Comment on Self-balancing commuter pods ride old railway lines on demand
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 4 months ago
Great, now we can have traffic but on these old rails.
How about, and I know this is a radical idea, actually fixing up the old rail lines and putting trains on them instead of this gimmick?
Old railway lines in Europe often aren’t complete anymore and only cover relatively small distances.
There simply isn’t enough infrastructure to handle a full train network and fixing them up would probably require existing infrastructure and buildings to be disowned and destroyed.
tonyn@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
This wouldnwork better on smaller scale, less traveled rural routes. Maintaining a whole ass train for a few dozen people is overkill. I kinda like this.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 4 months ago
Depends on what you call a “whole ass train”. Many of these routes could be easily service by a 1 or 2 car DMU like the rural routes in Scotland and Wales.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
Seems like a train that uses both sides of the track fulfills different requirements. A train can only be made to go one way at a time, but can hold more people (increased bandwidth), but these smaller half-cars can be moving people in both directions at the same time (lower latency). Seems quite clever if it works out.
MadBob@feddit.nl 4 months ago
There are stations on Anglesey where you have to stick your arm out for the train, and the only two routes they lie on are served by the kind of 1970s DMU like you mentioned on its way to Chester or a Pendelino on its way to London.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 4 months ago
I’ve used those request stops! Those sort of rural lines are exactly what we’re missing here in the states, just bouncing back and forth on the line. You can see here Americans don’t even know what they are, but they’re the perfect solution for these lines going between little towns
frog@beehaw.org 4 months ago
I live next to a railway line in the south west that is similar. A single train runs up and down the line. If you’re on one of the stations, you wave to the train so it’ll stop for you. If you’re on the train and want to get off, you ask the driver to stop.
abbadon420@lemm.ee 4 months ago
That sounds more like a tram than a train
i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
Would it though? It’s just vans on tracks instead of roads.
It’s not going to be more energy efficient with individually powered cabs. It’s not going to be more convenient unless your origin and destination are near a station. It’s not going to be more time efficient because of the extra distance getting to and from tracks and because you aren’t going to drive highway speeds in tiny self-balancing cars on old rails, especially when passing cars going the opposite direction. It’s not going to be more cost efficient because it’s more total moving parts requiring maintenance per person per trip.
It sounds like they are solving the problem of turning around only for terminal stations. This might make sense for trains that carry many people, but if you’re making cars on tracks there is no good solution. If you need to spend money on a system that turns the cabs around, then you either spend more money installing those systems at most stations or you spend money maintaining cabs that are driving around empty. Either way, cars on roads are cheaper.
They say it’s good for people who don’t want to wait for public transit, but they don’t say how this solves that problem. With public transit, you know when the train will be there. With this, unless they have a way for the cabs to wait at the station without blocking other cabs going the same direction, you have to wait for a cab to come and you can’t time your trip to the station around when the cab will be there. Maybe they have one? It would be a disaster if you wanted to get on from near the middle and needed to wait for either a cab that has already been vacated to come or for a cab to come all the way from the start of the track.
erwan@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
OK, it’s 2pm. With this system, you call a pod and ride it. With a rural train, you check the schedule and see that the next train is at 5pm. And you have to plan your trip back as well. Great, time to take your car.
And you might say “let’s have trains run at least once per hour then”. That means running empty trains all day, not sure it’s the best way to spend public money.
i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
If your options are waiting at the station up to 2 hours for a pod or waiting anywhere else 3 hours for a train, are the pods better?
Alto@kbin.social 4 months ago
I know it's kinda cheating to bring them up in this context, bur the Swiss manage to run trains to very small towns just fine