Design of Personal Rapid Transit Networks for Transit-Oriented Development Cities. NEXTRANS Project No. 081PY04

摘要

Personal rapid transit (PRT) is an automated transit system in which vehicles are sized to transport a batch of passengers on demand to their destinations, by means of nonstop and non-transfer on its own right-of-way. PRT vehicles run exclusively on its tracks, called guideways. The guideways are designed as elevated facilities above the ground, for purpose of eliminating at-grade crossings or interferences with other transportation modes. In US, PRT has been implemented as a mode of automated people movers at airports and institutions like schools, e.g., PRT system in West Virginia University campus in Morgantown, WV. Worldwide, PRT systems have been designed for several real world applications recently, including in Korea, Sweden, and United Arab Emirates. In the recent planning practice for urban development in future, there has been an increasing and sustained emphasis in the global community in sustainable transportation systems. Transit-oriented development (TOD) has emerged as a promising alternative for sustainable communities by creating compact environments using convenient and efficient public transportation systems. To facilitate TOD development, an alternative to the personal car needs to provide a public transit mode which offers the same door-to-door flexibility at an acceptable cost. This could be achieved through a mixed design of high passenger-flows mass transit and flexible public transportation carrying low passenger-flows for the times or places. PRT is one of such flexible systems serving a supplement mode for the TOD development, where a PRT system functions as a local area network, connecting the traditional transit systems and other means of transit modes within its network.