UAE gets First Wide Scale PRT Test
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: UAE, London, PRT, Green, Conservation
Soon, London and Masdar City will give the rest of the world a glimpse into the future.
Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), has been around as an idea for some time. Instead of highways and cities filled with human controlled cars running on oil and gasoline, PRT takes the emissions and the driver out of the equation, filling the roads with electric-powered, self-driving transports. It may sound like something out of a science fiction movie like Minority Report, but two countries will soon make this green idea a reality.
According to MIT's Technology Review, Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates and London's Heathrow International Airport will soon implement their own PRT systems. Bristol-based Advanced Transport Systems is building the PRT system for Heathrow. The system will be a complete circuit of driverless, electric-powered cars. How does it work? The cars are powered by the same lead-acid batteries found in many hybrid/all electric cars today. To drive themselves, the cars stay on a concrete track, and use laser-based range finders to adjust themselves on the road and maintain safe distance from other PRT vehicles.
The Masdar City PRT system is part of something much, much bigger. Masdar City is meant to be a zero emissions paradise. The carbon neutral city will be six square kilometers (roughly 3.73 sq. miles), and house 50,000 people. The PRT project was given to a Dutch company called 2getthere and is slightly different from the one in Heathrow. While it's still electric-powered, the batteries are composed of a more advanced lithium iron phosphate. As for the guiding track, magnets are placed every five meters and the PRT cars use them for location and self-orientation. Both the London and Masdar City projects are ultimately computer controlled.
"Really, all it is is a car," says Scott McGuigan of CH2M Hill, the company overseeing all of Masdar City's construction. "It's a simple vehicle [for] six passengers. It's designed like a car, but obviously it's powered by solar energy with batteries. You program what station you want to go to, and [the vehicle] will directly take you to that station," he says to NPR. "If you look at things like Blade Runner, etc., that we had 15 years ago, it's really bringing that to the fore now."
Masdar City will be environmentally friendly on several other levels as well. From recycling 80 percent of all water to utilizing solar power to converting nearly all waste to energy, Masdar could be the utopia the rest of the world will be based on.
Follow this link if you want to see a concept video of Masdar City.
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What are the specifics of this?
I can images a system with vehicles, each with a processing unit, over a network, with some central unit. Each unit would relay information to each other, and the network, on things like road conditions, obstacles, routes, and route priority.
What about ownership? do people own these vehicles?
Although the road system would be radically different. As things like traffic stops would be unneeded.
I personally haven't vistited the UAE, but I know quite a few people who have. I think a lot of people outside of the region would be surprised how nice it really is there.
The ironic thing about all this is for them to do a green push when their livelyhood is so dependant on oil. Then again they don't have much to worry about. Even if the US (laughing to myself) goes green China's using more oil than ever (before the world wide recession anyway) so the demands not going anywhwere.
If they were personally owned, then they can be personally modded... "engage the 'I'm late for work, drive like a jerk' mode"
If they were personally owned, then they can be personally modded... "engage the 'I'm late for work, drive like a jerk' mode"
Yes, don't forget the sunday driver in the middle of the week mode. Or, I don't understand the concept of right of way mode. Or the my vehicles bigger than yours so I'm gonna run you off the road mode. Actually if you're an oil producing country, it makes a lot of sense to change over to green transportation. That way you're countries consumable fuels are sold only to other countries, so you don't have to worry about the price per barrel costs with imports.
I thought most hybrids used NiMH or (for aftermarket mods) Lithium chemistry batteries?
The UAE has always been more progressive (relatively speaking) to it's Arab neighbors. They have seen the writing on the wall for fossil fuels for some time; what, with bio-algae, wind, solar, nuclear etc. What they are currently doing is a Hail-Mary pass and betting all or nothing that if they develope enough world beating infastructure and amenities than people will want to live and conduct business there even if there is no oil. It will either succeed or fail spectacularly.
Here is a scary thought: Currently most Arab nations only have enough indigenous natural resources (water, fertile land) to feed 10% of their current populations. When the oil runs out, or becomes obsolete, and they fail, which most certainly the majority will ( just look at their work ethic), to develope alternate exportable goods/services 90% will starve or dessicate (best word for "die of thirst" I can think of) to death. However, in light of their enormous financial investment in the west, they may strong-arm developed countires to take in all those people.
I am sure both systems will be powered by South Asian manual labor.
Having a 'green' program is a decent enough idea. I'm sure they realize that in 50-100 years the oil fields will be dry even if demand for oil DOESN'T go away.
If comments from blackbeastofaaaaagh are true, perhaps they should consider spending hundreds of millions of dollars (360 million AE Dirham) on reverse-osmosis systems to purify water from the 'Persian' Gulf and to develop arable land so they can grow food.
Living in a world economy, however, they may just choose to continue to import food/water and spend what they can today to build cool infrastructure to attract future investment. Just make sure those cars you are buying can be upgraded to use the uber-cool silicon nano-wire batteries that should be hitting the streets in a few years... they will hold ~10x the charge of li-ion.