Technical Paper
Miniature Maglev Vehicles for Personal Non-Stop Transportation
1991-08-01
911620
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.