At Grist, David Roberts writes Personal rapid transit: The future of public transportation, maybe. An excerpt:
The internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle had its disadvantages from the very beginning, not only relative to public transportation but relative to other types of car. (There’s a fantastic chapter in Alexis Madrigal’s Powering the Dreamabout this history.) But its advantages — power, personalization, and modularity — mattered more. It could go farther than other cars; you could drive it wherever you wanted to go, whenever; and it was small enough to be within the reach of average citizens, who had little control over larger transportation projects.
The ICE car has arguably passed the point when its drawbacks—particulate pollution, traffic, sprawl, climate change—exceed its advantages, at least from a social-welfare perspective. But it is still firmly rooted in human life, almost everywhere, despite much-hyped efforts in some places to boost alternatives. (See, for instance, Curitiba, Brazil, celebrated for its Bus Rapid Transit system, where auto ownership is nonetheless high and rising.) Vehicle miles traveled (VMT) are leveling off in the U.S. and in Europe, which have arguably reached auto saturation, but they are skyrocketing in China and other growing countries. Global automobile ownership is expected to rise and rise and rise. There’s nothing on the horizon that fundamentally displaces or marginalizes the personal vehicle.
Why is that? Well, tons of reasons. But a big one is that public transportation still cannot match the advantages of the car: power, personalization, and modularity. Inter-city trains and buses remain fairly slow and inconvenient. In terms of personalization, public transit routes are still limited, both in geography and in timing, and they face the notorious “last mile” problem, meaning that transit stations are often located too far from homes and businesses to represent a manageable walk. (One note: Cars rely on built infrastructure just like public transit. They are more convenient once roads have been built everywhere. But in most growing and wealthy countries, that’s already a fait accompli.) And, especially here in the U.S., public transportation systems, like all large construction projects, are large and expensive. They come in big chunks.
So what’s to be done? Ideally, we’d like a form of transportation that keeps the advantages of public transit—lower emissions, fewer roads, more walkable cities—but also matches the advantages of cars, in that it takes you where you want to go, when you want to go there, with a minimum of hiking and waiting.
Does such a thing exist? Advocates of “personal rapid transit” (PRT) say it does. PRT comes in many forms, but the basic idea is that there are fairly lightweight pods that hold a small number of people; they move over fairly lightweight tracks; and, crucially, they do not travel along prescribed routes, but rather can take passengers directly to their destination, with no stops along the way. There are currently four working PRT systems in the world, the oldest of which, weirdly, is in West Virginia.
You can learn more about PRT at the link above. The PRT system that’s really captured my fancy, mentioned by a commenter beneath my fustercluck post, is skyTran, a company that emerged out of the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. There are no operational skyTran systems yet, but a couple are in the works. […]
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2006—Bush is the new Nixon:
Historian Rick Perlstein, who is writing a sequel to his Before the Storm focusing on the Nixon years, passed this on:
Hunter S. Thompson, in the October 10, 1974 Rolling Stone: "But the climate of those years was so grim that half the Washington press corps spent more time worrying about having their telephones tapped than they did about riskign the wrath of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson by poking at the weak semas of a Mafia-style administration that began cannibalizing the whole government just as soon as it came into power. Nixon's capos were never subtle; they swaggered into Washington like a conquering army, and the climate of fear they engendered apparently neutralized The New York Times along with all the other pockets of potential resistance. Nixon had to do everything but fall on his own sword before anybody in the Washington socio-political establishment was willing to take him on." |
The author subsequently conceded:
Okay, I was wrong that Bush is the new Nixon.
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The solar PV capacity connected to the Chinese grid in the last 3 months of 2014 (8-9 GW) was the total global solar PV capacity in 2007.
— @Sustainable2050
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