> or (what would be much better) electrifying our major highways so that vehicles don't even need to stop to recharge.
Man, electrifying 8-lane highways everywhere sounds like a lot of work and maintenance.
What if instead, we built a special electric road with just two lanes, which means you only need to electrify one lane in each direction.
We want those cars to move fast, so let's make the lanes out of metal and use metal wheels on the cars. By making the lane actually a set of guide rails for the metal wheels, the cars can autonomously stay in their lane at high speed without special computer control.
Then, you could make each vehicle larger, so that you are efficiently using the capacity of each lane. These larger vehicles could autonomously follow each other at very close distances on the guide rails.
I bet such a system of two-lane, electrified, high-speed, autonomous-steering high capacity vehicles could move as many people as a large multi-lane highway in a smaller footprint all on grid power!
That's basically "pods" from every future sci-fi. Pods are not efficient because they have all the same problems as cars and none of benefits (except emissions). You will need gigantic roads everywhere like we have today, traffic jams, parking issues, all super expensive and financed by the city dwellers who don't benefit from cars so much. It is actually funny that rich car centric suburbs are subsidised by poorer population in the apartment blocks in the city cores. :)
Both things that are in common with air travel which seems quite popular.
A good train system is better at both. Stations are smaller and less noisy than airports so they can go directly in city centers instead of miles outside the city. And space and comfort per passenger is usually much better than airline coach class, plus on intercity trains you can usually move around to cafe cars, dining cars, etc.
Overnight trains are often built with private sleeping compartments if that’s more your style.
> I bet such a system of two-lane, electrified, high-speed, autonomous-steering high capacity vehicles could move as many people as a large multi-lane highway in a smaller footprint all on grid power!
To quantify this heavy rail has a route capacity of ~40k people per hour per lane, compared to ~2k for cars (using lower and upper estimates respectively). That means the route capacity for 2 lanes of heavy rail is at a minimum equivalent to a 40 lane highway.
Man, electrifying 8-lane highways everywhere sounds like a lot of work and maintenance.
What if instead, we built a special electric road with just two lanes, which means you only need to electrify one lane in each direction.
We want those cars to move fast, so let's make the lanes out of metal and use metal wheels on the cars. By making the lane actually a set of guide rails for the metal wheels, the cars can autonomously stay in their lane at high speed without special computer control.
Then, you could make each vehicle larger, so that you are efficiently using the capacity of each lane. These larger vehicles could autonomously follow each other at very close distances on the guide rails.
I bet such a system of two-lane, electrified, high-speed, autonomous-steering high capacity vehicles could move as many people as a large multi-lane highway in a smaller footprint all on grid power!
reply