Low Cost, Trackless PRT

In many urban environments, the use of private automobiles has led to severe problems with respect to congestion, energy, pollution, noise, safety and general degradation of the quality of life. Therefore, historical city centers are facing serious problems, traditional commerce in them declines — moving to the periphery, and they become less attractive to tourists. In spite of many recent improvements of public transportation systems (PTS), in many cases the car still offers a much better service at the individual level. A new approach for mobility, emerging now as an alternative solution to the private passenger car, offers the same flexibility and much less nuisances: small automated vehicles which form part of the PTS, and complement mass transit and non-motorized transport, providing passenger service for any location at any time. These vehicles can serve as a basis for new, trackless, Personal Rapid Transit systems (PRT). Such systems will avoid the many disadvantages of the "conventional" tracked PRT, because the infrastructure is much simpler and therefore also much less expensive, does not interfere with the landscape and all in all offers much more flexibility and convenience. This paper describes the general concept of the Trackless PRT system, several of the vehicles and the automated road network, and a fleet management method. The focus is on key technologies which are common to all these systems and which are still under development. Other issues discussed in the paper include cost analysis of advanced transportation systems, and impacts related to quality of life, environment, energy ands safety.