The People mover concept was started as the Skybus in Pittsburgh which would have been a 200 mile system that was used as the escuse by PAT to dismantle most of the streetcar system since Skybus was going to be next big thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpS5ess9VNc In the 1970s USDOT had a competition for a Fed Funded People mover Cleveland,Detroit and Miami applied and Detroit and Miami won the contract. Detroit people mover was under used as its downtown went into swift decay in the 1980s the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBl5YxHR89w. Jacksonville goes from one end of the river to the other but Jacksonville is the Pittsburgh Armpit of Florida and no one was on it when I was there. There are a few in Vegas for the hotels there. But as far as a actaul people mover that moves people in a downtown or a distance over 2 miles I cant think of one. Every Airport seems to have one but actauly extending the people mover as part of a larger system to get people to the airport from downtown is unthinkable.
Some people movers connect to rapid transit systems, allowing users to reach “downtown” via. a connection. At Newark airport, you can ride an actual monorail to reach a rail connection, for example.
People movers (I’m thinking about the automated, elevated, rubber wheel type) typically cost a lot per mile to build, probably have high operating and maintenance costs, aren’t high speed, and aren’t typically designed to handle big crowds of mass commuters. The reason you don’t see them much outside airports is probably simply due to the fact that there are cheaper, better mass transit alternatives.
- Ed Kyle
I suspect as I have heard this before is that Airport $$$$$ comes from a diffrent pot then Rail $$$$$ and that highway money comes from a diffrenrt pot then Highway $$$$ and none of the 3 shall mix. Airport monorails comes from FAA and cant be used for transit outside the airport
Morgantown West Virginia has a “Personal Rapid Transit”. Back in the '70’s I went to Pittsburgh and rode the Westinghouse test unit in the Park. On a later trip to Washington DC, I went through Morgantown and rode this system. It wasn’t built by Westinghouse however.
Not too impressive, with only five stations and 70 "vehicles.
You can read about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Transit
That Morgantown System was built when People Movers were a vision of George Jetson and the Jimmy Carter Oil Embargo
Phoenix AZ (PHX) airport has a people mover that at it’s east end connects to the light rail system, which is the way to get downtown.
At PHL (Philadelphia) the peole mover to/ from the airport facilities and the SEPTA trains at the airport are those 2 things at the bottom of your legs . . . [:-,]
- PDN.
Let’s not forget that many airports are miles from downtown destinations.
I would liken people movers to good old fashioned trolleys - they’re how you get around once you get there (which was often by train). And today, the people movers are connecting with other mass transit modes.
Very difficult to fend off established interests when trying to introduce a new technology in a political environment. I spoke with Ed Anderson some years ago, who developed the Taxi 2000/Skyweb Express personal rapid transit system. He wasn’t able to get it off the ground, so to speak. Competing, anti-type people would conduct disruptive smear campaigns whenever a city, etc. became interested in his system.
Most, if not all, airport people movers do not involve a multiplicity of routes. They usually run in a continuous loop and the only switches are for the equipment to get to and from the shop/storage area.
and there is the Indy.IN Hospital Monorail It also has pnumatic tubes for biological sample transfer
basically they are elevateds. Certainly not new technology and first you have to get to it. To be done correctly they should run to very remote parking lots and travel at very high speeds. Not gonna happen in my opinion.
An airport “people mover” has a captive clientel, that are all going from the Terminal to the Boarding area (and/or the other way) and do they not stop at every corner and go up and down every side street… it is “Here” (where I am) to “There” (where I wanna be).
I tried to ride the city bus (closest thing to a “people mover” around here) to work one time. Had to get up an hour earlier, walk 4 blocks to the bus stop, ride all over the neighborhoods in my quadrant of the city before arriving downtown… then I waited 20 minutes for the bus that would take me toward where I worked, and I rode all over the neighborhoods between the downtown and where I worked, and I walked another 4 blocks from the bus stop to the workplace. An hour and 30 minutes, including the brisk walk of 8 blocks to get to work.
I walked it a couple of times before I retired… took only 45 minutes! And I could sleep later and still get to work on-time by walking… (but I took my personal ‘People Mover’ [i.e.: my car] anyway, because my coworkers didn’t like my being wet with sweat when I got to work! … and I got to sleep even later!)
I’d love to ride a “people mover” if it would pick me up at my front porch, and take me to work, or grocery, or pharmacy, or hardware/lumber store, or Wally*Whorled, or well, wherever, (AND back!) without stopping at everybody else’s front porch and all the useless places they are going. And could carry all my groceries, meds, new sink and 3 sheets of plywood, winter coats and boots for the kids, and well… whatever. And would do it on MY schedule.
If the airport People Mover went from the Terminal to the control tower, to the restaurant, to the radar installation, to the gift shoppe, to the hangar, to the car rental, to the boarding area, and I had to transfer from one People Mover to another in the middle of all that… I t
People movers are generally automated buses on a fixed guideway and as such can’t do much that a bus can’t other than reduce labor costs at the expense of pricy infrastructure.
Technology - ALL technology
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
At MSP you can ride Blue Line LRT for free between Terminals 1 and 2.
When the Duesseldorf Airport in Germany was rebuilt after a desastrous fire it got a people mover to connect the railway station with parking lots and the main terminal: https://www.dus.com/en/arrival-and-departure/skytrain
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Düsseldorf_-_International_(Rhein-Ruhr_-_Lohausen)_(DUS_-_EDDL)_AN0361464.jpg
Siemens suffered software problems and the airport operator had to use busses for two years. They learned the economical disadvantages of bus service the hard way despite the high investments for the Sky train and the disadvantage of being part of the traffic congestion on the roads.
Regards, Volker
Semper Vaporo, you did a very good job of explaining why the vast, vast majority of people prefer to drive their own vehicles rather than using mass transportation. Thank you, I couldn’t have said it any better myself. One of the major reasons I went to college was so that I could get a good job to pay for a vehicle so I wouldn’t have to take the bus downtown to work any more. Now I could work in the suburbs where I lived and wanted to be.
As I’ve come to understand them, most transit systems were hub and spoke - with the spokes radiating from a business core, be it corporate, retail, or industrial.
Some were built between the downtown areas and locales where developers owned land they hoped (and did) to subdivide into residential areas.
This worked fine as long as everyone lived in the 'burbs and worked in the city.
As the suburbs turned into their own towns (with jobs to be had), there came a need to run across the spokes (think spiderweb). Were it not for the advent of the automobile, I would opine that might have happened. But the auto made it easy to get from point A to point B, no matter where those points were.
No one wants to have to travel 30 miles to reach a point five miles away.
It’s a challenge modern transit systems face. I’m sure those systems running buses analyze their ridership to see which routes are making sense. And building
The IU Health People Mover is an interesting system, but it is not, technically, a “monorail”. There are only a handful of true monorails in the U.S. (The Disney’s, Seattle, Las Vegas, Tampa airport (hidden inside buildings), and Newark Airport. Newark’s, the only outdoor, elevated one that really works for a living that isn’t a tourist attraction, is on the endagered list, with plans afoot to replace it in a few years.
- Ed Kyle
Why can’t people-movers break out of the airport?
I don’t know, but the last airport people-mover I was on was in Dallas-Fort Worth about 15 years ago. That thing could never break out of the airport, it could barely get out of it’s own way! I can walk faster than that thing!
Rode it once, once was enough.