Why Modular Automated Individual Transport ?

For more than a 100 years the rail&road transport has not changed principally--only extended, and improved considerably. What will now change things dramatically is computer and information technology. In the past, the human driver has been the only alternative for operating vehicles but nowadays computers can perform, and take over, many operational tasks. Computer systems have become cheaper, smaller and more powerful so decentralized control-structures are now a reality in many industrial processes, and may soon be possible in traffic systems. A computer can be installed in each vehicle to make intelligent decisions--humans are no longer required to do this job. It is possible that through decentralized control and automation, transport systems could be significantly changed from what we know today. Numerical studies summarize the potential benefits of an automated transport system installed in a city [12]:

• 24 hour availability.
• Reduction in average trip time by a factor of more than two.
• Reduction of infrastructure costs by a factor of six.
• Reduction in energy usage by a factor of ten.
• Reductions by a factor of ten in emissions compared with peak hour car traffic.
• Fare levels comparable to current public transport.
• Car parks and streets made over for people.
• Injury and death on the road significantly reduced.
• Accessible to at least 75% of disabled or elderly people.
• Better quality of life for both users and non-users.
• Capital costs between one sixth and one twelfth the cost of roads due to small scale infrastructure.

Below are more details on how and why MAIT positively effects every day lives, the economy, the environment, and land use.

Public advantages

Who is profiting and how with respect to present transport systems?

Everybody (MAIT users and non-users)

• Lower risk of injuries and casualties. The primary cause of accidents, human failure, is minimized by MAIT ; as well, accidents due to system failure can be reduced to almost zero with proper system design.

• Valuable land (especially the inner city) previously required by transit systems is now available for other uses because MAIT requires less space for guideways and other installations than a road with the same throughput of cars (see Sections 1.3.2 and 3.3). Large amounts of parking space inside the city is no longer needed since empty MAIT vehicles are reused and unused vehicles are redirected to an out-of-town storage facility.

• Better air quality and less noise pollution. MAIT vehicles are electrically driven, contain no local emissions, and are almost silent.

Figure 10: MAIT leaves more space for people: A parking lot in a residential area will be obsolete after the introduction of MAIT because unused vehicles are automatically brought to an out of town storage area. (a) Before and (b) after the introduction of MAIT .

(a)	(b)

All MAIT users

• Stress-free, convenient, individual, 24 hour, non-stop, door-to-door transport. For a detailed descriptions of MAIT trips see Section 2, for travel options see Section 1.4.2.

• Travel on MAIT is faster: A computer network optimizes traffic flow and prevents traffic jams. There are usually no intermediate stops at traffic lights. MAIT is demand responsive and does not have to run on fixed time schedules. The waiting time for a MAIT vehicle is only up to few minutes if none is already available, where needed. There are no waiting times for transfers since all trips are non-stop.

• Travel time is not wasted. Considering the passenger does not drive, their time during the journey can be used for other purposes. Furthermore, one can book cabins with completely equipped with office equipment or Internet connection (see Section 1.4.2).

Accessible to people off all ages and abilities

MAIT is easy and safe to use (see Section 2), does not require a human driver, and is therefore available to most people who are not able to or should not drive a car. Baggage can be easily transported because the floor of the cabin is flush with the platforms at the MAIT stops, and it remains in the same cabin during the entire trip. Furthermore, MAIT supports people with various needs (see Section 1.4.2).

Persons and families with low income

MAIT also offers personal transport to people with lower incomes, who cannot afford to buy and maintain a private car, or who may need access to jobs outside cities where increasingly more companies are finding it to be economically attractive to locate. Those industrial sites are, in general, badly served by public transport, whereas MAIT may be operated economically, even in more sparsely populated areas that are fat off the city center.

People without access to individual transport find it hard to shop at the large discount commercial centers and malls, which are placed far outside downtown, and are often difficult to reach by public transport. Fortunately, shopping malls and other activity centers will likely be the first places linked by a MAIT network.

MAIT will give low-income families access to destinations that currently cannot be reached by public transport at lower cost, because ownership of the vehicle is not required, and the price of MAIT is based on the distance the vehicle traveled and not on the number of persons inside.

Economical benefits

If MAIT is to have a successful introduction, it must prove to be economically attractive to potential investors and users. Of course the exact installation, operation, and maintenance costs will vary depending on many factors such as traffic-density patterns, network topology, system technology as well as decisions of potential costumers, landowners and officials. A preliminary and general cost comparison of MAIT and the car-road system indicates that MAIT might be at least as cost effective as the car-road system, and could, at the same time, offer a broader range of services (see Section 1.4).

Infrastructure costs

Due to the modular structure of MAIT (see Section 1.2), the applied transport technology and associated infrastructure may be appropriately designed according to the local traffic density. For the MAIT road-carrier system (see Section 1.3.3), an ordinary road with small induction loops inside would be sufficient to guide and communicate with the vehicles so the costs of this MAIT infrastructure would be almost identical to the road system used by cars. Road-carriers would usually use lanes of already existing roads, which can be equipped with induction loops and the necessary navigation system at relatively low costs.

The costs for one lane of a high capacity carrier-track system (see Section 1.3.2) are expected to be lower than for a 3-4 lane (one direction) motorway with the same capacity, due to the following reasons:

• One MAIT guideway can achieve a higher throughput (persons per hour) than a one lane motorway (see Section 1.3.2).
• Motorways are built for cars and trucks even though trucks make a smaller contribution to total traffic than cars. MAIT guideways are designed for vehicles of only one to two tons ⁷ and the lighter construction has cost advantages. In many cases the load of one heavy trucks can be distributed over a larger number of MAIT freight cabins.

• MAIT network may be designed for a smaller capacity than a road system that is covering the same area. Freight can be predominantly delivered during the night, (see Section 1.4.3), which leads to better distribution of traffic over the 24h and leaves the system open for passenger transport during peak times.

MAIT causes also additional infrastructure costs in form of carrier exchangers, which sometimes necessitate larger waiting queues for empty carriers (see Section 1.2 and Figs. 6(a), 9(c)). However, these costs may be kept small on the account of:

• carrier exchangers constitute only singular points in a MAIT network, where tracks with different technologies are interconnected. It is further the aim of the MAIT network design to minimize the number of carrier exchangers. The costs of carrier exchangers may therefore be small compared to the costs of the entire network.

• the necessary system to move the cabin from one carrier to another is simple and small since the cabins are of ``light weight''. The actual mechanics for the carrier exchange may be located on the cabin or carrier itself. See also Section 4.

Vehicle costs

A MAIT vehicle consists of a cabin plus a carrier, and is approximately the size of a small van. All components of a MAIT vehicle are mass produced.

MAIT carriers are driven with electric motors. They are incomplex and lighter since the speed of the electric motors is controlled by inexpensive electronic circuits; there is no heavy transmissions. On the other hand, MAIT carriers do need an additional system for automatic exchanging of the cabins. In the end, the total cost of the vehicle (carrier+cabin) is expected to be about that of a larger family car or a small van. However,

• the usage and costs of MAIT vehicles are shared, empty vehicles will automatically search for new customers.

• the same carrier can transport passenger cabins during the day and freight cabins at night.

Therefore the cost of the entire vehicle fleet of MAIT may be reduced considerably compared with the costs of cars and trucks with an equivalent transport capacity.

Unfortunately, the assumption that one cabin is always mounted on one carrier is an idealization. In reality, a certain number of empty carriers are needed to wait for cabins at carrier exchangers (see Fig. 9)(c)). This ``carrier buffer'' is required so that a cabin does not have to wait for an empty carrier at the carrier exchanger. The total of empty carriers in a network is called the carrier overhead, and if the network is properly designed, the carrier overhead can be minimized so that the cost of these additional carriers is not significant compared to the total cost of all carriers.

Operating & maintenance costs

MAIT is fully automated and works 24h a day. Low travel costs, similar or below the tariffs of public transport, efficient vehicle management, and overnight freight delivery are expected to guarantee a high attraction and usage rate for the system. The energy consumption of a MAIT vehicle per kilometer is less than that of a car as electrical motors are more energy efficient than combustion engines. In addition, electric motors have a longer life time and need less maintenance. The organization and guidance of vehicles, as well as the exchange of carriers, add no labor costs, except for maintenance. The cleaning of vehicles and standard system checks are expected to be at least partially automated. The operator's employees deal mostly with user-services and maintenance such as:

• consulting.
• programming and vending of MAIT cards.
• providing costumer customer service.
• repairing, cleaning and maintaining vehicles and track.
• deploying trouble shooting crews, consisting of technically qualified people who can rapidly resolve such difficulties as computer breakdowns or when a defective vehicle blocks a guideway.

• surveillance and security. MAIT stops and parts of the tracks are camera supervised. Security units need to take action if needed.

Competition

The modular structure of MAIT does not only mean flexibility in technology and service, it enables marked competition on multiple levels. First, there is competition for the manufacturing of each module of MAIT (cabin, carrier, track, computer network). Second, there is competition for the best service. The MAIT network is easily separable into track-clusters, where each cluster may be owned by a different operator. Even in the same region, multiple and overlapping track-clusters, possibly implemented with different carrier-track technologies, can compete for the best transportation service. Other companies own fleets of cabins, or carriers, or they provide the management of user services. Such a multilevel competition may lead to a diversification of services at the lowest possible prices. It further prevents monopolistic structures since all interface definitions and communication protocols (see Section 4) are public and therefore known to potential competitors. Hence, the organization of the MAIT network could become similar to the one of the Internet.

Scalability

The MAIT network needs have a certain initial coverage in order to be acceptable and usable for a reasonable quantity of people, i.e. it has to link at least all important activity centers and residential areas of a city. But beyond this ``threshold-size'', MAIT is highly scalable, which means that investments can be well matched to an increasing user demand. Scalability is an important quantity during the start-up phase of MAIT (see also Section 5) since it lowers the risk because capital can be invested in smaller portions and returns an immediate profit.

The reason for the high scalability of MAIT is that, once a skeleton network with a sufficient capacity is implemented, the it needs to be only refined in order to reach more residences of users. The costs for this refinement are mainly determined by two factors:

1. the costs for a road-carrier track. It is assumed that the road-carrier system is the carrier technology that predominantly accesses homes and serves as feeder for the high capacity tracks via carrier exchanger.

2. the costs for an extended fleet of cabins and carriers.

Both costs can be well adapted to the number of potential users. Dependent on the city and average vehicle usage, 10m of road-carrier track and one additional vehicle may allow four more potential customers to use the MAIT network. Because the road-carrier technology is considered inexpensive the extra cost per additional user is expected to be low.

Environmental benefits

Widespread implementation of MAIT could help to reduce the present waste of energy, land, and other natural resources, on a large scale:

• MAIT vehicles are usually driven by electric motors which have a higher energy efficiency than fuel engines ⁸The use of electric motors is possible as a result of powered guideways, similar to electrified railways. Electrical or fuel-cell battery powered carriers are also possible because they can be programmed to automatically access a charging station when their batteries run low. Carriers would only make short trips when using their batteries (see Section 1.3.3).

• The traffic flow is controlled and optimized by a computer network to avoid energy wasting stop and go traffic, searching for parking space e.t.c.

• Vehicles are usually shared which reduces the total amount of material (i.e. to built the vehicles) and land needed (i.e. parking) by the MAIT network when compared to the private car system.

• MAIT is designed for passengers and small freight, so the scale of its infrastructure is smaller than today's highways. At present highways, and railroads are designed for both passenger and freight transport, therefore their infrastructure has to be sized to handle heavy loads. If transport tasks were shared so that passengers and light freight used MAIT and heavy freight was delivered predominantly by rail, then considerably less infra-structural resources would be required. The railway network would have more available capacity for heavy freight since it would not be concerned with passenger service.

• When high capacity is needed, one MAIT guideway can achieve a higher throughput (personsperhour) than a four lane motorway (see Section 1.3.2). This means for the same capacity, MAIT requires less infrastructure.

• Transporting people during the day and freight at night helps to better distribute traffic. Less materials, energy, and land is needed for vehicle and guideway construction (see also Section 1.4.3).

• the use of electric motors has an indirect gain: their life-time is longer than combustion engines and less material and energy is required for their manufacture and maintenance. Some carrier-track technologies, like MAGLEV (see Section 1.3.1), have low friction, very few mechanical components, and therefore very long life-times.

Improvements in architecture

MAIT can enhance the architecture of a city:

• The total number of installations devoted to traffic in general decreases with the introduction of MAIT (see Section 3.3). The newly gained space opens up a large spectrum of design options to city planners and architects.

• The MAIT concept makes no restrictions on how the cabins are transported, so the carrier-track system can be integrated well with the architecture of any city.

The installation of MAIT guideways (in particular elevated guideways) are often subject to criticism because they are seen as a visual intrusion. However, for a fair comparison one should look at transport infrastructure before and after the introduction of MAIT . A considerable number of roads, parking lots, and bridges will disappear once car-road transport has been shifted to MAIT (see Figs. 11 and  12).

Figure 11: (a) Typical four-lane street in the city center. (b) After the introduction of MAIT three lanes were unnecessary. An elevated guideway has been installed along the building of a shopping center. Off-line stops reside within the buildings (see for example Fig. 4(a)) so that passengers are already in the store after exiting the vehicle. One lane of the previous road has been kept for heavy freight transport, fire protection vehicles, and other extraordinary services.

(a)	(b)

Figure 12: A six lane motorway has been replaced by a bidirectional elevated guideway-carrier system. During the transitional phase two lanes have been preserved for heavy or special transport. In the future long-distance freight will be handled by railroads which will have increased capacity because passengers will be riding on MAIT . (a) Before and (b) after the introduction of MAIT .

(a)	(b)

There are several different strategies for integrating MAIT into the city environment:

• minimization of visual impact:
  • construction of underground guideways.
  • MAIT stops, carrier exchangers, merge and diverge points inside buildings, for example, in unused railway stations, or inside shopping centers .
  • minimization of guideway size.

• adaption of guideways to city architecture: i.e., choice of technology, materials, and guideway design.

• secondary uses for guideways: elevated guideways can be used as roofs for pedestrian walkways, bike paths, street markets, street cafes, galleries e.t.c. ⁹A city with streets that are protected from rain and sun is more welcoming to both visitors and inhabitants.

Some of these strategies have been applied in the case study presented in Section 1.3.4.