Overview
Windcheetah recumbent tricycle
I. Executive Summary
Embarrassing in its obviousness, promoting human powered transport is like promoting clean air and water, good food, health, exercise, and intelligence. Intrinsic to our well-being it is relatively simple to optimize. Machine assistance is minimal. Common sense and convenience is the natural framework.
With monorails proven safe and popular, scaled down hybrid human-electric agile monorails will conveniently speed travelers to their destinations at low cost, minimal energy, and no emissions. While many anticipate elevated systems as sheer fun, to counter the derisive fearful snorts of the unbelieving when it is mentioned that rails will have to be fifteen feet high to avoid trucks and buses, these systems are quite modest conveyances, easy to build completely safe, compared to high motorbike roller coasters, ski lifts, and cable cars, or large lumbering jets traveling above 30,000 feet at some 600 miles per hour carrying great masses of passengers, or hulking train stations, aloft 75 feet in the air, holding and swaying to the dynamic loads of many hundreds of tons of elevated subway cars barreling along, stopping and starting, and automobiles and trucks hurtling down heavily peopled streets or traveling at speeds greater than 65 mph on highways where all-too-often easy-to-occur human error or happenstance can be catastrophically lethal!
As co-conspirator with physicist Francis Crick in one of the great biological and technological breakthroughs of our time, James Watson expressed a somewhat blunt perspective of typical can-do mode:
Of course there were scientists who thought the evidence favoring DNA was inconclusive and preferred to believe that genes were protein molecules. Francis, however, did not worry about these skeptics. Many were cantankerous fools who unfailingly backed the wrong horses. One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
-- James D. Watson, The Double Helix, A Personal Account of the Discovery of THE STRUCTURE OF DNA, 1968, page 14.
In any case, when the additional costs are understood for accommodating oversize vehicles under all monorails all the time, certain adaptations for rails and vehicles can be planned and it would be a big advantage to have most monorails at eight feet though many travelers would undoubtedly miss the loftiness and vistas on the more scenic routes.
II. Problem Statement and Proposed Solutions
Sometimes a lot of power is just right. Sometimes 200 hp in a car is a lot better than 100. Sometimes even 1 hp gets a bicycle up the hill quite fast. Yet a bicycle can cruise along at 6 or 8 mph with less than 0.1 hp. That's part of the elegance of the bicycle, as an extremely efficient mode of transportation. Yet by using external sources of power, I can go uphill much faster than I can by pedaling my bike. The dollars per mile can drop way down, if I count my time at even $5 an hour.
- Pease Porridge: What’s All This Power Stuff, Anyhow? Bob Pease April 2005 Electronic Design
In 2004 dangerous transportation killed 1,493 people in New York State and injured many more in accidents at a cost of 19.45 billion dollars. Those killed can be as prominent as billionaire philanthropist Andrea M. Bronfman, knocked down in January 2006 by a livery cab making a turn on the East Side, or as little known as Victor Flores and Juan Angel Estrada, fifth-graders run over two years ago by a truck turning a corner in Downtown Brooklyn. While most human powered transport use is recreational much more would be serious travel if the roads were not so dangerous. This wastes billions of dollars by forcing people to travel by more expensive and difficult ways or not traveling at all.
This is the conundrum that an elevated small human-scale monorail solves allowing travel above cars, buses, trucks, and pedestrians. The vehicle easiest to implement is a recumbent bicycle locked to an adapter pallet sliding along a rail it cannot come off except by a special unlocking action. Restraining seatbelts secure passengers in seats to prevent falling off. Travel is in one direction on a rail. With the vehicle locked to the rail, it cannot fall over and it cannot run into another vehicle unless the other vehicle is directly ahead and going slower. Bumpers on the adapting pallets extend in front and back to cushion impacts.
Switching rails allows travelers to pass slower moving vehicles and people can exit the system by switching to an offloading rail. Using hybrid human-electric powering, people can peddle to power the vehicle themselves, use auxiliary power located in the pallet adapter or bicycle, or peddle and use auxiliary power at the same time to go faster and farther.
The rail should be modular, portable, and as light as possible. Since about three six-foot long recumbent bikes can fit on a twenty-foot length, structural costs are low. Going above buses and trucks it will have to be about fifteen feet high and eight feet high if it only has to go above people. Without people and traffic the rail can be much lower and less expensive. One goal is to have it easy enough to assemble that two people can put up a section of rail the length of a city block in several hours. A team of about 40 workers can put up one mile of rail overnight which might not be much different than Christos’ Gates installation in Central Park.
