SkyTran - Congested Downtown Station Placement
Some city planners were still against SkyTran systems. They complained that in congested downtown centers our SkyTran unload/load stations, while admittedly small, would still partially block and disrupt heavy pedestrian traffic and thus were unacceptable. The entire engineering team brainstormed on possible solutions for weeks to no avail. Then one day, retired Marine "Major" Bob Johnson, our Human Resources Administrator (who was not even one of our highly paid supposedly inventive engineers) tossed out an idea: "If there’s no room for stations on the ground, why not put them up in the air along with the track? Heck, all those tall downtown buildings surround you - just attach the stations to the buildings right at the main SkyTran travel elevation!"Hotel owners were the first to go for that idea. They were happy to volunteer two rooms on the third floor to become SkyTran unload/load stations in order to bring people right to their place of business. The engineering team ran with Johnson's idea and created lightweight composite station modules that could be hoisted up by a cherry picker team, then bonded and bolted to the outside of any building. Simultaneously, the inside concrete cutting team would quickly create a direct station access door right through the wall of the building. A complete station installation start to finish, including cleanup, repainting and recarpeting, took less than 8 hours.
We soon started attaching our main track, our offline track and all the mini unloading and boarding "stations" to office, hotel and factory buildings everywhere in the downtown areas. People no longer had to walk outside from a station to get to work. Some skyscraper owners paid for an extra set of stations on all four building faces in order to have a 3,840 arrivals per hour capacity. Weather at one's destination was now irrelevant! Besides not consuming any surface land nor disturbing pedestrian or vehicular traffic, we also saved the time and expense of installing poles and pole foundation mounts. On the long stretches between buildings, we used baby versions of Golden Gate Bridge cable suspension systems for supporting the track. We also added side restraint cables to keep those long stretches of track aligned in heavy crosswinds.
Fig. 8. SkyTran stations with direct building access. Utilizing low cost, light weight, SkyTran station modules mounted directly to downtown buildings (patents applied for) meant absolute minimum commute times, no weather concerns and no parking costs. Having vehicles in dwell, always waiting to take passengers anywhere, meant millions of dollars and months of time were not spent building expensive stations just for people to waste their time in relative comfort while waiting for a scheduled train or subway departure. (Artwork courtesy of Len Stobar, Art Center College of Design)
