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.
    • erwan@lemmy.ml
      0·
      4 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·
        4 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.

        • Thevenin@beehaw.org
          1·
          4 months ago

          Even with unlimited funding, you want to scale the size of the train to the population that could potentially ride on it.

          A P42 locomotive pulling 7 Amtrak superliner cars is 700 tons of steel getting 0.4 miles per gallon of diesel. That’s a crapton of mining and drilling and CO2, and it would be incredibly wasteful if it ended up carrying, like, two people at a time.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Great, now we can have traffic but on these old rails.

    How about, and I know this is a radical idea, actually fixing up the old rail lines and putting trains on them instead of this gimmick?

    • chumbalumber@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      1·
      4 months ago

      FUCKING DOING OUR JOB AS TRANSPORT MODELLERS AND DOING A FUCKING COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS THAT SHOWS YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO GET FUCKING MODE SHIFT FROM RURAL USERS UNLESS YOU RUN A FUCKING METRO STYLE 10 MINUTELY SERVICE WHICH IS FUCKING UNFEASIBLE WITH THE FUCKING RESOURCES WE HAVE AVAILABLE.

      IN THE FUCKING UK WE HAVE A LARGE NUMBER OF FUCKING ABANDONED RAILWAYS FROM THE PERIOD OF FUCKING COAL MINING THAT WOULDN’T HAVE ANYWHERE NEAR THE FUCKING DEMAND NECESSARY TO JUSTIFY SETTING UP AN EXPENSIVE AS FUCK SIGNALLING SYSTEM TO BRING THEM UP TO MODERN FUCKING SAFETY STANDARDS, ALONGSIDE REPLACING THE FUCKING RAILS, SLEEPERS AND BEDS.

      IF INSTEAD YOU CAN HAVE A FUCKING PUBLICALLY OWNED FLEET OF FUCKING ELECTRIC ‘MINI TRAINS’ THAT PEOPLE COULD USE FOR INFREQUENT BUT NECESSARY TRIPS, THAT COULD REMOVE A FUCKING SIGNIFICANT BARRIER TO MODE SHIFT, WHICH WOULD BE PRETTY FUCKING RAD

    • androogee (they/she)@midwest.socialEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      Read the article, that’s literally the first thing they explain

      Besides which, it’s very obviously a train if you just look at it. It’s a small monorail train specifically designed for this purpose using existing infrastructure.

      People are never fucking happy.

      • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
        1·
        4 months ago

        A train is a collection of rolling railcars propelled by one or more locomotives. These are individual self-powered railcars.

        So no, there’s no train here. Just monorail pods that will get congested as density increases.

        The whole concept of a train is that all the cars move together and the only congestion is at the switching yards, where it can be optimized.