ULTra – Urban Light Transit concept
Having spent a little time this holiday scurrying around on the UK’s woeful excuse for a public transport system, I’m very receptive to a technological revamp of the ways we get around. The ULTra – Urban Light Transit – system looks like just the ticket if the video below is anything to go by, though it has the launch date for the Heathrow Airport installation wrong – ULTra themselves have it pegged for operation in spring 2009.
More than a hint of the Jetsons about it, isn’t there? I wonder if it could genuinely scale up to coping with the sort of traffic the London or New York subway systems handle? [via Tomorrow’s Trends]
December 30th, 2008 at 12:38 am
Is it me, or is trialing it at Heathrow a recipe for disaster? There’s no way discrete 4-person vehicles will be able to handle the likely amount of traffic.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:21 am
It doesn’t seem the most logical choice, does it? But the site mentions that the Heathrow install is not state subsidised in any way; I’m guessing they had to cast around for a big enough site to use as a test-bed that was willing to take the gamble. Also, it may be that there’s a way to cope with the scaling issues; the video doesn’t go into much detail. Maybe I should drop the company a line…
December 30th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Phoenix, Arizona, has just cut the ribbon on its light-rail train system. It wasn’t easy to get this off the drawing boards.
It’s cool, but it doesn’t look nearly like The Jetsons…