"Bicycle" Monorail more efficient?
 

Well you won't get hit by a car. But what if the person in front of you is a slow-poke? :turtle:

His fat ass stops pedaling once you start pushing him, and in frustration, you pop your pod and walk the rest of the way. There would actually be a clot of vacant pods in that case. I'll take elevated bike lanes in the style of limited access expressways, thanks.

What's up with the total lack of good aerodynamics on those pods?

Frank -

What a bunch a Shweebs.

CarloSW2

Frank -

Hmmmm, 28 MPH is ok if you can sustain it.

Can you imagine how smelly those things would get? Or do you bring your own?

CarloSW2

Jesus you guys need to imagine a little.

Drafting at 40+ MPH.

A fairly sharp incline for your pulse then a shallow decline for your glide.

Small battery and electric motor for those who need some help.

Heavier people will glide longer.

Riding in a gang in close proximity for even greater speed.

I see it hitting 50 MPH speeds, with much less effort than a bicycle.

All weather capability.

regards
Mech

Think of a sidewalk that has steps which you climb. Then you jump on your skateboard and ride the shallow decline for a couple hundred feet.

Compare that to walking.

The purpose of a machine is to make you effort more efficient and this one has much potential.

regards
Mech

@Old Mechanic: Human lungs and legs don't like to P&G. The best way to extract power is at a constant 90-120RPM. This monorail, like a bicycle, can provide that given enough gears.

It's a thoroughly nifty idea, but there are a few glaring problems. Such as what to do when the guy in the middle of the peloton reaches his exit. If the pods looked more like ultra low drag HPVs, they would go faster without much need to draft.

I sure like to P&G when I ride...

lots of things pulse and glide
http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...html#post89460

Robert name a single creature on this planet that has an axle and wheel as a part of its anatomy.

As far as entry and exit, use a hill to slow the vehicles down, where people can enter and exit from a moving sidewalk. then the vehicles go downhill to regain speed.

regards
Mech

regards
Mech

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.

OldMech,

There are none, and the bicycle is a huge improvement over going on foot. I'd love to figure out how to hook a horse's legs to a crankshaft, gears, and wheels. It might give the car a run for its money.

For entry and exit, I was picturing a second rail that you can access every few blocks. If traffic on the express rail was going 40mph, you'd need a really accurate, fast-actuating switch to move one rail car but not the next.

I've seen a horse on a treadmill. It still puts out 1HP.

On a bicycle, coasting is a welcome break from time to time, but only if it does not cost any progress. On choppy terrain, it gets tedious. In a velomobile, which coasts extremely well due to streamlining and weight, city riding is often a series of short, hard anaerobic sprints, followed by long rests with no motion in the legs - most unpleasant. A streamliner really needs an electric system to smooth out the effort.

Elevated bikeways are a far better investment than "expressways" for cars in cities, but I don't think many people will pay to use the Schweeb. It is just not very convenient to use. Let's put a bike lane on top of that rail, and see which gets the traffic.

do I have to use the seat and back rest that some other schweeb was sweating on?

bestclimb -

That's what I am asking. In reality, I am sure they have an answer, I just want to know what it is. They have to answer the "Joe User" questions along the way.

It looks like a little greenhouse pill in the picture, so there must be a way to cool the passenger on a hot day. Super NACA duct power?

I wish I had that idea. I'd have a cool goomilllion to flesh it out.

CarloSW2

Ask and ye shall receive:

http://depletedcranium.com/one-horse...-makes-me-cry/

The one-horsepower vehicle with an actual horse inside | DVICE

The seats are vinyl, and every pod will have a hook that holds a little bottle of bleach-water, a rag, and a sign that says "please wipe down the machine after using!". It will work about as well as it does at the gym, but the schweeb will smell ten times as bad as a gym.

Oh good, sign me up then. :)

I am waiting for vacuum tubes to whisk me across town.

It's a start
 

I think it's a good basic premise. It is certainly not new--I've seen similar ideas in science magazines 10-15 years ago. It is certainly not perfected.

Looking at the video the crank seems to be set up for one speed only--not very efficient. As far as speed, the only way you are going to see sustained 40 mph is if you get a half dozen wold class athletes to draft together.

You could have setup sops with rail switches so people could get off and not hold the line. I'd like to give it a ride, but don't see it working out for being so radical.

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.

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

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.

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 ;)

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.)

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.

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"

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.