New Transportation might be heading to Central Florida

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hbkrocco1

New Member
Original Poster
Click on the video on their website http://www.unimodal.com/ , very interesting and much cheaper then a monrail or rail service. In the video they said they are talking to people in Central Florida. This would be great for Disney with the rising fuel cost to run the buses.

Low cost.
Least expensive of all options to install and operate. Ten times less expensive than light rail.

Energy efficient.
Powered by electricity. Equivalent to over 200 miles per gallon of gasoline.
 
wickedfan07

wickedfan07

Member
xsupaxmanxsfnex said:
I wouldn't want to see that at the world. It is efficient ya but those pods only look like they hold a couple of people.
Click to expand...
I haven't watched the video yet so I don't know the specifics on the ods, but I'm sure if disney wanted this system, the conmpany would be willing to work on increasing capacity for them. (EDIT) Althouh with the design they have, slightly larger pods (say with a capcity of 10-15) could be very inteesting. It would still be a huge and complex system if it were to be property-wide, but it could work. It seems the biggest point made on the website is that this system takes the idea of MASS transit and makes the masses of peope into much smaller bite-sixed groups. Thiscould work well, I think.
 
WDWGuy

WDWGuy

Active Member
This is a very impressive idea. Maglev has always intrigued me.

Its the 2008 verision of TTA!

Can you imagine...at 150 mph...how fast you would complete the current TTA track at MK?....5 secs??? aahahahha
 
wickedfan07

wickedfan07

Member
WDWGuy said:
This is a very impressive idea. Maglev has always intrigued me.

Its the 2008 verision of TTA!

Can you imagine...at 150 mph...how fast you would complete the current TTA track at MK?....5 secs??? aahahahha
Click to expand...

Some of those turns might e painful at that speed...:lookaroun
 
B

bears163

Active Member
i could easily see that happening in WDW. It is alot cheaper than the monorail to build & they could increase the capacity no problem. awesome idea
 
Legacy

Legacy

Well-Known Member
It wouldn't be for Disney specifically. It's probably a state rail system that has been being discussed for a while, connecting Jacksonville, Tampa, Orlando and Miami. Orlando has been looking for something also.
 
R

Rayray

New Member
hbkrocco1 said:
Energy efficient.
Powered by electricity. Equivalent to over 200 miles per gallon of gasoline.
Click to expand...
Efficient?
Ah, not as much as you might think....


The article says it uses magnetic fields (by way of electricity). Although Maglev is an awesome way to propel something (because of little to no friction) it isn't necessarily energy efficient.

The reason I say this is that the system requires electricity. To get it from the powergrid, you have to transport it to the track over many lengths of wire... meaning much of the energy created at a powerstation is lost (see the wonderful rule called the second law of thermodynamics to understand why).

So the lesson here is that just because the single process that the train uses may be efficient, the entire process of using the train and getting its source of power may not be.
 
kurros

kurros

New Member
that video is a year and half old...

The "plans in Florida" are for a solar-powered prototype at the Museum Of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Tampa that have been around since at least 2005.

That 3/8ths of a mile to the main entrance from the parking lot is brutal :D
 
dxwwf3

dxwwf3

Well-Known Member
This is a pretty good idea. I would love for something to connect from WDW to downtown Orlando, making it easy to go to Magic games :)
 
Unplugged

Unplugged

Well-Known Member
Disclaimer: I'm only evaluating the pods as it applies to WDW in the following; There are many instances where they could be of significant value.

I'm curious as to how anyone could think this would cost less to build than a monorail?!? Has anyone who's jumping on this bandwagon evaluated all the points yet? Here's only a few I can think of at this hour, but they seem pretty mission critical:

  • Instead of a few sizable trains, your talking a LOT of pods which increases production & maintenance costs.
  • Both the monorail and these pods are electric. However, more pods across the track system would mean power is active in more zones, thus less efficient than a monorail train.
  • All the features they claim to have in the pods (climate, voice control, audio/video, etc.) would make them extremely expensive compared to the current monorail cars that are grouping the features for many more passengers.
  • Both require building towers and track. This was always the expensive issue with the infamous "monorail expansion" threads. Monorail track is primarily concrete with a reltively inexpensive power feed system where as Maglev track is inherently expensive to build. Since the monorail essentially rides on concrete like a car and it uses a very basic power pick-up system, that's inherently be cheaper than this pod system.
  • The clincher is the overall design: The pod system is designed for lots of people traveling to different locations but defined within the system, comparable to taxis being allowed to pick-up/drop-off at the bus stops. Monorails are designed to move lots of people traveling to the same locations.
My thought, and perhaps I am mistaken, is that the monorail is cheaper to build, operate (from an electrical perspective), and maintain for the movement of mass quantity of people between pre-define distant locations. If this pod system were ever evaluated with any intent, you'd see a monorail expansion built first.

My bet is we'll see fuel-cell buses before either track-based system. Isn't nuclear the local source for WDW? It's a low-carbon source to split water into H & O for use by a fuel cell system that puts out water. That way, the nuke-power can be swapped for solar, fission, orbital, whatever FPL or WDW buys into in the future.
 
Rob562

Rob562

Well-Known Member
There have been a number of conversations on here about systems like this in the past. Do a search for "PRT" (Personal Rapid Transit, which is the generic name for such a system) to find the old threads.

I believe one of the biggest hurdles mentioned for such a system would be the fireworks dump at the Magic Kingdom. Any system implemented at WDW would need to be able to handle the massive exodus at the park that happens after the fireworks. Current PRT systems would require MASSIVE multi-lane boarding areas to handle such a huge influx of people, more real-estate than Disney has in front of the MK.

And for an outside company, I would most likely assume that Disney would go with Siemens, who although they don't have a PRT system (at least one currently available), they already design and build light-rail systems.

-Rob
 
luckyeye13

luckyeye13

New Member
London Heathrow Airport is due to get a personal transport system linking Terminal 5 and its parking lot later this year. Here are two links to videos for that system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7hgipbHBK8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epiiPy9kAho

It seems pretty neat and since British Airways flights from Newark Airport are going to start flying to Terminal 5 right around the time that the PRT launches, I will be quite tempted to take a ride on it if I happen to be flying towards or through that part of the world.
 
S

spacemt09

New Member
Rayray said:
Efficient?
Ah, not as much as you might think....


The article says it uses magnetic fields (by way of electricity). Although Maglev is an awesome way to propel something (because of little to no friction) it isn't necessarily energy efficient.

The reason I say this is that the system requires electricity. To get it from the powergrid, you have to transport it to the track over many lengths of wire... meaning much of the energy created at a powerstation is lost (see the wonderful rule called the second law of thermodynamics to understand why).

So the lesson here is that just because the single process that the train uses may be efficient, the entire process of using the train and getting its source of power may not be.
Click to expand...

I really don't want to do this, but the engineer in me is making me...

You stated that wire transporting the electricity from the powerstation is the cause of a significant loss of energy, when in fact it really isn't. True, some power loss is unavoidable, but power companies minimize this. P=IV is the equation for power where P is power (watts), I is current (Amps), V is Voltage and R is resistance (Ohms). Using Ohm's law (V=IR) you can substitute I*R into the original equation for V and get P=I^2*R for the total power loss. Minimizing current and resistance will lead to minimizing the power lost over the electrical wire. This minimization is done by raising the voltage to extremely high levels (20,000+ V) which will reduce the required current to power the same electrical load, which leads to lower guage wiring which in turn leads to minimizing resistance.

I have no idea what the overhead costs for building, maintaing, and the power requirements for such a system would be, but it would be interesting to look at it a bit deeper. Of course there is the question of whether or not it is truly "green" but I cannot answer that either. I'm sure one of the companies proposing such things has looked into it and I haven't had the time to research it enough.
 

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