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]
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.
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…
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…