Perhaps the problem can be solved if we just have the first rider who volunteers drive the bus until they get to their destination. This would basically cut the cost of bus service in half. Car rental companies already make money renting their cars to random people (of dubious and uncertain driving ability) and how hard can driving a bus really be?
Sort of the Lime scooter model of public transport.
I've always liked the notion of gondola-like aerial transit, for many of the reasons you have cited. I'd be interested in hearing about the noise situation; a ski lift type of operation (with the car clamped on to the cable) is pretty quiet except at the towers, whereas I would expect an annoying hum of high-speed-small-wheels-on-twisted-steel-cable throughout this system. Probably no more than road traffic, but if it were at the second and third floor level it could be annoying to neighbours. And the visual impact of the towers would also be an issue with the public in some corridors (unlike the image you've used, which shows cables magically hanging from a single overhead gantry).
Like many of these tech-focused transit solutions, a major issue with procurement and municipal implementation is its unique and commercially proprietary nature. Municipalities know how to build and maintain roads and bus systems, and they don't need some high-tech company from California to do that. They can have a competitive consulting process to create the standard design using off-the-shelf components, hire any number of local construction firms to build and maintain the infrastructure, buy vehicles through competitive bidding, and pay (unionized) staff to operate things. Much the same goes for railways. Governments are terrified of getting locked into some (foreign) private company's proprietary system, where they have little control over incident response, spare parts, operating knowledge, and the operating company's financial stability and longevity. And unions hate this stuff because driverless systems "take away" operating jobs. You need a visionary government to commit to something like this (e.g. Ontario with Skytrain) and even then, the potential for success seems limited, because in any different market you need another government to have the same willingness to leap into the void. And so on and so on in every market, until it becomes a standard option for everywhere. Just look at how long it has taken for congestion charging to become "normal" (i.e. decades, and not yet) despite its compelling merits and proven implementability.
Governments are also obsessed with having competitive bids and demonstrating "best value" to their taxpayers, so they have no procurement mechanism to handle a unique or non-competitive piece of infrastructure, particularly a big-ticket city-shaping item. When I worked with the City of Toronto, we were approached occasionally with something like this, and we simply could not handle it on the procurement side because there was no competitor to choose from.
And the PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) aspect of it is most appealing; it is kind of amazing that so little progress has been made on that front over the decades (hence Uber, Lyft, and taxis picking up the slack). You may know that a cool but relatively unknown rail-based quasi-PRT system has been operating - in West Virginia, of all places - for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Transit
Your points are well taken, Steve... as you know, the whole Sidewalk Labs misadventure came to grief in large part because of municipal inflexibility. Against this, while roads-and-buses are open non-proprietary technologies, rail of any sort is not; there is a small market but not a very competitive one, which is one reason for LRT debacles we saw in Ottawa and we're seeing now in Toronto. Relative to LRT or heavy rail, Swyft seems to be a lower-cost, lower-risk approach, which I hope gives them runway to build up markets and establish credibility.
Generally, no; they charge tenants enough in rent to more than offset the cost of elevator operation and maintenance (and the capital debt to install it in the first place). The analogy does not readily extend itself to transit... the elevators only benefit the occupants of the building, so it's obvious who should pay for it. Transit systems benefit far more people, and far more diffusely, which is one reason the Endless Emergency persists.
Perhaps the problem can be solved if we just have the first rider who volunteers drive the bus until they get to their destination. This would basically cut the cost of bus service in half. Car rental companies already make money renting their cars to random people (of dubious and uncertain driving ability) and how hard can driving a bus really be?
Sort of the Lime scooter model of public transport.
I've always liked the notion of gondola-like aerial transit, for many of the reasons you have cited. I'd be interested in hearing about the noise situation; a ski lift type of operation (with the car clamped on to the cable) is pretty quiet except at the towers, whereas I would expect an annoying hum of high-speed-small-wheels-on-twisted-steel-cable throughout this system. Probably no more than road traffic, but if it were at the second and third floor level it could be annoying to neighbours. And the visual impact of the towers would also be an issue with the public in some corridors (unlike the image you've used, which shows cables magically hanging from a single overhead gantry).
Like many of these tech-focused transit solutions, a major issue with procurement and municipal implementation is its unique and commercially proprietary nature. Municipalities know how to build and maintain roads and bus systems, and they don't need some high-tech company from California to do that. They can have a competitive consulting process to create the standard design using off-the-shelf components, hire any number of local construction firms to build and maintain the infrastructure, buy vehicles through competitive bidding, and pay (unionized) staff to operate things. Much the same goes for railways. Governments are terrified of getting locked into some (foreign) private company's proprietary system, where they have little control over incident response, spare parts, operating knowledge, and the operating company's financial stability and longevity. And unions hate this stuff because driverless systems "take away" operating jobs. You need a visionary government to commit to something like this (e.g. Ontario with Skytrain) and even then, the potential for success seems limited, because in any different market you need another government to have the same willingness to leap into the void. And so on and so on in every market, until it becomes a standard option for everywhere. Just look at how long it has taken for congestion charging to become "normal" (i.e. decades, and not yet) despite its compelling merits and proven implementability.
Governments are also obsessed with having competitive bids and demonstrating "best value" to their taxpayers, so they have no procurement mechanism to handle a unique or non-competitive piece of infrastructure, particularly a big-ticket city-shaping item. When I worked with the City of Toronto, we were approached occasionally with something like this, and we simply could not handle it on the procurement side because there was no competitor to choose from.
And the PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) aspect of it is most appealing; it is kind of amazing that so little progress has been made on that front over the decades (hence Uber, Lyft, and taxis picking up the slack). You may know that a cool but relatively unknown rail-based quasi-PRT system has been operating - in West Virginia, of all places - for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Transit
Your points are well taken, Steve... as you know, the whole Sidewalk Labs misadventure came to grief in large part because of municipal inflexibility. Against this, while roads-and-buses are open non-proprietary technologies, rail of any sort is not; there is a small market but not a very competitive one, which is one reason for LRT debacles we saw in Ottawa and we're seeing now in Toronto. Relative to LRT or heavy rail, Swyft seems to be a lower-cost, lower-risk approach, which I hope gives them runway to build up markets and establish credibility.
Do skyscrapers lose money on every elevator ride?
Generally, no; they charge tenants enough in rent to more than offset the cost of elevator operation and maintenance (and the capital debt to install it in the first place). The analogy does not readily extend itself to transit... the elevators only benefit the occupants of the building, so it's obvious who should pay for it. Transit systems benefit far more people, and far more diffusely, which is one reason the Endless Emergency persists.