Comment on Self-balancing commuter pods ride old railway lines on demand

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i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨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.

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