Peter Yates

1/16/06

ORF 467

MercerCounty PRT Project

Introduction

MercerCounty is a diverse county. It contains dense urban regions, sparse farmlands, and everything in between. With a population of just over 350,000 and a land area of 228 square miles, it is among the larger and more populous counties in New Jersey. It has a very extensive education system, containing over one hundred schools serving over 50,000 students, as well as six colleges and universities. MercerCounty houses many business, from small retail stores to the office complexes of companies such as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merill Lynch, and McGraw-Hill. A Personal Rapid Transit system (PRT) would server MercerCounty well in providing its inhabitants access to the many places of employment and recreation within its borders, as well as those in the surrounding counties of New Jersey.

PRT Network Conceptual Design

The design that I have chosen to implement for the Mercer County PRT is one of a series of clockwise loops. Each of the intersection points of the loops represents an interchange. This allows for a change in direction between loops. Given this structure, all points will be accessible from every other point, and it minimizes the number of interchanges required to connect the whole system. The downside is that some rides may be longer than in an alternating grid based system.

The clockwise loops will be used extensively in urban and suburban areas, and when practical, in rural areas. In many situations, a single loop will suffice in rural towns. These loops are then connected to each other via two way interchange to interchange interconnections. This system may not be the optimal way to link rural communities, but it is the way that this network is constructed.

Actual PRT Construction

The diagram above is the ideal version of the PRT design. The implementation, however, was different; due to the preexisting roads and buildings, the PRT network has to weave around what is already there. The cost of buying properties and demolishing buildings would in most cases (especially in highly populated areas) exceed that of simply going around them. That being said, one of the rules to which I adhered in creating this network in MercerCounty was to stay on existing roads and empty land as much as possible. This is what the final network looks like for the county:

Construction / Quantity
Stations / 545
Interchanges / 432
Miles of track (Urban) / 312
Miles of track (Rural) / 134

The clockwise loop design is more visible in closer views of the network. For example, this suburban neighborhood features a large outer loop, with a smaller loop tangent to its inside lower edge:

In order for ORF467 students to continue making strides in the area of PRT development, they should be immersed in it while on campus. This is only possible if they are able to take the PRT frequently around campus. A layout such as the one below should work well, providing PRT stations at Nassau Hall, E-quad, Lot 23, the Dinky/Wawa, and the football stadium.

New Development

The Mercer County PRT network will not only improve travel times on existing trips, it will create new ones. People will be able to go from Point A to Point B seamlessly, without changing roads, hopping trains, or catching busses. The PRT network can also be expanded easily to accommodate and even encourage new developments. A development, whether it be a business district or housing, will be only as successful as it is accessible.

The northwestern section of MercerCounty is mainly farmland, but there are several small towns in the region that are linked only by two way interchange to interchange connections. There is plenty of acreage here for a new development, and PRT would make it accessible to everyone else in the county (and state). The new development would also serve as a hub to link the rural communities more comprehensively.

For MercerCounty, I have decided that a NASCAR track would be appropriate. After all, PRT will make automobiles obsolete, and auto racing will appeal to their nostalgic longings. Here is an image of the proposed site:

Costs

Constructing something as comprehensive as a PRT network will not be cheap. It will, however, be much more efficient (both cost and environmentally) and will pay for itself in both money saved over traditional transportation systems and convenience. A high level estimate of costs will include only the price of stations, interchanges, and miles of track. The table below summarizes these costs:

This works out to just under $5000 per person in Mercer County to construct. This may seem like a lot, but at present, the average American family spends almost $8,000 on transportation annually. This system would provide a significant number of trips daily. If 30% of the workers in MercerCounty use PRT to get to and from work each day, PRT will be used for 130,000 trips for them alone. If that number jumps to 50%, the number of worker trips goes to 216,000. PRT could also be used to replace school busses for the public school system. If 80% of children use the PRT to get to and from school, the PRT will serve 90,000 trips. This is 200,000 to 300,000 daily trips (almost entirely by automobile or bus) between workers and school children alone that are being handled by PRT.

Comparison to Last Year

Year / Stations / Miles of Track
2004-2005 / 586 / 369
2005-2006 / 545 / 445.8

This is a simple comparison between the number of stations and miles of track that I placed and those placed by the student who designed the PRT for MercerCounty last year. I have around forty fewer stations than he does, but I used roughly 25 more miles of track. It is interesting to note that, at least in this case, there seems to be a tradeoff between miles of track and the number of stations.

Improvements

  1. Linking Rural Towns

Right now, the rural towns are linked by long, highway-like two way interchange tracks. This provides connectivity to the network as a whole, but the cost may be too much. The new development helps to bridge some of distance and form the rural PRT network into some large loops, but there is still a lot of money being put out there (expensive rural track and stations) to serve not that many people. The PRT system should probably be implemented first in the heavy traffic areas (Trenton, Princeton, etc.) where the majority of the customers are, and if it catches on, it can then be expanded to cover the outer realms.

  1. Optimize Loops within Urban Areas and the Suburbs

The current loops of the PRT system in highly and moderately populated areas reflect what I considered to be neighborhoods or communities. There were many times that I simply guessed where the loop should cut off to limit its size, but this may not have corresponded with the actual neighborhood.

  1. Improve Population Data

For the populations at each station, I took the population per square mile in each township or borough and multiplied it by .2 miles squared (the area contained within a quarter mile radius of a station). I assumed that the populations were geographically uniformly distributed within the respective township/borough, but I know that this is not correct. More accurate data would allow for a much better gauge of how many stations to place in certain locations to prevent overcrowding.