Wednesday, September 2, 2009

The New Auto Trams


The New AutoTrams

From this science article. These multi-carriage configuration contain visual guidance for lane following.

"The advantages of a train and a bus are united in the AutoTram: It has the transportation capacity of a streetcar and the versatility of a bus. Fraunhofer researchers (Germany) have cooperated with Hübner GmbH to devise a new concept for a modular vehicle that, depending on the volume of passengers, can either be operated as a single bus or assembled to form a uni-directional or bi-directional high-capacity vehicle."

This is what we want for BRT.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I don't see a real advantage to running a 2X-capacity vehicle every Y minutes over running an X-capacity vehicle every Y/2 minutes. In fact, that seems to be a distinct disadvantage. There is probably not much in the way of fuel savings because of frequent stopping and starting and the low impact of air resistance at bus/light rail speeds. I suppose the labor costs are cheaper, but providing double the service frequency could potentially offset the doubling in labor cost by increasing ridership.

On the other hand, I do think it's a good idea to provide something that looks a lot like light rail to customers but in fact is a lot cheaper to install. The more we can make BRT look and feel like LRT, the better.