Intercity Travel

Fast Inter-City Travel by SkyTran

Ok, if we assume we can build a SkyTran Personal/Mass Transportation system that meets all the essential specifications of the previous page what, if anything, does it buy us? Will it be worth the development costs??

LA to SF High Speed Rail cost comparison.
Remember earlier when we mentioned a proposal about building a $12.6 billion high speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco that would travel at 125 MPH? Let's use that as a comparison model. As an alternative to the high speed rail, we could build a SkyTran track for the 450 mile distance between the two cities for $450 million ($0.45 billion = 3.5% of the high speed train!). AHHH! Don't forget we need to include vehicles as this train proposal did. 25,000 SkyTran vehicles at $3,000 each would be an additional $75 million for a total of $.525 billion (5.2% of the high speed trains proposed budget!).

LA to SF High Speed Rail travel time comparison.
The only disadvantage of the SkyTran System is that you wouldn't travel at 125 MPH, you would be going only 100 MPH!
Hah! I just tricked you - Don't forget that the SkyTran vehicles never stops and cruises the whole 450 miles at 100 MPH in 4.5 hours. What happens if the 125 MPH train makes six intermediate stops enroute (logical choices might be Redwood City, San Jose, Salinas/Monterey, San Louis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Hollywood) at 10 minutes per stop (including the lost time to slow down and speed up again)? Guess what? It then takes the 125 MPH train 4.6 hours to cover the 450 miles and its true AVERAGE speed is 97.8 MPH!
AND I tricked you again! The SkyTran vehicles are not on a fixed schedule. You go when you get there! Would one train passenger train leave every hour? If so, wouldn't you plan to get there at least 20 minutes early? Well, then your trip time is really an extra 20 minutes longer. Now your average speed on the train is down to 91.2 MPH. Interesting??

LA to SF High Speed Rail capacity comparison.
Let's be generous and assume that one completely full 500 passenger train leaves every half hour from Los Angeles and simultaneously one from San Francisco. If the train service runs for 16 hours per day, then even at full saturation, with trains running in both directions a maximum total of 32,000 people per day can be served. The 25,000 SkyTran vehicles on the other hand can each do two round trips per day. Thus 100,000 people can be moved between the cities per day with just one passenger per Pod and 200,000 per day with two passengers per Pod. Also, consider that if the train is nowhere near full it has to make the run anyway and probably costs the same to operate whether it is full or not. SkyTran vehicles, on the other hand just sit unpowered till needed.

We can also, compare this capacity with current airline traffic. If the average plane can carry 300 passengers, it would take 667 flights between the cities to carry 200,000 people!

Conclusion.
The conclusion is that IF you build a Personal/Mass Transportation System that meets the essential SkyTran engineering specs you can move more people, faster than the proposed High Speed Rail for 5.2% of the initial cost.

Now for the real hooker!
PART 1. If the State of California wants to consider spending that $12.6 billion for "improved High Speed Rail inter-city transportation" and we can install a more useful SkyTran inter-city solution for just $0.5 billion, do I deserve to keep the $12.1 billion remaining difference??? Great! I would use $5.3 billion of my Bill Gates-like profit (the amount currently being spent in Los Angeles for 23 miles of subway that has a projected ridership of 335,000 per day) to install a complete, fully inter-linked three dimensional SkyTran system on a one mile by one mile grid (4,000 miles of two lane track!) that would cover all of Los Angeles, Orange County, San Fernando Valley and Riverside. Such a system would have a capacity of moving 4,600,000 passengers per hour - if each person was traveling 25 miles to get to work!

If the average trip was only 10 miles, then this $5.3 billion system could carry 11.5 million people per hour. MMM? What is the population of LA? AND what is the population of non-children and non-elderly whom might actually be needing to commute to a job?? (The serious mathematicians out there, now know why I don't even bother getting into the queuing theory aspects of the system!)

PART 2. Next I want to take another $3.9 billion from my remaining $6.8 billion and do the same thing in San Francisco. Proportional benefits for that city result and I still keep $2.9 billion out of the original allotted $12.6 billion!

Back to the Train comparison.
I tricked you one more time! Part 1 and Part 2 was what I wanted to do all along! Now lets analyze what happens to the "Speed" of the SkyTran traveler compared to the High Speed Rail traveler. SkyTran is no longer offering you better inter-city travel we are offering door-door travel (plus an average of 880 steps to get to your closest SkyTran Station and 880 more average steps once you get off the vehicle. MMM? AND how far do the train users have to the walk from the car park lot??)

Consider that actual total trip time boils down to how close do you live to the single High Speed Rail station in San Francisco or Los Angeles. Let's assume just 10 miles and a half hour drive if you are lucky. Same for the other end. Don't forget time to walk from a parking lot along with time spent checking in on one end and renting a car on the other end. For analysis purposes lets call walking the average 880 steps a wash with these last items. Now you can calculate that the High Speed Rail average trip speed is down to 75.8 MPH. It takes 5 hour and 56 minutes to actually get from A - your house to B - your true destination. The Pod still averages 100 MPH because I spent some of my billions building a complete grid in each city!

Let's be bold and now compare SkyTran to 550 MPH jet airplane travel.
Using the same business trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco as our model and a few more assumptions we can generate the following door-to-door Business Trip time table:

ACTION TIME

1. Drive time to airport 30 min

2. Park, check in, wait for flight 30 min

3. Board and prepare for flight 15 min

4. Taxi and take off 15 min

5. Climb out, fly , descend 55 min

6. Land, taxi, deplane 15 min

7. Walk to rental car booth 15 min

8. Pick up rental car 15 min

9. Drive to destination 30 min

10. Park car, walk to meeting 5 min

TYPICAL TOTAL TRIP TIME 3.75 HOURS

Most business travelers I know, readily agree that this LA to SF flight takes 4 or so hours when you start to consider true door-to-door time. Once you are on a SkyTran vehicle and moving, the door-to-door trip takes 4.5 hours, no matter what! Also, delays for the flight itself, road traffic, lines at the rental car counter, etc. put all kind of unknown variables into the airplane trip time. SkyTran does not beat the jet, but it's pretty close time-wise and saves a lot of intermediate hassles, parking costs and rental car costs. (Obviously, using an airplane still saves tons of time if you have to travel 1,000 or 2,000 miles fast. It is then the transportation mode of choice.)

Using your 1) personal car, the 2) jet (or High Speed Train), and 3) the rental car combined would be considered to be parts of an INTERMODAL transportation system. This is a common term used by the people in the bus, light rail and heavy rail businesses. Basically, the rail stuff costs so much that they cannot effectively put enough of it in to benefit everyone - so you are stuck needing one type system (car or bus) to get to use another part of the system. Boring - does anyone love transfers and transferring??

The real reason for the jet plane comparison!
You may or may not know it, but 63% of airplane operations involve flights whose origins/destinations are within 600 miles of each other. What would happen if most of those were replaced by all-weather SkyTran trips? The real benefit is not the door-to-door, sit back and relax convenience for the traveler in nearly comparable door-to-door trip times. The real benefit would be enhanced long haul capacity for existing airports (because an alternative to all the short flights exists in a go everywhere future SkyTran system).

Currently, hundreds of billions of dollars are being planned to solve airport gridlock problems. Simply eliminating even one half of the under 600 mile range flights in and out of a busy airport would eliminate the impending gridlock and the need for spending those hundreds of billions. AND I hope you don't have to ask where the hundreds of billions would come from - US taxpayers - you and I, dear buddy! Personally I don't mind if the government takes that money from you because I'm sure our wonderful magnanimous government would pass on 50% of the savings (say $50 billion) to me! Thank you all in advance and so sorry Bill, that means I'll pass you up (but barely). Cool!!

One last airport related thought. A well designed SkyTran 3-D grid would at the same time be a cost effective way to relieve the ground surface congestion in and out of those same airport terminals - a further benefit for the long haul travelers!

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