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The People Pods™ transportation concept for commuters is based on extremely light weight, 200 pound, advanced composite, two passenger Maglev vehicles traveling on a monorail system above all other traffic. To provide on demand, point to point transportation, guideways are installed in multiple directions across and between urban business and residential areas. Vehicles are to be available for immediate departure at regular stations along the guideway system. The challenges of automating such a transportation system can be met by implementation of a vast number of processing units, including one in each vehicle. The overall architecture of automating this system can be viewed as a dynamic network of systems. Component systems in this network must also be capable of operating independently, and of still providing service given the multiple levels and potential combinations of failures which all have some probability of occurrence as part of normal operations.

The People Pods Maglev transportation concept (fig 1) uses extremely light weight, 200 pound electric vehicles that are aerodynamic, non-polluting and carry two passengers. While traveling at 100 MPH on a monorail track system (safely above all other heavier traffic) a pod achieves an equivalent 400 MPG energy efficiency. Because of this miniscule traveling weight, an elevated guideway can be built with minimum materials for less than $2 million per mile and still exceed all static, dynamic and seismic structural criteria. This can be compared with proposed 160 passenger monorail trains (weighing 100,000 pounds) which require guideways costing up to $40 million per mile.(1) * The light weight of track design allows us to create an automated track forming/manufacturing robot that enables a two shift crew to deploy one mile of two way track per day. This further reduces costs and interrupts neighborhoods for shorter periods of time.