Country folk tend to like the independence offered by their cars, so how do you get them to use public transit? The Monocab system may be the answer, as it utilizes individual on-demand pods that travel on existing abandoned railways.
  • cestvrai@lemm.ee
    0·
    6 months ago

    Seems over-complicated…

    I could imagine an autonomous, on-demand rural train service. Due to the low expected traffic, it seems like you could just build some additional sidings and use a more conventional design.

    • FuzzChef@feddit.de
      0·
      6 months ago

      How would traffic pass each other? You would be stuck with the same issue as normal trains.

        • FuzzChef@feddit.de
          0·
          6 months ago

          If someone was willing to invest into building and maintaining infrastructure there would be no need for this concept, but that’s a political issue. The idea of this concept is do make the best of what you have.

  • Butterbee (She/Her)@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Yes Louis Brennan designed a gyroscopic monorail in the early 1900’s but there’s a reason it didn’t work out. Every car needs its own gyroscope which is a lot of dynamic components that need maintenance. A regular two rail train is much simpler and cheaper to operate. The idea these techbros have that everything is made better with individual pods is pretty wasteful when we already have better and cheaper solutions to virtually every problem they have tried to invent for us. Are we even super concerned about rural folks taking transit? By definition they are a small portion of the population and have the greatest need for personal transport. Where we need transit adoption is in urban areas with large populations who all want to drive their personal 2 tonnes of plastic and steel right into town and park it (for free obviously) in their own little parking space.

    A gadgetbahn like this will only serve a limited population and won’t be able to tie into the existing transit network. There might be niche situations where it’s not a terrible idea but it is not a good generalized solution.

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
      0·
      6 months ago

      I could see those as an option for rural areas without much traffic. A full train might not be economical, but a small pod is. It could transport people to the closest proper train station where they can hop off.

      But that would mean you’d have to maintain a ton of tracks for a handful of people.

    • erwan@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      Trains suck if you don’t have frequency, and because of the population density with a good frequency more than half of the trains will be completely empty and the rest almost empty.

      • Maxe@feddit.de
        0·
        6 months ago

        If you out half the funding from car infrastructure instead into train and bus infrastructure this would not be a problem. Induced demand works both ways.