InTranSys - My Great Uncle's Plan For Mass Transit

[willtel]

Growing up in the 1980's I was always somewhat mystified by my great uncle who lived in Colorado. I had only met him once or twice that I could remember and everything I heard about him always sounded fantastic compared to my simple life in Georgia. By the time I was old enough to remember stories he had traveled around the world several times on photography expeditions and had started a chapter of the Audubon Society in his area. He was highly educated and was the first to observe and document several bird behaviors although his findings have been difficult to document.

I also heard stories of his plan to revolutionize mass transit. At the time I had no idea what his idea was, my father just told me he had an idea to eliminate Interstate highways in urban areas and didn't know any other details.

About a year ago my grandmother passed away and she was in possession of all of my uncle's belongings. Shortly after my parents made a trip out to Colorado to settle her estate and returned with thousands of my uncle's 35mm slides and some presentation materials for his mass transit idea. Using those and an old newspaper article I have been able to piece together what his plan was.

He and his research partners called it InTranSys - Integrated Transit System. It is basically an elevated train-like system that allows traditional automobiles to be loaded onto platforms and travel nearer to their destination where they can then be driven on traditional surface streets. It also had the means to accommodate passenger compartments like a bus and cargo carriers to move goods in an automated fashion.

His idea was supposed to automate traffic flow while reducing our needs for fuel and greatly reduce costs for infrastructure construction and maintenance. I have loads of materials about the finances and efficiency of everything but I have only included the basic concept stuff here. I thought it was interesting that he was working on reducing traffic and our needs for oil and so long ago and that in the past 30 years nothing has really changed.

Thoughts?

from willtel on Vimeo.

ITS11 by willtel, on Flickr


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ITS12 by willtel, on Flickr


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ITS10 by willtel, on Flickr


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ITS3 by willtel, on Flickr

[Kraftwerk]

utopian coolness!

[john70t]

That's a neat idea from a innovation standpoint, but as always the implementation would be difficult: A line of individual modules running 60-150mph in close proximity is vulnerable to a single mishap (bearing failure, trash out the window, etc.).
In an age of Large Hadron Colliders and supercomputers, trains are still colliding....

It's a great idea, similar to loading boxcars and ships "on the fly".
Hope it has it's place in history.