Design of Personal Rapid Transit Circulator for Major Activity Center

Abstract

The design of a comprehensive mobility system for a suburban San Francisco, California, East Bay Area office park exposes a number of new transit circulator implementation challenges. Original system design perspectives are provided for many aspects. These include horizontal mixed use and how resident out-commuters will generate more trips than do employee in-commuters; line-haul transit capacity constraints that loom as an obstacle to rapid spread of personal rapid transit (PRT) circulators; PRT station placement challenges with office park superblocks; design methodology to allocate PRT stations to workers and residents; and ideal office park characteristics for PRT alignments. Also considered are problems with generating too much PRT circulator ridership (solved by semi-independent loops); multimodal transit hubs at the edges of the PRT alignment; PRT alignment style choices; and the need for folding grocery carts and other solutions when the car is left at home.