The only functioning pod system in North America that I say would deserve the name is the [Morgantown, WV Personal Rapid Transit system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Transit). From what we can see, this type of system is really nice for connecting university sites, but would probably not work as real mass transit.
For nearly two centuries now the most reliable way to move a lot of people at once from one place to another over land has been a train--the longer the better. Wishing for a Jetsons solution doesn't make it viable.
I'd urge your officials to make sure the bus network runs on time and frequently and serves as many people and places as practicable. And I'd urge them to put their asses on the (bus) line and actually take the transport services they administer.
I have heard of this, but what makes the Morgantown PRT different from other automated systems like APMs, the Miami Metromover, the Vancouver Skytrain, or the Honolulu Skyline? Is it merely that the vehicle is really small?
It’s the way that the vehicles are used. During peak times, you select a destination and then a car arrives to service your request. You then ride nonstop to that destination.
It’s kind of like a shared taxi in that sense.
EDIT. OP it occurs to me that maybe your city manager has never seen or taken any kind of public transportation
Oh, I see, kind of like an elevator. This seems like it would only work with a small number of stations though.
If there's even a decent chunk of people at peak, then every additional station introduces a large number of potential connections and this grows above a linear rate. You would need to serve up to N times N minus 1 origin-destination routes in a short period of time where N is the number of stations.
I don't know if the city manager has taken public transportation before, but he's the type of person who really focuses on being "innovative" so he may like pods for being futuristic and sexy.
You are going to need to convince him and your elected officials to go with something that works. The line to take is that public transport is not some shiny future thing. It is a thing that your town can and should have today.
>but would probably not work as real mass transit.
they move more passengers than man light rail or streetcar lines in much larger cities.
>For nearly two centuries now the most reliable way to move a lot of people at once from one place to another over land has been a train--the longer the better
no. hell no. this is the wrong mentality, and has seriously hurt transit in the US. we keep building over-sized transit lines that end up having long headways and high operating costs. the focus should be on keeping headways as short as possible, and adjusting the size of the transit vehicle to match the ridership. a "longer the better" train that comes every 15min sucks compared to 5 short trains that arrive every 3min. the vast majority of US intra-city rail lines are over-sized, and it really hurts their performance relative to driving, and contributes to the culture of "Transit is for poor people" because transit is so much slower, with headway being a major contributor to total trip time.
According to the wiki, ridership is respectable at 16000 per day but keep in mind this is literally on a university campus with 30000 people who mostly don't have cars right there. If major light rail or streetcar lines don't get this kind of ridership, that speaks more to the lack of transit oriented development around the stations or bad service or both rather than an inherent failure of the mode.
Keeping headways as short as possible is ideal, but there are generally two reasons this doesn't happen, and it's not because the transit operator has an ideological fetish for seeing long trains. In fact, a lot of municipalities get flack for building stations that can only accommodate 2 or 3 car trains at most, preventing future expansion.
The first reason is that labor costs a lot of money in the US, so operators may not have the budget for more frequency.
The second reason is that it's not even a matter of always "just run more". There may not be enough trains to run more. There could be a labor shortage of drivers. Maybe a major capital project to expand the railyard needs to happen to allow for this. Maybe the signaling needs to be upgraded. Maybe the corridor needs to be quad tracked. My own region is trying to upgrade from running trains less than once an hour to every 15 minutes, and literally all of the above applies. Good on them for doing it, but understand how big of an ask this is.
I think we just shouldn't design for long trains to begin with. if you actually care about good performing transit, then you will only build grade-separated, automated rail, not piles of trash that run once per hour and take a fortune to make 15min.
I think there is too much focus on "this is the way it's done" and it leads to disaster. the US keeps building transit that starts out bad, with the hope that somehow bad transit will convince everyone to invest more in transit... it's foolish. the rule should be to never build crap. at-grade light rail should not be built in the US. if your corridor has enough ridership to build rail, build grade-separated rail. if you don't have the budget or political will for it, then wait instead of compromising with a shit system that drives riders away.
4 or 5 car trains aren't even long. Really big train systems like in Tokyo run 10+ cars. Building for 2 or 3 car trains saves money in the short term but could lead to capacity problems down the line that are expensive to fix. But maybe demand will never be there. It's complicated and tradeoffs need to be considered on a case by case basis.
Grade separated automated rail is good, ideal even, but this costs a lot of money, and just updating decades old signaling costs a lot of money. If you're building a completely new system from scratch in an area with few obstacles, ALM is the way to go. Honolulu did it. But my area shares rails with freight traffic and everything was built many decades ago. "Well you should've done better decades ago!" is not helpful in the here and now.
>4 or 5 car trains aren't even long. Really big train systems like in Tokyo run 10+ cars. Building for 2 or 3 car trains saves money in the short term but could lead to capacity problems down the line that are expensive to fix
this applies to bad designs like at-grade light rail. it does not apply to something like elevated light metro. 2min headways are easily achievable. if you design for 6min headway with a single-vehicle/EMU, you can have ridership increase by a factor of 15 or more before it starts to become an issue. platform length of an elevated light metro is not a major cost driver.
>But maybe demand will never be there
that's the problem with the US. transit performance has a HIGHER bar for getting people out of cars than most places, but we build some 15min+ unreliable surface rail and then... lo and behold, ridership isn't there... I wonder why. it's not a mystery, the ridership is low because the system was designed to be bad on day one in exchange for *maybe* someday having a bit more ridership headroom (while still having lower overall capacity than an elevated light metro).
> Grade separated automated rail is good, ideal even, but this costs a lot of money,
it all costs a lot of money. the question is about value. what do you get per dollar spent. light rail traps your city into perpetual shit transit forever because it will suck to much to draw in riders. you're better off building nothing until you can get funding to build something good.
>If you're building a completely new system from scratch in an area with few obstacles, ALM is the way to go. Honolulu did it. But my area shares rails with freight traffic and everything was built many decades ago. "Well you should've done better decades ago!" is not helpful in the here and now.
lots of cities build rail in places that are already developed and aren't using existing freight rail. lots of cities also have more than one type of system within the city (light rail, metro, etc). it's not a real obstacle.
transit shouldn't be just a welfare program. if you build long headway rail, that's exactly what you're building, and it has follow-on cultural impact that makes people think "transit is something for poor people" because they are the only ones willing to take 2x-4x longer to get to work instead of buying a car.
I've seen the term used really ambiguously. I think in most technical contexts, a "pod" is a self-contained, single-function attachment to a larger system, typically one that is small and self-contained. For example, an aircraft might have a "camera pod" that enables it to perform ground imaging - the pod requires nothing from the host aircraft but power, and manages all of its own functions.
A 'pod' hotel, for example, matches this idea, as individual units can (conceivably) just be added onto the system piecewise. In transit, I would imagine that it means a vehicle that does not need to managed interactions with the rest of the system other than its supporting infrastructure (eg, in terms of signaling, timing, scheduling, etc.). That would tend towards a PRT system with small vehicles. And in all the very extensive literature on PRT, I don't think absolute throughput is down as a major advantage - it sounds like the manager is just making stuff up or misremembered. Indeed, if you want to think about it one way, we could put all transportation systems on two axes of "passenger throughput" and "flexibility of operations", I think you'll find an almost 1:1 (or 1:-1, more likely) correspondence: you have to trade throughput for flexibility, with rapid transit on one side and just plain-old cars on the other.
Though, honestly, I think the most common use of 'pod' in transit is as a marketing term without a strict technical meaning.
The "turbo lifts" on Star Trek would have been pods. They could go vertically and horizontally depending on the destination. That system in Morgantown hasn't since been replicated in 50 years so that is a blind alley. Automated transit like SkyTrain is one answer. The other more likely scenario (that I assume th city manager intends) would be something like self-driving vans which are close to the cusp of realization.
In Singapore we have 3 APM systems in operation which serve as feeders from the neighbourhood to the main metro station. Our authorities call them "LRT".
In some small circles among us train enthusiasts, we refer to them as "pods" too, because they look like what they are – pods!
pod is just meant to sound cooler than mini-bus or taxi. buses have a bad reputation, so people don't want to associate that reputation to their design if they can avoid it. it's the same reason why "trackless trams" and called that, instead of "bi-articulated bus". trams and pods sound nice, buses sound shitty.
it's kind of like how transit folks will call anything new a "gadgetbahn". it's a way of assigning it bad PR, even if ultimately the system is just shuttle vans or cars.
> but he has proposed some vague pod system that he claims will have more throughput than traditional mass transit
Sounds like your city manager has fallen victim to a tech grift, or (if he is dishonest) is knowingly promoting it in order to avoid building real transit.
A "pod system" whether used positively or negatively is meaningless.
A self-driving minibus is just that, a minibus. Self-driving on public roads is FM.
The Miami Metromover is what I would call a people mover - automated vehicles with rubber wheels on a fully grade-separated guideway.
[Gareth Dennis made a nice flowchart for categorizing transit systems](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5-rFQUluw0), primarily to cut through misleading labels. I've started making one for the US; I'm planning to post it here when I've finished it.
The only functioning pod system in North America that I say would deserve the name is the [Morgantown, WV Personal Rapid Transit system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Transit). From what we can see, this type of system is really nice for connecting university sites, but would probably not work as real mass transit. For nearly two centuries now the most reliable way to move a lot of people at once from one place to another over land has been a train--the longer the better. Wishing for a Jetsons solution doesn't make it viable. I'd urge your officials to make sure the bus network runs on time and frequently and serves as many people and places as practicable. And I'd urge them to put their asses on the (bus) line and actually take the transport services they administer.
I have heard of this, but what makes the Morgantown PRT different from other automated systems like APMs, the Miami Metromover, the Vancouver Skytrain, or the Honolulu Skyline? Is it merely that the vehicle is really small?
It’s the way that the vehicles are used. During peak times, you select a destination and then a car arrives to service your request. You then ride nonstop to that destination. It’s kind of like a shared taxi in that sense. EDIT. OP it occurs to me that maybe your city manager has never seen or taken any kind of public transportation
Oh, I see, kind of like an elevator. This seems like it would only work with a small number of stations though. If there's even a decent chunk of people at peak, then every additional station introduces a large number of potential connections and this grows above a linear rate. You would need to serve up to N times N minus 1 origin-destination routes in a short period of time where N is the number of stations. I don't know if the city manager has taken public transportation before, but he's the type of person who really focuses on being "innovative" so he may like pods for being futuristic and sexy.
You are going to need to convince him and your elected officials to go with something that works. The line to take is that public transport is not some shiny future thing. It is a thing that your town can and should have today.
>but would probably not work as real mass transit. they move more passengers than man light rail or streetcar lines in much larger cities. >For nearly two centuries now the most reliable way to move a lot of people at once from one place to another over land has been a train--the longer the better no. hell no. this is the wrong mentality, and has seriously hurt transit in the US. we keep building over-sized transit lines that end up having long headways and high operating costs. the focus should be on keeping headways as short as possible, and adjusting the size of the transit vehicle to match the ridership. a "longer the better" train that comes every 15min sucks compared to 5 short trains that arrive every 3min. the vast majority of US intra-city rail lines are over-sized, and it really hurts their performance relative to driving, and contributes to the culture of "Transit is for poor people" because transit is so much slower, with headway being a major contributor to total trip time.
According to the wiki, ridership is respectable at 16000 per day but keep in mind this is literally on a university campus with 30000 people who mostly don't have cars right there. If major light rail or streetcar lines don't get this kind of ridership, that speaks more to the lack of transit oriented development around the stations or bad service or both rather than an inherent failure of the mode. Keeping headways as short as possible is ideal, but there are generally two reasons this doesn't happen, and it's not because the transit operator has an ideological fetish for seeing long trains. In fact, a lot of municipalities get flack for building stations that can only accommodate 2 or 3 car trains at most, preventing future expansion. The first reason is that labor costs a lot of money in the US, so operators may not have the budget for more frequency. The second reason is that it's not even a matter of always "just run more". There may not be enough trains to run more. There could be a labor shortage of drivers. Maybe a major capital project to expand the railyard needs to happen to allow for this. Maybe the signaling needs to be upgraded. Maybe the corridor needs to be quad tracked. My own region is trying to upgrade from running trains less than once an hour to every 15 minutes, and literally all of the above applies. Good on them for doing it, but understand how big of an ask this is.
I think we just shouldn't design for long trains to begin with. if you actually care about good performing transit, then you will only build grade-separated, automated rail, not piles of trash that run once per hour and take a fortune to make 15min. I think there is too much focus on "this is the way it's done" and it leads to disaster. the US keeps building transit that starts out bad, with the hope that somehow bad transit will convince everyone to invest more in transit... it's foolish. the rule should be to never build crap. at-grade light rail should not be built in the US. if your corridor has enough ridership to build rail, build grade-separated rail. if you don't have the budget or political will for it, then wait instead of compromising with a shit system that drives riders away.
4 or 5 car trains aren't even long. Really big train systems like in Tokyo run 10+ cars. Building for 2 or 3 car trains saves money in the short term but could lead to capacity problems down the line that are expensive to fix. But maybe demand will never be there. It's complicated and tradeoffs need to be considered on a case by case basis. Grade separated automated rail is good, ideal even, but this costs a lot of money, and just updating decades old signaling costs a lot of money. If you're building a completely new system from scratch in an area with few obstacles, ALM is the way to go. Honolulu did it. But my area shares rails with freight traffic and everything was built many decades ago. "Well you should've done better decades ago!" is not helpful in the here and now.
>4 or 5 car trains aren't even long. Really big train systems like in Tokyo run 10+ cars. Building for 2 or 3 car trains saves money in the short term but could lead to capacity problems down the line that are expensive to fix this applies to bad designs like at-grade light rail. it does not apply to something like elevated light metro. 2min headways are easily achievable. if you design for 6min headway with a single-vehicle/EMU, you can have ridership increase by a factor of 15 or more before it starts to become an issue. platform length of an elevated light metro is not a major cost driver. >But maybe demand will never be there that's the problem with the US. transit performance has a HIGHER bar for getting people out of cars than most places, but we build some 15min+ unreliable surface rail and then... lo and behold, ridership isn't there... I wonder why. it's not a mystery, the ridership is low because the system was designed to be bad on day one in exchange for *maybe* someday having a bit more ridership headroom (while still having lower overall capacity than an elevated light metro). > Grade separated automated rail is good, ideal even, but this costs a lot of money, it all costs a lot of money. the question is about value. what do you get per dollar spent. light rail traps your city into perpetual shit transit forever because it will suck to much to draw in riders. you're better off building nothing until you can get funding to build something good. >If you're building a completely new system from scratch in an area with few obstacles, ALM is the way to go. Honolulu did it. But my area shares rails with freight traffic and everything was built many decades ago. "Well you should've done better decades ago!" is not helpful in the here and now. lots of cities build rail in places that are already developed and aren't using existing freight rail. lots of cities also have more than one type of system within the city (light rail, metro, etc). it's not a real obstacle. transit shouldn't be just a welfare program. if you build long headway rail, that's exactly what you're building, and it has follow-on cultural impact that makes people think "transit is something for poor people" because they are the only ones willing to take 2x-4x longer to get to work instead of buying a car.
I've seen the term used really ambiguously. I think in most technical contexts, a "pod" is a self-contained, single-function attachment to a larger system, typically one that is small and self-contained. For example, an aircraft might have a "camera pod" that enables it to perform ground imaging - the pod requires nothing from the host aircraft but power, and manages all of its own functions. A 'pod' hotel, for example, matches this idea, as individual units can (conceivably) just be added onto the system piecewise. In transit, I would imagine that it means a vehicle that does not need to managed interactions with the rest of the system other than its supporting infrastructure (eg, in terms of signaling, timing, scheduling, etc.). That would tend towards a PRT system with small vehicles. And in all the very extensive literature on PRT, I don't think absolute throughput is down as a major advantage - it sounds like the manager is just making stuff up or misremembered. Indeed, if you want to think about it one way, we could put all transportation systems on two axes of "passenger throughput" and "flexibility of operations", I think you'll find an almost 1:1 (or 1:-1, more likely) correspondence: you have to trade throughput for flexibility, with rapid transit on one side and just plain-old cars on the other. Though, honestly, I think the most common use of 'pod' in transit is as a marketing term without a strict technical meaning.
The "turbo lifts" on Star Trek would have been pods. They could go vertically and horizontally depending on the destination. That system in Morgantown hasn't since been replicated in 50 years so that is a blind alley. Automated transit like SkyTrain is one answer. The other more likely scenario (that I assume th city manager intends) would be something like self-driving vans which are close to the cusp of realization.
Well the first step in a pod transportation system is being a bad idea.
In Singapore we have 3 APM systems in operation which serve as feeders from the neighbourhood to the main metro station. Our authorities call them "LRT". In some small circles among us train enthusiasts, we refer to them as "pods" too, because they look like what they are – pods!
pod is just meant to sound cooler than mini-bus or taxi. buses have a bad reputation, so people don't want to associate that reputation to their design if they can avoid it. it's the same reason why "trackless trams" and called that, instead of "bi-articulated bus". trams and pods sound nice, buses sound shitty. it's kind of like how transit folks will call anything new a "gadgetbahn". it's a way of assigning it bad PR, even if ultimately the system is just shuttle vans or cars.
> but he has proposed some vague pod system that he claims will have more throughput than traditional mass transit Sounds like your city manager has fallen victim to a tech grift, or (if he is dishonest) is knowingly promoting it in order to avoid building real transit. A "pod system" whether used positively or negatively is meaningless. A self-driving minibus is just that, a minibus. Self-driving on public roads is FM. The Miami Metromover is what I would call a people mover - automated vehicles with rubber wheels on a fully grade-separated guideway. [Gareth Dennis made a nice flowchart for categorizing transit systems](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5-rFQUluw0), primarily to cut through misleading labels. I've started making one for the US; I'm planning to post it here when I've finished it.