🚀 go-pugleaf

Am Sun, 9 Sep 2007 02:20:42 UTC,  schrieb "Jack May" 
<jack.may@comcast.net>  auf misc.transport.rail.americas :

> With door to door time of several times that of a car, dramatic reductions 
> in door to door time are required.  There seems to be nothing being 
> developed that can dramatically reduce transit delays.   For cars, the 
> technology has the potential to eliminate most of the congestion while 
> reducing accident and death rates to extremely low levels.

  The main problems with the individual car remain, even when the 
problem of transforming the car into a sort of rail vehicle, i.e. one 
which rides in convoys and is being steered not by the person being 
transported, but by some centralized guiding system. 

  Each car needs its own engine for propulsion, and has to carry the 
energy with it for that engine; cars take much more space than trains 
to, even in the most comfortable trains the footprint of it per 
passenger is smaller than for the number of cars needed; and the car 
has to be stored somewhere to be available for the return trip, taking
space while sitting idle. 

  I think the research into automatic convoy building and dissolution 
without stops is a very interesting one, and is done among others at 
the Universities of Paderborn and Bochum with an experimental rail 
systems. 

  And as you wrote a few contributions earlier: 

>For the next 75-100 years we will be developing increasingly 
sophisticated 
>electronic systems for roads.  People will still migrate to 
transportation 
>systems that minimize their total cost in time  + dollars.

  The system which relieves them of the cost of buying their own 
vehicle and storing it somewhere will minimize total cost in time and 
dollars, pesos, yen, or Euro, or what have you. 


Cheers, 
L.W.