"Bicycle" Monorail more efficient?

[skyl4rk]

The benefits are that there are no street crossings to stop for, and it looks like it would be much cheaper to build a monorail bridge over a river than a bicycle path or road bridge. That is the most interesting part, the infrastructure looks relatively simple to build in comparison to road building, at least for bridges. Obviously this is only good for densely populated areas.

[user removed]

Another idea would be to treat it like a roller coaster where there were sections that had a drive mechanism to lift you up an incline, then a shallow decline to provide some added energy to the vehicle.

regards
Mech

[Bicycle Bob]

The nice thing about building elevated bikeways is that people on bikes don't occasionally crowd together to watch something to nearly the same density that they do on a pedestrian bridge. Consequently, the loading is about 5 times lower per square foot than for highways or footpaths. The same advantage would benefit the monorail. It also gains from having steel wheels, with very low friction. I'd like to have the option to ride my bike, all packed from shopping, onto a monorail car that gives an all-weather, streamlined cover. However, any old separated bike expressway would do, and the nearby residents might prefer it to the sound of steel wheels.

Many cities have bike routes along waterways that are a good sample of what could flow all over a city, without cutting it up like a car expressway. At rush hour, the bikeway would be going at least as fast as the car highway anyway.

During the planning for a steep hillside community, I proposed laying out all the streets at about 2 deg slope, with occasional bike lifts going straight up across the grid, powered by available water. You could coast down from anywhere to a lift road, and from there down to anywhere else.

[euromodder]

As to the original idea : where do they store the pods when they're not needed ?
By volume they are a good lot harder to stack away than a bike.
As they're obviously not personal means of transport, they'll be neglected and vandalised.

Aerodynamically they're even the wrong way around

Originally Posted by skyl4rk

The benefits are that there are no street crossings to stop for, and it looks like it would be much cheaper to build a monorail bridge over a river than a bicycle path or road bridge.

Don't elevate, but sink bicycle paths.

The infrastructure wouldn't be nearly as intrusive and visually polluting.
The average rider is a lot lower than the height requirements for motor vehicles. Ramps to ground level could become shorter or less steep.

The bicycle path can be rather narrow, negating the need for complex road bridges, all that's needed is a simple short-span bridging structure that can be standardized.

Bicycle trences also cut down on the wind.


The open trench bicycle paths can become an emergency buffer capacity to counter the flash-flooding that more and more densely populated regions are seeing.
(It's not due to climate change, it's the huge increase in hardened surface area hitting back.)

[Bicycle Bob]

Any of these pod-based transit systems can benefit from the ability to make up trains and do merges neatly. This could be automated to any extent with electrified roadways. For anything resembling current expressways, we could have a moving LED display along an entrance ramp, showing where a gap will arrive if we maintain the standard acceleration it is moving at. Just pace yourself to the green dots, and not the red ones, and there will be room in the lane you want.

[dcb]

Originally Posted by RobertSmalls

P&G on a bike might make sense at a walking pace, but if you P&G at higher heart rates, you're doing it wrong....

That seems accurate, though walking pace for a bike is significantly faster than actual walking and likely much more efficient since you can coast and your legs balance each other out rather than lifting and dropping (and your whole body lifting a bit each step). So you *should* be able to cover a lot more ground and do it faster on a bicycle using only the effort of walking.

Edit, ok maybe that is too obvious http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance

"A human being traveling on a bicycle at low to medium speeds of around 10-15 mph (16–24 km/h), using only the power required to walk, is the most energy-efficient means of transport generally available. Air drag, which increases roughly with the square of speed,[4] requires increasingly higher power outputs relative to speed, power increasing with the cube of speed as power equals force times velocity. A bicycle in which the rider lies in a supine position is referred to as a recumbent bicycle or, if covered in an aerodynamic fairing to achieve very low air drag, as a streamliner.
Racing bicycles are light in weight, allow for free motion of the legs, keep the rider in a comfortably aerodynamic position, and feature high gear ratios and low rolling resistance.

On firm, flat, ground, a 70 kg person requires about 30 watts to walk at 5 km/h. That same person on a bicycle, on the same ground, with the same power output, can average 15 km/h, so energy expenditure in terms of kcal/(kg·km) is roughly one-third as much. Generally used figures are"

[bestclimb]

If I am going to power my own transport, I will want to go directly from my point of origin, to my destination. A pedal powered light rail may get me close but then I have to disembark and I will be without my bike to get me the rest of the way there.