World's largest PRT system (105 km) fast-tracked in Gurgaon, India

[afransen]

The system is 105 km, 143 stations. The vendor is ULTra, the private developer is Fairwood Holdings, an infrastructure company that partnered with ULTra on the smaller Amritsar system under construction. Three phases will be built at the same time, to be completed in 2.5 years.

Fares are set to be INR 6/km or 0.11 CAD/km, and the expected ridership is expected to be 623,000 daily.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/India...xi-project-on-fast-track/Article1-882935.aspx


I don't know about you guys, but this is a huge deal. This system, if it gets off the ground, will prove beyond the doubt of any naysayer that PRT works in complex urban environments. And an entirely privately financed system that sells transport for 11 cents/km is going to be a very disruptive model.

 

[leopetr]

The system is 105 km, 143 stations. The vendor is ULTra, the private developer is Fairwood Holdings, an infrastructure company that partnered with ULTra on the smaller Amritsar system under construction. Three phases will be built at the same time, to be completed in 2.5 years.

Fares are set to be INR 6/km or 0.11 CAD/km, and the expected ridership is expected to be 623,000 daily.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/India...xi-project-on-fast-track/Article1-882935.aspx


I don't know about you guys, but this is a huge deal. This system, if it gets off the ground, will prove beyond the doubt of any naysayer that PRT works in complex urban environments. And an entirely privately financed system that sells transport for 11 cents/km is going to be a very disruptive model.

Or they could have waited a couple years and rolled out a fleet of Google robot cars instead for much more convenience and a lot less capital cost.

 

[afransen]

Or they could have waited a couple years and rolled out a fleet of Google robot cars instead for much more convenience and a lot less capital cost.

If only. Robocars will be great, someday. The technology is still in the prototype stage.

Unfortunately, robocars might not be the best technology for this application. This system is a feeder/district circulator for a subway station in an extremely dense city. This system will have an average travel speed of about 40 kph. Robocars won't be able to travel above the average speed on city streets, which is probably in the 10 kph range, at least not without dedicated infrastructure (at which point it becomes PRT). Also, this system will add to transport capacity, whereas robocars would work with existing road capacity. Also, $0.11/km is a pretty unbeatable fare. Not very likely that a gas-powered robocar will be able to operate for less than this. It might not even cover the cost of gasoline.

I'm also not sure that a fleet of robocars would be cheaper than this system. Robocars will probably cost $50,000+ when they first become commercially available. To handle this passenger volume, thousands of vehicles would be required. This system is priced in the range of $600 million. That would buy about 12,000 robocars, but no dedicated stations for boarding/alighting, facilities for storing or maintaining the vehicles when not in use, fueling/recharging facilities.

I can't say I understand the general hostility to PRT. It is a great, innovative transit technology that can help enhance the rest of the transit infrastructure and reduce auto dependency.

 

[mpd618]

I can't say I understand the general hostility to PRT. It is a great, innovative transit technology that can help enhance the rest of the transit infrastructure and reduce auto dependency.

It's a potential technology, unproven as urban transit. There is frequent hand-waving about how it can solve the same problems that conventional transit does, but little discussion of how much infrastructure PRT doing the work of conventional transit would require.

The system did open at Heathrow airport last year, and claims a grand total of 800 passengers a day. This project that you're linking to has been in the works for at least two years, and there just might be a few more bugs (or fundamental issues) in getting a system going that is several order of magnitude bigger than any existing implementation.

To many observers, myself included, PRT appears to be more branding than substance and thus is slotted firmly in the gadgetbahn file. At least when the purpose is urban transit, rather than a people mover.

 

[afransen]

On the bright side, with Amritsar and now Gurgaon, we shall soon see whether ULTra's PRT solution works in urban environments. I doubt a private infrastructure company would be willing to splash out $600 million of their own capital to develop a system that they are not very confident in. Don't forget that Amritsar, a smaller system from the same developer, is under construction now and due to open for service in 2014. It is intended to serve 100,000 daily riders.

I find the opposition questionable, when it is private capital being put at risk to build and operate these systems (in this case), when billions of dollars of public money are routinely sunk into transit that won't recover operating costs, much less capital costs. I don't see why the reaction should be anything other than delight that companies are actively investing in non-car transit infrastructure at no cost to the taxpayer. We should all be so lucky, and perhaps one day we will.


Regarding the Heathrow application, that is a pilot system, and operating well below the feasible capacity of ULTra's technology. I don't think you can malign the technology as a whole because the particular application has low demand. A similar argument could be used to critique some of the LRT systems deployed in the US.

 

[rbt]

On the bright side, with Amritsar and now Gurgaon, we shall soon see whether ULTra's PRT solution works in urban environments. I doubt a private infrastructure company would be willing to splash out $600 million of their own capital to develop a system that they are not very confident in.

Are you kidding? Lets look at how laser eye surgery clinics become profitable.

Person X borrows cash from bank Y. Person X knows they cannot pay the bills, waits the required amount of time to declare the company bankrupt, and bank Y auctions the equipment off to the sole bidder person X'. Person X' happens to be the son of Person X and hires person X to manage and run the business.

After a couple of rounds of bankruptcy the clinic now has all of the capital paid off (banks wrote it off) and gets enough in revenue to cover operating expenses.


11 cents a km in that part of the world is like us charging $1 per km. The only people paying $1 per km here are using Highway 407 for the large majority km's driven, and drive very few km's (high capital cost per km).

It's going to take a couple of rounds of bankruptcy for this thing to become profitable; which is likely possible in India as it is extremely new money and the banks won't be familiar with these kinds of tricks yet.


Private money being involved just means someone pulled a fast one on the entities loaning them money (investors or banks).

I'm glad it is being done just to advance the technology but it has a long long way to go before being proven viable.

I still think computerized and synchronized (cooperative) self-driving cars will be PRT first simply because they can make use of the legacy system of streets.

 

[afransen]

$600 million is a bit more than a laser eye surgery clinic. The due diligence is a different level.

11 cents (6 INR) /km is a lower fare than auto-rickshaws in the area. That so few are willing to pay that fare for transportation must explain why there are so few auto-rickshaws in India.

You can't make sweeping generalizations about what Indians can or cannot afford. Yes, there are hundreds of millions of very poor Indians, but there is also a significant middle class. You made up some PPP stats. From what I found, PPP of INR is something like 3x USD. So, 11 cents/km is like charging us 33 cents. A closer approximation. Most transit riders here pay that, and that is after a capital and operating subsidy.

You're alleging fraud by the company that is developing this project. I don't know how you could know that. It's certainly possible, but it is also possible that this project is economic. Again, we shall see. In the mean time, it is no skin off the nose of you or I, nor the Indian taxpayer. Perhaps some bondholders will take a haircut, or perhaps not. That's capitalism.

Robocars could and likely will be a great technology one day. There are still some problems with the car paradigm (robo- or manually controlled) that make it less than ideal for all applications: weight and energy consumption, costly infrastructure per unit capacity, land usage at grade, and a planar network topology that reduces capacity when traffic flows cross. Cars are also very capital intensive (if there are 3 million cars in the GTA and each one has a mean depreciated value of $10,000, that is $30 billion worth of capital tied up in vehicles alone). It's a fallacy to say that robocars don't require any infrastructure. We are constantly building or expanding road infrastructure to accommodate growth in car traffic. Robocars would not add much capacity in this application in Gurgaon as robocars would only be crowding out other surface transportation. Coordinated robocars providing substantially increased road capacity in urban environments is a technology that is actually unproven. There are a lot more variables than with PRT on dedicated ROWs, and a much more difficult engineering task.

 

[rbt]

$600 million is a bit more than a laser eye surgery clinic. The due diligence is a different level.

Not really. I personally watched billion dollar deals which turned out to have near zero value (SBC acquisition of InQuent for roughly $1B, sale 2 years later for roughly $10M because there wasn't actually any revenue).

The owner of InQuent was a damn good salesman and managed to pump up the value of assets which had no value.

AmDocs is another example I can use with much bigger numbers involved and a very similar result.


SBC, the company that bought AT&T, wasn't stupid, just disorganized (money/tech/legal guys didn't talk enough to eachother). Each group was impressed by their individual component but the entire picture didn't make any sense. The CEO and owner of InQuent somehow managed to slip that past the CEO and executives of SBC.

At some point the PRT transaction came down to someone managing to sell investors a good feeling.

Good feelings can come from a solid business case or it can be provided through other means (magic wordsmithing amongst other things). New money is particularly succeptible to wordsmithing because they haven't learned the tricks to watch for yet.


Canadians are significantly more conservative (likely to perform thorough due dilligence) than Americans. Due dilligence is expensive for all parties involved and can rapidly eat into profits.

I have no idea what the high-finance business culture in India is like but if it's anything like the Chinese markets then they can be sold just about anything (new money and very agressive risk-takers). Some win and some lose.


I'm not trying to knock PRT. I take issue with the thought that since it was expensive and invested in, that it must be a good investment.

$2M and $1B are basically the same as only someone with prior success or good luck can take part.

 

[afransen]

I can't (and didn't) discount the possibility that this project may not be successful. I think we ought to be able to agree that a large project that gets funded privately is more likely to be feasible than one that did not (unless investments are made randomly).

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, though. We'll have to see how it performs. I think the business model is sound in general, so it comes down to execution and their research into this particular market. I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt rather than assuming it is a stupid investment that somehow managed to get funded--that's just Occam's razor. I'm not familiar enough with the city to be able to pull apart their ridership assumptions. I think their system cost estimate is sound, from what I understand of ULTra, and their fare rate sounds a bit low to me.