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this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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micromobility - Ebikes, scooters, longboards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
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Ebikes, bicycles, scooters, skateboards, longboards, eboards, motorcycles, skates, unicycles: Whatever floats your goat, this is all things micromobility!
"Transportation using lightweight vehicles such as bicycles or scooters, especially electric ones that may be borrowed as part of a self-service rental program in which people rent vehicles for short-term use within a town or city.
micromobility is seen as a potential solution to moving people more efficiently around cities"
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I would say 30kph would be plenty especially for nonstop on-demand service. 60kph sounds unrealistic.
The reason I think you could lay new track is that kiddie train track is really cheap and used railroad rail is pretty valuable.
It would be simple to make self driving golf carts that followed a magnetic or inductive guideway or even used a virtually guideway with gps. There are a few of these available off the shelf right now. One I remember is dutch and there was another produced in Great Britain.
Railroad track is certainly valuable, although its removal and rehabilitating the rail bed can add up. Here in the USA, a number of disused railroads are simply left in place, usually only removing the points which connect to the mainline. I'm informed that part of the reason is due to regulations that make it hard to re-establish a rail segment if the rails are fully dismantled. I also have to imagine that if the rails are too valuable, unscrupulous scrap dealers would have made off with them already.
I certainly agree that any track used in service of a self-balancing pod has better of good or excellent quality, since we absolutely do not want pods coming off due to a rail issue.
I do like that all these ideas are essentially recreating the lazy river experience, but with no inflatable donuts lol
P.S. I added the right link to my last post; I forgot to paste it earlier
Rail is hard to steal because it is hard and heavy. Look at the price of small sections used for anvils. It was a shock for me.
I participated in a exploration of PRT that was done by someone at University of Washington a few decades ago. One of the things discussed was the comparison of travel times between slow PRT and fast light rail. It doesn't take many 60-90 second stops to really slow your average speed.
It's kinda like that brain teaser: If a race car does the first lap at 60 miles an hour how fast does he have to go on the second lap to average 120.