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by toddmorey·11y ago·view on hn ↗
Exactly. Monorail systems of the 1980s never really had their breakout moment, either, likely for a lot of the same reasons. Dedicated, elevated right of way can get expensive, not to mention the cost of each elevated station with ADA compliance. It also adds quite a bit of blight, which is apparent in the sample renderings.

I've been comparing the coming evolution of transportation to the evolution of computing. Shared servers (equates to buses), dedicated servers (equates to car ownership) and cloud computing (equates to the idea of on demand autonomous vehicle networks).

I think the sweet spot really is having these atomic units that can act independently (off rails, stop anywhere without stations) but are a cooperative part of a larger network. It's going to entirely change transportation. It's the first alternative I've seen for America that can genuinely rival car ownership.

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I would guess that stations are the real problem here. To make this kind of transportation system really useful, you need really lots of them.
The videos show them as small elevated platforms reachable by a single flight of stairs. Would be low cost as depicted but I see no way that it would get safety or ADA approval in that form. Add an elevator and it gets much more complicated. Have them dip down all the way to street level and there's a much bigger footprint required.
The plus is the stations could be quite small, closer to the size of a bus stop than a subway station.

And the routes themselves could be much more diverse than a subway or light rail line, though probably not a lot more than buses.