On 3 Jul 2001, at 12:04, David A. Bandel boldly uttered:
> trains are obsolete. Don't you think it's kind of stupid to make 999
> people on a train stop when one wants to get off? I was talking a
> personal transportation vehicle, not a mass transit vehicle. Same
> obsolescence applies to busses.
Not sure how much time you've spent in Panama or the U.S., but I know
in the U.S. one of the major problems with train efficiency is that
suburban sprawl has made public transit very expensive to deploy.
(some assert such urban planning was highly promoted/lobbied-for
etc by the oil/automobile industries)
So unlike much of Europe, the U.S didn't "grow up" around the train
system, and trains are way impractical for sprawling suburbia. If
you had more concentrated population centers, you wouldn't have one
person getting off at each stop.
Of course it helps that we now have technology that makes hybrid
personal/mass-transit systems like the one you mention feasible. But
Lee is right - it is no trivial matter cost-wise to build brand new
overhead rails everywhere.
(In the U.S. telecom industry we have a similiar situation where we
are seeing the former AT&T operating companies, ie "Baby Bells",
wiping the street with most of the upstart competition because they
are playing their trump-card to the hilt: they have a virtual
monopoly over 100 years worth of local loop that NO competitor can
begin to duplicate in a short period of time.)
The same hurdle exists for giant mass-transit projects: we've got so
many roads/highways and spent so many billions on 'em and there are
so many companies intertwined with 'em, it'll be an uphill battle,
like Lee said. Probably a lot better likelihood of doing something
like that in a relatively undeveloped country, it would seem.
Phil
--
Philip J. Koenig [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Electric Kahuna Systems -- Computers & Communications for the New Millenium
_______________________________________________
http://linux.nf -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Archives, Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, Etc
->http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
