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by stewdellow
2498 days ago
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I really wish the powers-at-be would look at Hyperloop as a serious alternative to HS2. While it seems so futuristic it's well within our technological abilities, just seems to be health and safety / legislature restrictions. Potentially far cheaper to build and maintain, modern, environmentally better and quicker amongst a host of other benefits and would help make Britain a global leader in transportation. The Danny in the Valley podcast episode with Dirk Ahlborn was eye opening on the potential benefits and briefly mentions HS2 and Crossrail along with the current SF to LA High Speed rail project. |
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Smartrail and PRT are designed as a point to point separated-grade network carrying on av. 1 person or a pallette of goods. With a hanging rail you don't need heavy batteries, parking for the vehicles, you can run a pod straight into the factory to pickup goods, and large/rich places can pay to have track straight to their door.
You can prefab the rail and as land usage is just poles in the ground it can be rolled out over fields etc quickly. Track is one-way to eliminate junctions. Pods are on-demand ie. No waiting.
Accessibility improves, you can use the top of the rail to generate (solar) power, run highspeed internet cables in the rail to improve comms across a country, and save on distribution center logistics as you're going point to point.
The last mile may possibly be an issue, but forklift drones and bicycles can take most of the load I feel.
Drivers for this are that it would go fast (200mph+ as light pods so little wear), can go overnight (sleeper pods), you could buy track to your door, personal transport (like a cinema room if you want). The main real issue with cars is that there's a large lobby behind what is a legacy transport solution...
By way of example, UltraPRT has been running flawlessly at Heathrow airport for 10 years, was built on time, on budget, and performs exactly as predicted/modelled.
For more info checkout http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/ in particular Swedetrack (https://web.archive.org/web/20060202013014/http://www.swedet...)