At 03:17 PM 9/26/2000 -0500, Bruce Gaarder wrote:
>
>As far as prt being a feeder to lrt, I expect that you will hear from
>proponents such as Steven that the average wait between trains (as you
>transfer from prt to lrt) will be about the same amount of time as would
>have been needed to continue to your destination on prt. Not to mention
>the time it would take for lrt to actually travel the rest of the distance.
>Remember that lrt will average less than 22 mph.
There's definitely room for hooking PRT to light rail as the system first
starts out. The $90 million downtown Minneapolis plan would be an excellent
way to deliver Light Rail passengers into the whole of downtown - including
the Convention Center and the Target Center. It was designed before planners
settled on 5th Street for light rail; we were thinking that a Washington
Avenue station using PRT to link to the rest of downtown would be more
viable than this business of adding dozens of buses to downtown traffic.
However, I still believe that PRT would be much better than LRT in any
application. If we were to abandon light rail completely and build PRT
service in the Hiawatha corridor, the total capital costs would probably
be less than $250 million - for faster, safer, more convenient service.
>Of course, the lrt crowd would see that a prt implementation would make it
>very obvous how poor a solution lrt is to most problems it is supposed to
>address.
I agree completely. In fact I'd be very surprised if we built any
more light rail once a single PRT system was implemented. But this would
only happen for the best of reasons - if we find that PRT would indeed
provide better service at lower cost.
