SMRTram™ is a high-capacity people-mover–a “HORIZONTAL ELEVATOR” that can be inserted into virtually any existing urban street corridor to extend the distances a pedestrian can access from a parked car, or a hotel room, or an apartment. This “pedestrian access distance” is typically a quarter mile or less. SMRTram™ can extend that distance to a mile or more.
This may seem a simple (and obvious) functionality that every urban business district ought to have (with enormous implications for reducing traffic-congestion and increasing livability) but the technology to make it happen must achieve four necessities that pose a significant challenge:
1. A transparently convenient, 2-3 minute elevator-like “headway” (waiting-time for the next ride). Even the newest urban streetcars have headways of 10 or 15 minutes. Skyscrapers wouldn’t exist today if people had to wait fifteen minutes for an elevator!
2. On-grade operation adjacent to sidewalk. Walking up a stair—or taking an elevator!—to an elevated platform and guideway is not transparently convenient.
3. Operation that is independent of street traffic—i.e. in its own dedicated lane. It is impossible to maintain 2-3 minute headways while traveling in local traffic congestion.
4. Bi-directional operation: From the same sidewalk boarding area, a pedestrian should be able to ride in either direction every 2-3 minutes. (A single dedicated-lane loop system requires riders to go “all the way around” to access a destination behind them—again, not convenient.)
SMRTram™ accomplishes all four of these goals—and does so with a technology that costs a fraction of fixed-rail streetcars or elevated monorails. The technology synchronizes the movement of on-grade, rubber-tired tramcars, operating in both directions simultaneously along a single, dedicated lane adjacent to a sidewalk.
The oppositely moving tramcars are synchronized to arrive at each tramstop at the same moment. Pedestrians get on and off, then the tramcars use a short bypass at each stop to go around each other. At full capacity, pedestrians only wait 2-3 minutes to get on a tramcar going in either direction.
In essence, SMRTram transforms an urban business corridor into a “Horizontal Skyscraper” that operates much like its vertical counterpart.
There are two important features of this visualization. The first is that people don’t drive their cars into the skyscraper. The second is that the SMRTram™ system–in conjunction with the pedestrian access distance to either side of its alignment– is an infrastructure that defines a specific community. The “Horizontal Skyscraper” then, becomes a specific model for a Community Infrastructure.
I designed and patented SMRTram™ in 2006—and then spent nearly a decade trying to convince one city or another to build and demonstrate a prototype. I did not succeed. My persuasive efforts, unfortunately, coincided with President Barak Obama’s announcement that the U.S. government was essentially “bankrupt” and so far in debt that it would take generations of taxpayers to pay the bill! The idea of convincing an American city to pursue a federal grant to build a SMRTram™ prototype went up in smoke.
SMRTram™ still exists, however, as a latent technology that could transform urban business districts–and function as a “backbone infrastructure” for new architectural communities. Look it up: Patent No. US7,082,879B2.
Obama, as we now know, was looking at things with an old-fashioned (and very dysfunctional) perspective about what modern fiat-money can accomplish.