Yes Louis Brennan designed a gyroscopic monorail in the early 1900’s but there’s a reason it didn’t work out. Every car needs its own gyroscope which is a lot of dynamic components that need maintenance. A regular two rail train is much simpler and cheaper to operate. The idea these techbros have that everything is made better with individual pods is pretty wasteful when we already have better and cheaper solutions to virtually every problem they have tried to invent for us. Are we even super concerned about rural folks taking transit? By definition they are a small portion of the population and have the greatest need for personal transport. Where we need transit adoption is in urban areas with large populations who all want to drive their personal 2 tonnes of plastic and steel right into town and park it (for free obviously) in their own little parking space.
A gadgetbahn like this will only serve a limited population and won’t be able to tie into the existing transit network. There might be niche situations where it’s not a terrible idea but it is not a good generalized solution.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 6 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?
tonyn@lemmy.ml 5 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 5 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.
i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de 5 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.
Alto@kbin.social 5 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
Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
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.