Why is it always these goddamn pods that are supposed to improve public transit? What’s wrong with trains?
Here’s an amazing business plan: take the old designs for a railbus. Remove chassis, design a new chassis, but make it all futuristic. Show it to the investors. They’ll say “but I want a pod!” And then you say “But it is a pod. A megapod, even!” And they’ll squint and go “oh I see. Let’s make 1000 of them.”
(And actually this is exactly what people have done in the past. Cool futuristic exterior hiding what’s basically just a diesel bus with train wheels.)
They’re too expensive. These pods are designed to run of tracks whose commuter train lines have been abandoned due to low ridership.
Is it though?
- You’re still going to need rail workers to make sure the tracks are healthy.
- The cost of a fleet of these self-standing pods versus one or two older decommissioned trains It’s about the same price.
I’m struggling to see any benefit here.
If ridership is low, you can’t run train often. And if you can’t run it often, people will not use it. It just does not work. This one has chance to work, since essentially you can run it on demand, like Uber.
Sounds like they need a shuttle bus which would be a TON cheaper and more efficient.
No, these pods on existing rails are potentially a TON cheaper. Even if you don’t count the cost of maintaining the road (which is significantly more than maintaining rail tracks), the need for paying a driver makes most small shuttle bus services prohibitively expensive.
But the roads are already there. And R&D of this new and untested technology isn’t cheap, either.
In this case the rails are already there but unused.
That is also several strike against this. Those rails exist but they are all in really bad shape as they were nearly universally used without maintenance until it was no longer feasible. They are also generally in bad areas where there isn’t much need for more transport - we already have roads in good shape (to run a bus on). The only thing this has over a bus is you can run them fully automated - which isn’t enough IMO.
The tracks are also already there, and gyroscope stabilized monorail is a 100+ year old technology, not much new to develop about it other than using modern battery technology and some basic self-driving features for it.
Sounds like they really found a gap in the market… /s
Their entire goal is to commercialize it. Its not about efficiently moving large numbers of people. That makes too much sense for this endeavor since you need a set/rigid schedule and predictable travel patterns.
These abominations, are for the convenience of the individual, in the most poorly thought out way. Rather than waiting for the 3PM, they want to advetise you can show up at 2:51 and get on the next available pod and embark, and charge a premium for no waiting and probably try to jazz up the idea that you don’t have to worry about other riders ruining your trip or being a distraction.
It entirely ignores the basic engineering problem of more moving parts means more chances of failure per trip and a single pod going down at best causes the entire line to shut down and at worst a catastrophic pile up as following pods fail to slow or stop and ram into the broken down pod.
Regular trains have conductors who can contact the control station or manually slow the train if an obstruction is on the track and some trains even have engineers on the train or on call who can report to a troubled train in short order to deal with the issue. These smaller pods probably arent all going to have gps or location trackers in them to cut costs so even if the pod can accurately report problems there is no garuntee the engineers will be able to quickly and easily find or know its general location to render assistance as needed.
Id also wager enough of these pods to carry enough passengers to equal a common commuter trainer would have a lot higher maintenance requirements compared to that commuter train, so despite charging higher ticket prices the company probably won’t be making any more profit than if they just managed regular trains. I’d be willing to be anyone that concerned about privacy for commuting and willing to pay higher would just find that buying or renting a car or bike was just as cost effective and less restrictive than these pods.
TL;DR this entire exercise is a solution looking for a problem and is generally worse in every way that matters.
Let’s forget trains and go to trolleys. Cheaper than these new pods, simpler, can hold more than 2 people.
You don’t need as much power as a commuter train.
I cathegorized them in the same way. 😅
Simpsons did it!
And then you can widen it to fit more people abreast. Then lengthen it to fit more people front to back. Then hook them together because a lot of people are going to the same destination… The new becomes old again.
You put it best, but I approve seeing more trains made.
Me too. Why are we constantly fucking around with pods? Just use that money to build a train.
Its kinda cool how by making it mono-rail, they can use a single track rail to have pods moving in both directions, and the rail could still be used during the night for regular cargo trains.
It looks monorail at first but if you look closer its not.
I also wouldn’t want to be the forgetful dumb person that forgot how late it was before taking this thing home because those cargo trains ain’t gonna stop.
It is a monorail, the outrigger is just for testing purposes. It’s gyro stabilized. The tech has been around for more than 100 years, developers always wanted higher capacity which is problematic.
It actually is monorail. It looks like the stabilizing arm is for when the vehicle is off and not moving. It uses a gyroscope while moving for stabilization
The arms connecting the 2nd rail are being used during testing.
Using that for monorails and regular cargo trains would require the monorails to follow regulations and I don’t see that happening.
Not if it is strictly time separated. Like I wrote, I could see these pods operate exclusively during the day and regular/cargo trains operate exclusively during the night. Or any other such time based system.
That isn’t acceptable. One person who for whatever reason is out late (emergency at work, or invited to a party) will be screwed when they can’t get back home and tell everyone else.
At 3am? Come on. And that’s also true for all public transport.
I know it is true almost everywhere, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. People need to get places, transit is just a tool.
Better than nothing still, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good and all that
While you are not wrong, you should always strive to perfection. Running train transit 24x7x365 is low hanging fruit (modern fully automated trains exist - note that the topic here is trains not buses). You do need to do something about maintenance, so I’ll let you get by with 30 minute headways overnight, while during the day you should be running every 5 minutes.
Does that mean that these things can’t go across points? (and anywhere that there isn’t an outer edge to the rail)
I like the idea, but there doesn’t seem a way for a pod to temporarily move into the other track, which raises questions. Like, how do they handle rebalancing the pods? Ideally, you want a free one at each station for the next person who comes along, but if you come into a station with pods already there, do you have to get out and move to the first pod? Or when you leave your station, do all the pods on the line automatically move one station up the line, making a new pod available for the next person and leaving you a smooth trip to your destination (but limiting energy savings)? Do the pods have to cycle all the way to the end of the line to turn around (again, energy inefficient if most of the traffic is between a lesser number of stations)?
I like the idea, I really do! I’m just curious how they handle balancing availability and traffic.
Good questions. I guess given how lightweight these pods look there could be probably some sort of lifting device at some of the stations to move the pods between the two rails.
Since they’re light weight, they don’t need the heavy rail for freight trains that put >25 tons per axle. It would be incredibly easy to make little switching stations that could pass, turn, and store these pods. Having mini train infrastructure like that everywhere would complete my autism. Life would be complete and I could die happy in a monorail pod crash.
The article actually says they’re developing a device to transfer them from one track to the other
I searched train rail bikes: https://www.riverfoxtrain.com/experiences/railbikes/
https://www.trains.com/trn/railroads/tourist/pedal-the-rails-railbike-excursions-guide-2024/
Tho’ what I was imagining was a ‘regular’ bike fitted with an outrigger to keep the wheels on the track.
You can find a few YouTube videos of people converting normal bikes into rail bikes. It doesn’t seem too labor-intensive.
oh boy a brand new gadget bahn
at the least it is (presumably) cheaper than fully restoring those old railways and getting actual two-track trains running on them
No disagreement at all, but I genuinely think something like this is at least worth consideration. In low traffic or rural areas having a “cab” on standby would come at worst with no downsides as long as it doesn’t conflict with normal tram traffic.
At best it would be the best selling point to populations that have become accustom to personal vehicles. Be it for privacy, safety, poor time management, or whatever other reasons. Its also technically a monorail bahn
E: Also this one could’ve been just fine being its own cab, or we could also include the GYROSCOPE because everyone likes monorails with gyroscopes!
My main issue with these is they don’t have any benefit a regular train doesn’t have for long distance and for shorter commutes in low traffic areas that aren’t densley populated enough to warrent a proper train or tram… You’d probably just a bike.
I happen to know the approximate area where this is being trialed, and a bike (even an electric one) is really only an alternative for hard-core all-weather bikers that have no problem driving 60+ kilometres a day.
The distances are just too far, the weather too bad 80% of the year, and the shrinking, elderly population too low density for other means of public transport to work economically.
The options are really either cars, such kind of novel ideas, or abandoning these tiny villages all together.
I think the one and only benefit would be that they can have carts going both directions at the same time using the existing 2 rail system, without building a second pair of rails. I’d love to see some sort of bike add-on that would let me do this with a bicycle.
Interesting idea. Would only realistically work on abandoned lines rather than rarely used lines, with special permission from the railroad infrastructure owner and the national governing body for railways (Federal Railroad Administration in the case of US, Eisenbahn-Bundesamt in Germany), since normal railway signalling systems for single track wouldn’t work with the bidirectional monorail system.
Project founder Thorsten Försterling tells us that the team is working on a track-installed machine that will be able to lift individual pods off of one rail and place them on the other (without passengers in them at the time), keeping them from all collecting at either end of the route.
Still sounds dumb to me. How much effort would it be to lay down a second track, rather than invent a gyroscope-balanced pod that can propel itself along a single railroad rail, along with a specialized machine to move it over to the other rail?
invent a gyroscope-balanced pod that can propel itself along a single railroad rail
No need, it was invented over a century ago.
Here’s a good video about it: https://youtu.be/kUYzuAJeg3M
Just dealing with with land rights for the extra space the second track would need is a nightmare. And the very idea of these is to use existing tracks without getting into new track construction.
Guys! What if we took an already existing idea, but made it worse, and put it in a pod? The VC people will eat it up!
Fun idea, I hope it works! In the states I don’t think there’s sufficient abandoned rail that’s also near population centers for this to succeed.
In the northeast there used to be a fair bit, but I think a lot has been torn up in the process of making bike paths. A lot of the small towns I grew up in still have intact tracks running between their centers, I’d love if these pods made an appearance, if only to show folks that trains can be useful to them.
That would be a neat feature. I remember in college which was in the middle of nowhere our professor was trying to promote a bike trail between the two closest towns, because there used to be train tracks going through. Good to get anything, like a recreational path, but I’d prefer transport that serves commuting needs too.
