Personal Rapid Transit One-Way Guideway Design

Why the one-way guideways? Two-way guideways are better and keep the travel time identical for both legs of a trip.

• PRT stations are far smaller than rail transit stations. Their small footprint means lower costs for each station, and less need to reduce station numbers.

• The fully elevated nature of the PRT station would allow little of the structure to be shared by both directions. Many dual direction stations would have to have stairways, elevators, and ticketing equipment on both sides of the station since customers cannot walk across the guideways and mid-platform stations will often be impractical.

• The small size of PRT guideways greatly reduces right of way costs, thus reducing the justification of using the two-way design.

• The one-way design allows over twice as much service area to be served by the system for much less than twice the costs. This occurs because the additional right of way costs are relativly small. Most of the costs are from guideways and stations that are already required for the dual-direction system design.

• The added ridership from the additional stations and service area is far greater than the number of people who won't use the system due to the small difference in travel times for the two legs of a commute.

While some cost savings could be obtained by dual-direction systems, it would come at the sacrifice of the ridership and revenue generated along the second guideway. This revenue is expected to be more than the costs of the additional right of way.