains behind the conceptual design of the system.
"Since the pod is on a track and elevated, it's never going to collide with an SUV, a bus, a tree, or a truck," Morache said. "Because it's on this safe network, the only thing it could do is bump another pod. So there's a weight reduction that comes with eliminating that safety cage equipment."
The electricity used in an automobile, therefore, is dragging the battery, the motor, and the transmission - not to mention the solid metal frame in which it all sits. In addition, electric cars have very heavy batteries, Morache said.
"The car, even though it's the same size as a pod, might weigh twice as much, which means it will use twice as much energy to get it moving," he said.
The pod is also going from point A to point B directly, without stopping, while the electric car is going from A to B "stopping 25 times at lights intersections, stop signs, decelerating and accelerating, always loosing energy."
Since the PRT system is a dynamic electric network, that energy is shared amongst pods. As one pod is heading down the hill and generating power, the electricity can be transferred to another pod heading up the hill, and any excess is maintained within the system for future use.
Getting motivated
Connect Ithaca's motivation behind a renaissance of the mobility paradigm extends far beyond the practical mechanics and operational integrity of PRT. For one, members of the group are of the opinion that the money spent on the car industry is out of proportion to the needs it serves.
"It's a social justice issue," Bokaer said. "Our nation's poorest spend 40 percent of each paycheck on transportation. It has a disproportionately difficult effect on the poor: they're forced to get cars, to use this infrastructure because public transportation is so inadequate. In order to get the jobs they need to get the car."
Bokaer mentioned a recent statistic from AAA stating that on average, Americans spend $8,000 to $10,000 a year on the maintenance of their cars.
"And the poorest families have older cars, which break down more and use more gas," she said.
Secondly, CI advocates fighting against sprawl and big-box development.
"The big box development that happened in Ithaca's Southwest Park is an entirely car-based system that came at the tail end of 20th century," Morache said. "It used to be that the shopping mall would get a couple of anchors, then get a bunch of small stores in between and put them in an enclosed environment."
These days, it's the out-door mall-type layout of individual stores in the same plaza, attracting traffic to fill up the parking lots that are often as expansive as the stores themselves.
"The reason businesses locate out there is because they get the free parking," Morache said. "But whenever you improve transit, no matter what it is, you eliminate car use and bring the whole city closer together so that you can get more stuff within walking distance."
Businesses need people - not necessarily parking - and if the PRT can bring 75 customers to a business all at one time, it's a mutually beneficial environment, Morache argued.
It's the idea of access by proximity: instead providing parking that allows customers to drive from here to there, the PRT would bring origin and destination closer together by eliminating parking.
"So, you don't even need to drive," Morache said. "You can walk because they're just across street from each other and not down the block. Until you achieve a critical mass of transit, you're never going to achieve access by proximity."
Current automobile infrastructure feeds the system that nourishes sprawl, building roads to support development outside of cities, which is apparent on the edge of almost all U.S. cities, Bokaer added.
"This means we're loosing our most precious farmland," she said, quoting a report from the Yale School Forestry that claimed the best agricultural climate exists underneath our highways.
"That's usually the best farmland," Bokaer said. "The farmland around cities usually has the best soil because it's usually around water."
However, 50 percent of most American cities are devoted to the automobile, she said.
"It's hard to fathom how much space the automobile requires," she added. "It's a huge amount when you consider how much farm-ready soil is covered by asphalt. Instead of using that space for urban agriculture and growing food on the shrinking amount of arable farmland, they're using it for cars. It's the absurdity of the whole mindset."
As such, Connect Ithaca wants an upheaval of the status quo and a u-turn - or maybe k-turn depending on the progress of the study - of mentality: changing the way people think about transportation and mobility.
Getting started
Since the very beginning, CI honed in on transportation and transit-oriented development as the nexus of many societal problems.
"We began to look at things as not simply as transportation, but as sustainable mobility," said Jake Roberts, who researched the history behind and development of transit in the Ithaca area as part of the team's conditions to receive the NYSERDA funding.
"It's a change in wording," he said. "Transportation doesn't have to be by plane, car, or bus. It can be any number of things," like walking, hiking, biking - even rollerblading.
"My intention is always to advocate for reduction in vehicle usage, not stopping it altogether, in order to create greater economic sustainability within a city," said Frost Travis, a local real estate developer and member of CI. "We need to be more efficient."
Roberts, in studying the way Ithaca could handle a PRT system, attended a conference in Upsula, Sweden, where he said his flight took him right to the train station, which brought him directly to the bus stop, where buses were waiting patiently.
"Upsula covers the physical land mass of Town of Ithaca plus the City of Ithaca, but it has 200,000 residents," Roberts said. "There are dedicated routes for bikes, the canals are still up and running, transporting goods and people."
Everything is green, he added.
"There was a lot of housing built around courtyards and shared space; people were healthy and happy," Roberts said. "What are we doing wrong in America?"
The priorities in Sweden centered on the pedestrian, and then shifted to bikes and public transportation. Cars were the last priority.
"Ours are opposite: the car comes first and people second," Travis said. "We've chosen to focus on sustainable mobility because if we don't have something to orient our efforts around, we'd be too diffuse. This is a great organizing principle."
Connect Ithaca looked at reprioritizing these values because of the desire, they said, for a different urban character.
"A lot of people think that the car is inevitable, but the reality is that the car is a choice," Morache said. "I don't think people believe they can have that here."
"The car is not inevitable," Bokaer added. "We have some beautiful examples, like one of the most popular cities in the world: Venice, Italy. It's a popular tourist destination with no cars."
Having the organic, interconnectedness of a European city, she said, isn't impossible in a place like Ithaca, but it requires the relinquishment of cars.
"Portland, Oregon, is one of the greenest cities in the country," Bokaer noted. "It's the number one biking city with a double-track, light rail system that occupies 50 times less space than the automobile. Pod cars are even a fraction of that."
One of the reasons, in fact, that CI came together so effectively was that "we had this window of opportunity when the county announced they wanted to support nodal development," Travis said.
Testing the potential viability of a PRT system in a city like Ithaca makes logical sense from several different angles.
"One of the nice things about where Ithaca is regarding it's progressive nature is that the city, town, county, Cornell University and Ithaca College are all at some state of their comprehensive master planning," Roberts said, "figuring out what their objectives are, what the best pathway is. It's impressive that they are all doing this."
These entities, however, are not vocally planning together, which is unfortunate, Roberts said.
"But to be able to inject this conversation so that public mass transit has a chance is great," he said. "The scale of Ithaca as a mid-sized city is also good. Other big cities already have public transportation systems. Then there are second-tier and third-tier cities that are auto-dependent and don't necessarily have the ability to bring in a mass transit system."
CI suggests that the configuration like what's home to Ithaca, then, is a highly appropriate Petri dish for the manifestation of a beta pod car set-up.
"The electrical system infrastructure eliminates the greenhouse gas emissions and energy used by conventional transportation," Travis said.
The theory behind an eco-city, Travis added, provides a compelling argument for mitigating the impact of the automobile on a smaller city and weaning off the culture behind the auto-city.
Getting tested
In favor of avoiding jumping the gun, CI simply wants to bring a test track to Ithaca.
"On one hand, it's important that American engineers and transit planners and academics can kick their tires here and test it, but it's important for everyday folk to see how it functions," Roberts said. "It's not that futuristic - it's just advanced railroad.
CI plans to continue engaging the community ahead of time so that people get a full understanding is important, Morache added.
"We want to create win-win situations," he said. "We have to study the impact on TCAT and on taxi services and make sure TCAT stays solvent so that the two compliment each other. We have the opportunity to make everything work better together as a multi-modal transportation system."
The team plans to educate the public on all relevant factors, including how a PRT system would fit into the community and what the challenges are, including the legalities of implementing such a thing into an already established city.
"We need pub input and participation to make sure that as we move forward, everybody has a seat at the table," Roberts said.
Any community that looks into a PRT system has to ask these questions, Morache said. Ithaca's experience with this will offer some knowledge and future expertise advice for other cities.
"This is a labor of love and exploration, trying to find new strategies," he added.
Members of CI actually see this as an economic strategy for the entire region of central and Upstate New York, formerly an influential manufacturing base known for it's history of innovation.
"There has been so much talk about turning a corner regarding the economic downturn and re-identifying upstate New York as the Silicon Valley of green enterprise," Roberts said. "If we can test a pod car or PRT manufacturing base here, it would go a long way to attract other green enterprises."
CI knows, however, that the car is far too practical and comfortable being a trusted staple in many lives.
"There is an enormous culture built around the car," Travis said. "It's here to stay. We just want to provide a viable alternative."
http://www.ithacatimes.com/main.asp?...ArticleID=9439
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) travel experience, I can say that the Finger Lakes area look very scenic. Too bad I only went up as far as Danby.
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