this is not new Walt Disney bilt this at his parks they call it the People Mover

Very interesting idea. There will certainly be plenty of logistical issues, but I don't think it's as impractical as it sounds.

If you've ever been in Bangkok there are these water shuttles which don't really stop, they just cruise close to the warf and everybody jumps. It seems to work pretty well, but it's not for a culture where anyone old, slow, overweight or disabled would be using them...

Efficiency is one thing, but think about the biggest advantage here: travel time. The travel time will be short, and independent on the number of "stops", which would be more aptly named as "pickups".

Why not just have train cars which can separate from the main train? A car loads at the station, then accelerates away before the main train gets there - to merge a half mile down the track, becoming the first car. Then, the last car on the train detaches before the train gets to the station, and slows to stop at the station. The main train speeds on through the empty station. Obviously this only works for trains where each car has it's own set of motors (like BART), but I think it's pretty elegant otherwise.

It'd be much simpler and it would also avoid issues like how elderly/disabled people get up and down inside the moving train. In addition, stops where more people get on/off (e.g. stadiums, transfer stations) could be handled by having more cars which detach / reattach.

Just a heads up: that's not Taiwanese he's speaking but Mandarin Chinese.

Very interesting idea, though.

The idea is nice, but it'd have a limit to the ammount of people getting off or on at each station, plus the problem of bottlenecks to get on the small cart to get off. Instead of having three wide doors per car, you'd get only per train.

Here's an idea, funnels on top of the train to jump in and slides on the sides of the rail to get off. You'll feel like going to the park instead of work. Would be tricky to implement in a bullet train, though. :P

Well, seriously now, the train could be made more efficient using a good transmission, like a belt-drive torque converter. Add to that a breaking system that instead of friction, wasting the energy as heat, stores it for later use when resuming motion, such as an air or fluid compression system.

Such a combination would probably make it very efficient and would not cost more to implement than the one suggested in the article, and is applicable to existing machines and stations. Add to that some hypermiling techniques like push-and-glide, and they've got to save fuel.

It would be easy enough to drop the last car at the stop and push a new car from the stop. The first car could get up to speed to match the speed of the train and then get pushed from there. The last car would be released to stop itself and wait at the station for the next train. I would be a real reduce in the energy since only one car would have to move. Potentially for more popular stops, more cars could be dropped or pushed.

I remember reading about a bus system in the city of Curitiba in Brazil. The article, in Scientific American, described how bus delays were reduced by using enclosed bus stops where passengers must pay to enter them. When a bus arrives, riders leave the bus from two doors, while incoming passengers enter through a single door. This prevented the kind of traffic problems that normally come with simultaneous boarding and exiting passengers, especially when combined with making payment and obtaining a transfer ticket, etc.

I liked the diagram of the cylindrical bus stop enclosure that was shown in the article, and thought that the idea could be extended by pre-seating passengers in an enclosed module, to be loaded onto an "engine" or "motivator". Thus, payment and seating could be taken care of before the bus arrived.

This would not work for a bus, of course, since destinations are so varied. I decided that it might work for airlines, though. Passengers could be pre-seated in a "can" module that could be arranged on the tarmac. An incoming airplane could then drop passenger cans for arrivals to that airport, and pick up departures. Passengers and their luggage would be together in their module.

Yes, I know this has many complications that almost certainly make it unworkable, but maybe the idea could be used somewhere else.

The idea presented in the post also separates passenger carriers from the motive force. This is supposed to create greater time savings and efficiency by specializing the movement function from the carrying function. In a way, the cable cars of San Francisco use a variation on this. The underground cables are drawn by a single (?) engine, which serves to power many cars that have no power of their own. If this kind of centralized mechanical power transmission is more efficient than individually powered vehicles, like busses, then a type of "packet forwarding" system could be envisioned for individual transport.

Small passenger carriers could be boarded at a station, and then moved to their destination powered by a single moving cable. The cars could be programmed with an itinerary impressed onto a prepaid ticket, purchased online or at a station kiosk. A passenger would then insert the ticket into the car, which would be inserted into the moving stream of other cars.

When the car approaches a branchpoint, where its destination can differ from that of the main stream of cars, it can be queried by the branchpoint station for its itinerary. If the itinerary requires a change of stream, the station mechanism could disengage the car from the main motive cable and insert it into a branching cable. In this way, the car is "forwarded" to the next branchpoint.

This is analogous to the "Store and Forward" model of packet transmission over computer networks.

Constant analysis of usage patterns may cause the system to pick up unoccupied cars from terminal stations and return them to base stations, or stockpile empty cars in stations that normally anticipate heavy usage at certain times of day. For instance, outlying stations may accumulate cars at 3 am, to be available to commuters at 7 am. A movie theater may request extra cars to be allocated shortly before a popular movie ends.

Because regular usage is easier for the system to anticipate, there could be a discount on prepaid fixed itinerary tickets for commuters. Such tickets would be impressed with data and mailed or emailed to subscribers. Alternatively, a commuter authorization could be transmitted to the subscriber's cellphone, which would serve as the ticket.

Since the system forwards each car at branchpoint stations, interruptions of service can be flexibly detoured, and traffic loads can be normalized to prevent bottlenecks. A block of commuter cars may reach their common destination by different routes in order to spread the burden to underutilized tracks. An estimated time of arrival can be displayed inside the car, as well as information about unexpected changes of route to reassure the passenger.

It would be best for short distances, at least at first. The biggest problem is that it would limit the maximum speed of the train. A human body can only endure acceleration below a certain number of g forces, and having a moving train pick up a non-moving car of passengers would be pretty sudden.

I suppose the individual cars could accelerate themselves so that they are not moving much relative to the train when the train catches them. That would work and it could still have the efficiency gains, but the individual boarding shuttles might need to be a little heavier

I love this idea!!!

The idea of one carriage speeding up ahead of the main train and then the last one dropping off doesn't work as to travel a short number of stops (significantly less than the total number of carriages in the train) you would have to walk through the whole train before the detachment happened... Pretty impractical.

That said, the idea in this article isn't any better. Presumably you would still have to get on and off the top shuttle at some specific location on the train.

Also, you would need some awesome engineering to have a good abort plan if one of the shuttles (or both) aren't ready to go. Imagine what would happen if the front shuttle got something stuck in the door and couldn't go at the same time that something got stuck between the rear shuttle and the main train (preventing it from detaching)... Ouch.