Alden staRRcar
The Alden staRRcar, short for "Self-Transport Road and Rail Car", was a personal rapid transit (PRT) system designed by William Alden in the 1960s. It originally envisioned small electrically powered cars suitable for short distance trips at low speed within urban areas, which could optionally merge onto tracks that would provide power and guidance for high-speed travel over longer inter-city distances. It was one of the earliest dual-mode vehicles to be proposed, and one of the earliest to be actually built.
Over its lifetime the design changed dramatically, originally a four-person vehicle with dual-mode operation but eventually emerging as a much larger
History
Original design
William Alden, a graduate of the Harvard Business School, started Alden Self-Transit Systems Corporation around 1955.[2] His idea was to design a "dual-mode" transit system – small cars that operated like traditional electric cars when driven around town for short distances, but allowed long-distance travel via automated guideways that provided power. The vehicle were quite lightweight because they could only travel at low speeds when manually guided and didn't need full crash safety or large battery packs. On the guideways they travelled much faster; they were protected from collisions by the automated guideway, and conductors on the guideway provided the power needed for high speeds while also recharging the batteries for local travel at the destination. Alden envisioned guideways being built in place of the existing interstate roads, but the automatic guidance allowed for much shorter headways and thereby increased route capacity, reducing the need for multiple lanes.
The initial design evolved into small four-person cars that were tested on a guideway set up in a parking lot in
During development, they realized that developing a single-mode vehicle would be much less expensive. The existing system was adapted into a larger six-person vehicle that was essentially a fiberglass box on top of a larger version of the same basic chassis, 10 feet long, 6 wide and 4+1⁄2 tall. The roof section slid open along with the doors on the side of the vehicle, allowing passengers to enter standing upright.[5] Full-scale testing of this system took place in 1968 on a test track in Bedford, while a smaller 1/20th scale model with ten vehicles and four off-line stations was used to test the guidance and scheduling systems.[6]
Proposal for 'Expo 76' in Boston
In 1969, as the transportation system for the
Morgantown
Professor Samy Elias of the Industrial Engineering Department at West Virginia University in Morgantown had been pressing for the development of a PRT system for their campus since the late 1960s. Elias was able to obtain $50,000 from UMTA for a comparative study of three different types of PRT systems:
At the time the
When the DOT visited Alden they concluded they were too small to be trusted with the deployment phase of the project, and arranged for
The
In spite of the eventual success of the Morgantown system, changes to the funding system within the DOT and UTDC led to little follow-on interest, and it remains the only on-demand PRT system currently operating in commercial service.
After Morgantown
Interest in PRT systems "dried up" after Morgantown,
See also
References
Notes
- ^ "Expo '75 - Publicity Photos". Retrieved 7 July 2021.
- ^ a b c d Kirsner 2009
- ^ Richards, pg. 42
- ^ Wahl, pg. 74
- ^ Wahl, pg. 75
- ^ a b c Anderson
- ^ Technical Proposal No.P25-1-69 EXPO BOSTON 76 TRANSPORT SYSTEM. Alden Self-Transit Systems Corporation. May 1969. p. 26. Retrieved 9 July 2021.
- ^ "Expo 76: Future Vision or Fever Dream?". Hub History. 28 March 2021. Retrieved 9 July 2021.
- ^ a b Hamill 2007
Bibliography
- John Edward Anderson, "Some Lessons from the History of Personal Rapid Transit", 4 August 1996
- Scott Kirsner, "At 83, Cape Cod Entrepreneur Still Focused on the Future of Transportation", Boston Globe, 22 July 2009
- Brian Richards, "Future Transport in Cities", Taylor & Francis, 2001, ISBN 0-415-26142-2
- Paul Wahl, "Personal Rapid Transit", Popular Science, November 1971
- Sean Hamill, "City's White Elephant Now Looks Like a Transit Workhorse", The New York Times, 11 June 2007