Summary
SkyTran can be implemented now because all the integrated technologies are available today! SkyTran has many direct economic and reliability benefits because it is a solid state transportation system! SkyTran is the solution for safe, mentally painless, super quick commuting in the new millennium! SkyTran performance and cost analysis has long been complete and then reworked over and over. The analysis simply and repeatedly dramatizes that integrating lightweight, minimum frontal area, streamlined private vehicles onto a three dimensional overhead network/grid system with modern computers and sensors yields outstanding short travel times and superb safety for very low energy costs.
Utilizing innovative semi-automatic assembly concepts for building track and modular stations and the economies of scale for high volume, repetitive vehicle fabrication yields a package cost that is under 10% of the costs of existing popular systems such as light rail. SkyTran also does not require expensive 300 foot wide right of way acquisitions (by eminent domain and many law suits). SkyTran can be placed anywhere without infringing on existing surface land use. For comparison, a 300 foot wide right-of-way consumes 11,000 times the surface area of the SkyTran's 1 foot diameter support pole foundations.
Trapping the vehicles to the track eliminates derailment accidents and greatly simplifies the logistics of following and trailing safety control. This further allows total replacement of bus and train chauffeurs with far more attentive computers having much faster than human reaction times. Over and over again, the result is an affordable system that cities will be able to operate at a profit instead of having to collect more taxes forever to subsidize.
Most mass transit systems (read old fashioned) collect fares that represent only about 1/4 of their annual operational costs. A private business couldn't and wouldn't even get into the transit business using such equipment and technology because there is no continual free money in the real world to be thrown away annually - only the political world. A private company would have to quadruple their fares to NOT GO bankrupt, which in essence would also bankrupt them - because no one would deem riding such slow, antiquated commuting systems as worth 4 times the current daily cost.
