Personal Rapid Transit in New Zealand - Future Transit Now

This paper documents 32 vehicle simulation programs that have been developed since 1969 to simulate the operation of automated vehicles operating in net-works of guideway under a variety of strategies

High-capacity personal rapid transit (Hi-Cap PRT) is a concept that has been evolving for over 50 years.

Notwithstanding attempts to kill it, it has kept emerging because in optimum form it has the potential for contributing significantly to the solution of fundamental problems of modern society including congestion, global warming, dependence on a dwindling supply of cheap oil, and most recently terrorism.

The future of Hi-Cap PRT depends on careful design starting with carefully thought-through criteria for the design of the new system and of its major elements.

In this paper, Dr Ed Anderson gives a complete and concise view of the rationale of PRT, its history, current status, and potential. This is a robust technical explanation complete with the data and arguments needed to help planners and engineers get a full understanding.

The Intelligent Transportation Network System (ITNS) is a totally new form of public transportation designed to provide a high level of service safely and reliably over an urban area of any extent in all reasonable weather conditions without the need for a driver’s license, and in a way that minimizes cost, energy use, material use, land use, and noise. Being electrically operated it does not emit carbon dioxide or any other air pollutant.

This remarkable set of attributes is achieved by operating vehicles automatically on a network of minimum weight, minimum size exclusive guideways, by stopping only at off-line stations, and by using light-weight, sub-compact-auto-sized vehicles.

With these physical characteristics and in-vehicle switching ITNS is much more closely comparable to an expressway on which automated automobiles would operate than to conventional buses or trains with their on-line stopping and large vehicles.  We now call this new system ITNS rather than High-Capacity Personal Rapid Transit, which is a designation coined over 35 years ago.

A comparison of the energy use per passenger-mile of eight modes of urban transportation is made in terms of eleven variables, resulting in conclusions about the direction transit system design should take to provide adequate transportation with minimum energy use. The method can easily be programmed on a personal computer to be used to study the effects of parameter variations on energy use.