Personal Rapid Transit in New Zealand - Future Transit Now!

In June 2006 a memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between the Kingdom of Sweden and the State of California regarding renewable fuel, energy and green transportation. Following on from this, the Institute for Sustainable Transport in Sweden sent representatives as part of a delegation to California and this is their travel report.

The prestigious Economist magazine has a look at PRT in this article "Beyond the Stagecoach."

Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) offers driverless, on-demand and non-stop travel over a network of dedicated guideways separated from other traffic.

During early stages of introduction, many public transport trips require transfers to/from scheduled route services by bus, tram, subway or train. This paper describes a model for trip assignment and transit mode split estimation in mixed transit networks. If non-transit modes remain unchanged, changes in transit disutility contain sufficient information to estimate increased transit ridership.

The mixed mode assignment has been integrated in the generic PRT simulator ”PRTsim” and has been applied in a case study of PRT mixed with scheduled bus services in Umeå Sweden.

Results show that the first stage introduction of a PRT network not only attracts trips from private cars to PRT but at the same time may attract more trips to remaining bus services. In a Swedish case study, full implementation of PRT is estimated to more than double transit ridership.

 

Prof. Ingmar Andreasson
KTH, Centre for Traffic Research
Teknikringen 72
SE-100 44 Stockholm
Phone: +46 705 877724

E-mail: ingmar@ctr.kth.se

Resubmitted October 23, 2010
3441 words, 10 figures and 1 table

Lean production theory provides a basis for understanding how Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) improves upon traditional mass transit. Lean production refers to manufacturing processes that improve upon mass production techniques to reduce cost, reduce time to produce, improve quality, and better respond to market demands. The benefits of lean production techniques have been documented in several studies, including an intensive worldwide study of the automotive industry. Those same benefits as applied to transit planning have important implications for the economic development of our communities.

Podcar City Ithaca 2008 Conference - Newsletter #2