SkyTran vehicles ride 20-30 feet above the ground, hanging from a one-foot-wide "guideway" track supported by ordinary utility poles. The guideway itself is a shell of composite material wrapped around and supporting the wire coils that generate the the magnetic fields that support, stabilize and drive the vehicles. Elevated guideways make the system safer both for SkyTran riders and for pedestrians and other vehicles on the ground. They also greatly simplify the system, because SkyTran does not have to interact with ground traffic or incorporate extra infrastructure like railroad crossings or stoplights.



Because vehicles are extremely light, the structure of the guideway itself can be lean and light-weight while still far exceeding strength criteria. Inexpensive standard utility poles (like the ones street lights and traffic signals use) at 30-foot intervals support the guideway. The major benefit of light-weight construction is that the cost of the system is much smaller, allowing more track to be built for a given budget. Another benefit of light-weight construction is that the guideway is small and unobtrusive enough that it can fit alongside existing streets or sidewalks. One of the goals of SkyTran is to minimize land usage and interference with pedestrians and other surface traffic. SkyTran does not need the large swaths of land that rail systems need and no one would ever need to give up their home for SkyTran to be built. Also, the track's visual impact will be trivial compared with elevated roadways or train tracks. The guideway will be able to house power and communications lines, hiding these cables inside.

Building SkyTran

Building SkyTran will be more like installing street or traffic lights than like building a massive freeway or train section. The guideway has fewer fabrication steps than an inner-city road and each mile can be erected in 7 days or less. The guideway contains simple, heavy-duty copper wire that interacts with magnets in the moving vehicles to levitate them. This passive maglev cushion gives vehicles a very smooth and efficient ride. Maglev technology does not have parts that touch, increasing the reliability of the system. Increasing reliability further, electromagnetic switches, used for vehicles turning or exiting the guideway, need none of the maintenance that mechanical switches would need. The guideway also has electronics for sensing and propelling the vehicles. The only major moving part in the system is the vehicle. The system's regenerative braking system recaptures the energy of vehicles braking at their destination - increasing efficiency.

Vehicles enter and exit the main guideway via freeway style on-ramp and off-ramp tracks. Once on the guideway, vehicles travel at a constant speed non-stop to their destination. A vehicle never slows down unless it needs to make a 90 degree turn or is exiting the guideway at its final destination. A line of vehicles wait at stations for people to use them, rather than the other way around. SkyTran guideways require no intersections, because they can simply be built over or under other SkyTran tracks, elevated highways or rail lines or other existing structures, just as freeway overpasses let us ride over or under other roads. This concept, called "grade separation," is why freeways have a much lower accident rate than ordinary roads, and why cars on freeways don't need intersections and stoplights.

Carrying More People than Busses, Trains, or Freeways

Mass transit cars carry a lot of passengers, but their actual carrying capacity is much lower than you'd expect. There are two reasons for this:

1. Trains spend a lot of time waiting in stations and slowing down and speeding up
2. Trains need minutes of separation between them because they take a long time to stop. Steel wheels have too little friction to stop suddenly, and passengers standing in the aisles would be at risk if they could.

SkyTran's tiny one-foot-wide guideways and little two-passenger cars can actually carry more passengers per-hour than rail lines costing far more. Why?

• Like cars on a freeway, vehicles on SkyTran never need to stop at intersections
• Many features of SkyTran vehicle design allow them to stop in a very short distance: light vehicle weight, brakes inside the guideway shell where they are protected from rain and snow, and computer control. These allow vehicles to follow each other more closely than automobiles can. Instead of the "two-second rule" for automobile drivers, SkyTran cars are designed to eventually be safe with as little as half-second headways. They can still stop completely in the distance between vehicles.
• That's 120 Skytran cars per second, which works out to 7200 vehicles and up to 14400 passengers per hour. A single SkyTran line can carry as many vehicles per hour as three lanes of freeway. Freeways can carry between 1500 and 2500 cars per hour, while SkyTran has a capacity of 7200 vehicles per hour. (While a car does have more seats, most car trips, even in Hummers and Cadillac Escalades, only involve one or two passengers.)

Guideway Design

SkyTran's design suspends vehicles below the guideway shell, with just a slot on the bottom for the vehicle supports. The guideway shell protects the maglev track coils that a vehicle glides on, together with the mechanical emergency brakes, from dirt, rain, ice, and snow. Along with the reliability of maglev, this ensures that the need for maintenance is at a minimum. The track design also traps a vehicle so it can't derail. Brakes inside the guideway are relatively unaffected by snow, rain and ice; so SkyTran cars travel in complete safety even in weather that at best greatly reduces the capacity of roads, and at worse makes travel on them very hazardous. With their electronics and mechanics inside the guideways high above the road, SkyTran cars can ride over blizzard snowdrifts or even flood waters as easily as over dry ground.