The SkyTran Offline Portal

SkyTran Offline Portals

In our concept, vehicles must always be available for one's use, in line and waiting at SkyTran Offline Portals .

Such an on-demand system means that the long accepted standard concept of a large and expensive, comfortable station for relaxing while waiting for scheduled departure also becomes totally obsolete. This further means that our modular portals can become absolute minimalist structures as shown to the left. This means very low costs. Most importantly, low costs mean more units can be deployed for a given budget.

As you can see, we plan to use the monorail guideway support poles (which also supports the weight of all the SkyTran vehicles), to also serve as the Offline Portal module's primary support structure. Using the SkyTran track support poles to serve double duty saves costs. Only in this manner can we create a minimalist structure.

We can place our guideway support poles along existing streets or into existing sidewalks. One of the goals of the SkyTran invention is to minimize surface land usage and interference with the pedestrians below and all other preexisting surface traffic.

SkyTran Offline Portals are the key to non-stop fast travel. It is a simple concept. It is the same as pulling into a gas station to refuel your car. Once your car has exited the road and turned into the gas station, all the other adjacent automobile traffic is free to keep on going. You have done it thousands of times in your lifetime. Once you have pulled in and stopped, your car is irrelevant to all of the rest of the continuing traffic. As depicted above, the through traffic shown on the higher guideway never slows down.
SkyTran operations also has an analogy in freeway driving. When exiting a freeway you don't even start slowing down until after you exit the main freeway and are safely on the exit ramp. Similarly, for merging, one learns to already be at freeway speed before blending back into freeway traffic. It is very dangerous to join into the freeway traffic at say 30 mph and then try build up to full speed.
Besides saving time for the commuter, non-stop SkyTran through service also saves a lot of energy. Accelerating from 0 to 100 mph takes 5 to 7 times the power needed to just cruise along at a steady 100 mph!