CarTube - yes, another cunning plan

[whole diary]

[stuving]

Here's another of those cunning plans dreamed up by architects in need of a bit of publicity. Though in this case they are being a bit coy - its public launch was last Friday, but PLP's own web site only mentions briefly its preview in March. This is from the Guardian:

A tube for cars? Proposal to bury London's traffic says it's 'next best thing to teleportation'

The proposed CarTube supposedly reclaims streets for people by moving cars on to a underground network of automated tracks. But do these transport ideas mean the ‘smart city’ is going backwards or forwards?

The CarTube vision for London proposes greening over the Embankment and putting cars underground. Photograph: PLP

I've seen quite a few of these attempts to combine the high capacity of public transport, off the roads in the case of railways, with the door-to-door convenience and speed of private cars. And some of them are not down to Uber.

Unfortunately some of the details are vague, and don't seem to have been well understood by the audience. The Guardian's report talks about actual conveyor belts - which I just can't believe (was he really there?). It makes nonsense of some of the other features (and that graphic), so I suspect it's more a matter of "as if".

So PLP claim higher capacity than Crossrail, but to do that you have to trust synchronised automatic electric cars to whizz along a couple of metres apart at 50 mph, joining and leaving at junctions as they go. Now, rubber tyres have more grip than steel ones, but not that much, so it relies on all braking together ... or never having to brake. But of course if you can safely assume that, what can you do with a railway? And when there is a crash, the access is ... oh dear. Maybe we'll have to forget the tiny tunnels bit of it.

Here's a couple of other reports, one from autocar with different bits of PLP stuff , and one from inhabitat with a video (of sorts).

[ellendune]

I see another idea dreamed up by a car obsessed fantasist who cannot bring him/herself (or their clients cannot) to consider that cars might not be the best mode of transport for a city.  They usually refer to so called calculations they have dreamt up to prove it is better than railways.  When reviewed by a real expert these always seem to prove to be just fantasy.

The last one wanted to convert waterloo into a bus station and produced fantasy calculations to show that the a ridiculously small number of buses could manage the huge numbers of people in the rush hour.

[grahame]

The last one wanted to convert waterloo into a bus station and produced fantasy calculations to show that the a ridiculously small number of buses could manage the huge numbers of people in the rush hour.

Bus numbers needed are indeed huge.

I've just done a calculation on a different flow - there are 37 bus services from "S" to "O" each day with journey time up to 90 minutes - which works out as 7 vehicles.  A train could to the same journey (the tracks are all there) in 30 minutes, and as there are trains terminating at "S" from several points west which could carry on to "O", you could replace the 7 vehicles with a single two carriage train.

But actually that 7:1 ratio is probably wrong; I suspect that the train would be very popular any you would need 2 x 2 coach trains to cope with a massive move to public transport, and I suspect that you would need to retain 3 buses to cover intermediate traffic at intermediate places like "S" where the station was closed may years ago, and "F" and the other "F" which never had stations.

You can probably get away with fewer bus seats on a flow than train seats if you replace a train with a bus. But as the train is faster you need less of them ...

And I think the case I'm proving is that you need a proper expert to look at each individual case.  And, yes, I have reconfirmed my belief that there's a case for running trains from "S" to "O"   

[Bmblbzzz]

It's like a 1930s idea.

[rogerw]

There is already a high capacity system in place at the location shown in the illustration.  It's called the District/Circle line.  The proposed tunnels would require its closure and removal.  Do these people live in a real world?