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Autonomous Vehicles, New Mobility & the Built Environment

A Power Grid with a Transit System

Google’s real innovation in deploying Fiber-to-the-Home broadband networks had little to do with technology and a lot to do with improving the process for building physical plant. The technology to light the fiber was available when Google started its quest to offer a gigabit/second to residential customers. The big challenge was creating the fiber connection between residence and the Internet. By looking at things from an outsider’s perspective and the with the credibility of their heft, they were able to convince cities to change the way they do things to speed the deployment of outside plant infrastructure.

In many ways, CyberTran International has a similar plan for transportation. As CyberTran president Dexter Vizinau explains in the above interview, CyberTran is creating a “direct-to-destination”, autonomous, elevated, ultra light rail system that will be 1/10 to 1/4 the cost of traditional transit systems. Their plan takes proven building blocks to create, what Vizinau, calls the “Transportation Internet”; a continuous network of urban circulators, commuter rail and high-speed connections between regions. The original concept for CyberTran grew out of work at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory.

Like Google with its fiber network, a major focus of CyberTran is reducing the upfront cost of deployment. This starts with the design of the rails, which are elevated and held in place by towers. By designing smaller autonomous cars, the cars are relatively lightweight, making the associated towers lighter and allowing the towers to be prefabricated off-site and assembled quickly on-site (think roller coaster at an amusement park).

Similarly, because the cars are smaller and on-demand, stations do not have to be massive, like they would for a traditional transit system where hundreds of people might be picked up at any given moment.

From an ongoing standpoint, costs are reduced in several ways compared to traditional transit systems:

  • Electricity is generated via a “solar canopy” that Vizinau suggests will generate about a Megawatt per mile, which he says would supply about 8 times their needs with the excess electricity feeding back into the grid.
  • The combination of autonomy and direct to destination allows resources (e.g. the railcars) to be deployed to serve the most number of passengers possible.

In a follow-up email, Cybertran explained there are a number of techniques they will use to mitigate noise:

  1. Elastomer barrier between rails and structure
  2. Hollow structural elements that are filled with sound dampening material
  3. Sidewalls on structure that will serve as sound walls
  4. The wheel load is around 2500 pounds on 4 wheels, compared to a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) car wheel load is about ten thousand pounds on 8 wheels
  5. Power from an accelerating BART train is about 8 MW.  The CyberTran vehicle is about 150 KW or less
  6. Reduced steel squirm due to smaller wheel/rail contact patch.
  7. The wheel base also turns at a slight angle at curves to reduce friction and metal on metal squealing

CyberTran’s first demonstration track is planned at UC Berkeley’s Richmond Field Station. Longer-term goals include extending commercial implementation in the Richmond, CA, where they will also manufacture their on-demand transit networks. That they are locating manufacturing in Richmond is somewhat a throwback, as this fine berg is home to the Rosie the Riveter museum and during its heyday in World War II was the largest U.S. ship building locale.

 

Author Ken Pyle, Managing Editor

By Ken Pyle, Managing Editor

Ken Pyle is Marketing Director for the Broadband Forum. The mission of this 25+-year-old non-profit “is to unlock the potential for new markets and profitable revenue growth by leveraging new technologies and standards in the home, intelligent small business, and multi-user infrastructure of the broadband network.”

He is also co-founder of Viodi, LLC and Managing Editor of the Viodi View, a publication focused on the rural broadband ecosystem, autonomous vehicles, and electric aviation. He has edited and produced numerous multimedia projects for NTCA, US Telecom and Viodi. Pyle is the producer of Viodi’s Local Content Workshop, the Video Production Crash Course at NAB, as well as ViodiTV. He has been intimately involved in Viodi’s consulting projects and has created processes for clients to use for their PPV and VOD operations, as well authored reports on the independent telco market.

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4 replies on “A Power Grid with a Transit System”

This YouTube video makes a pretty strong argument for considering Personal Rapid Transit. He points out that, at its peak, 10 miles of rail per day was installed during the construction of the transcontinental railroad; surely that amount could be accomplished today. To put that in perspective, that means it would take less than a week to cover one typical San Jose suburban neighborhood that has about 6,200 homes.

http://www.prtproject.com/

https://youtu.be/yD-cbV2LT2U

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