People Movers can be a good solution.
I remember looking at a map of the Singapore MRT as a kid and wondering what the strange carbon copy lines in the northeast of the city state were.
When I eventually realized they were automated people movers, I was well into my “transit phase”, and the decision seemed incredibly silly. Low-capacity transit service can easily be provided by buses or light rail, so why would you ever build an airport people mover for what is essentially a local transit problem?
I think the attitude I had at the time was grounded in a few things that I think a lot of people believe:
The only major modes a city should use are urban tram, bus, and train.
If your destination does not justify a direct metro connection ,then a tram or bus is the next best thing.
Transit systems should be optimized for operators, not passenger experience, so that operators can run a better system more easily and less expensively.
But the issue is, transit, especially transit designed to centre the user experience is not quite so simple. There are far more modes — high-speed, regional, suburban, and metro rail, which can all be blended together into other hybrid modes, and tram-style vehicles can be used on everything from a suburban rail type system to a metro.
Not all destinations can also be fit within such a simple system of requirements that point to one mode or another purely based on passenger demand. Reliability, travel time, frequency and passenger experience are all huge drivers behind transit use, and we should not be dismissing these elements that lie orthogonal to the mode choice for a particular route — not to mention the route in question and environmental constraints.
The final issue is that sometimes transit is expensive to build or operate, and that’s okay — as long as the benefits are commensurate. Suburban subway extensions to transit dead zones in the US are often high-cost, low-benefit, and thus don’t make sense, while a project like Crossrail might cost on the same order of magnitude as much (which is astonishing, but I digress) and be a good project because it has immense benefit. Similarly, sometimes a more expensive mode — be it capital cost intensive or operating cost — is worth spending money on.
Generally, I think transit problems need to be broken down along their major features — capacity, alignment, network structure — and then we can find a particular solution that best matches needs across all of those dimensions. And sometimes, that solution is a “people mover”.
I recently did a video on Rennes, whose metro system perfectly explains why things are not so simple. Rennes probably couldn’t afford or justify a “heavy metro”, but had it built a tram system instead, the transit service and outcomes would have been very different. That’s not to say they would necessarily be worse, but they would certainly be different, and that would have implications for the way the city develops.
The obvious criticism to make for systems such as those in Singapore and Rennes is that they rely on proprietary technology that makes them more expensive and potentially risky. This is valid, but given the large number of rubber-tire people movers of the three main varieties — Alstom Bombardier Innovia, Siemens VAL, Mitsubishi Crystal Mover — that exist around the world, it seems unlikely that vehicles for any particular system would ever be all too hard to come by. Better yet, as CBTC signalling systems have become more developed, it also seems possibly to couple different traction technology with an independent signalling system, reducing vendor lock-in.
What’s better is that the Hitachi’s driverless metro technology used in Taipei, Copenhagen, Milan, and soon Toronto, can be equipped with trains small and flexible enough to provide a similar service to the rubber-tired systems (albeit probably not quite as flexible), while still using bog standard steel wheel-on-steel rail trains. There’s actually a women’s university in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (the world’s largest women’s university) that uses two-car Hitachi trains to shuttle students and faculty around its campus with a complex automated people mover-like system with a number of different routes, and with full air conditioning!
At the end of the day, any system is going to need to rely on a manufacturer to produce its trains, but if worst comes to worst, Taipei shows that alternative rolling stock manufacturers can usually step in and build to an existing specification. (Taipei bought Bombardier rolling stock for its VAL-powered Wenhu line).
Such solutions are obviously not inexpensive, but they do have real value where they can be implemented. A people mover is going to almost always be more comfortable and reliable than a bus or perhaps even a tram, and it may well have lower operating costs if demand is high enough too.
In North America and Europe, people movers have traditionally been limited mostly to airports, but this is one (of many) place(s) where we should be learning from Asian cities that are replete with people movers (and enhanced pedestrian connections with covered walkways, moving sidewalks, and escalators that play a similar quality-of-life enhancing role).
People movers are often good for getting people around all kinds of big sites: From exhibition and recreational areas like Odaiba in Tokyo, to housing estates like those served by the Pujiang line in Shanghai, or the BTS Gold Line in Bangkok that connects to the ICONSIAM mall. In Macau, the entire “LRT” system will be built using Crystal Mover technology (the trains have what are supposedly the widest doors in the world).
So why are they well suited? Well for one, such systems can operate incredibly flexibly. Given their automation they can quickly ramp service up or down (say when a major event is happening or a concert lets out) and operate 24 hours a day — which is particularly useful for what are rarely commuter-oriented services. The small light trains also mean that routes can be built elevated without giant structures being required, and can sometimes even reuse existing structures. Since these systems often have platform screen doors and passengers don’t really see the trains, they also end up feeling a lot like the modern metro trains that often operate in the same cities.
People movers can also have extremely flexible alignments, owing to the light and often rubber tire-equipped vehicles that can handle super tight corners and climb steep hills. This makes them well-suited to being quickly retrofitted into an existing urban environment above ground.
Now of course, people movers should not be a crutch that replaces a more logical transit solution — for example, a linear transfer onto a people mover should generally just be a metro line extension (or a major facility located along a metro line cough cough LA) — even perhaps operating with shorter trains and with a cross-platform transfer such as with some lines in Madrid; and airport people movers which connect a mainline to a major airport probably should be mainline diversions. But, for serving a big mall, or a large inaccessible housing development, or a campus, people movers can be swell.
Thank you for reading RMTransit. Feel free to share this post with anyone who loves public transport!
ncG1vNJzZmiqlZqwprnAq6uipl6owqO%2F05qapGaTpLpwvI6pnKionJp6rrvVnqmsZZOWu26uxGaYZp%2BfpLFuv86lrK2hn6M%3D