African Alternative Technology appointed as Fastransit’s exclusive agent for the Southern African Development Community
Fastransit is a packet-switching transportation system that uses permanent magnets and linear motors to move freight, passengers, and vehicles over dense urban networks or high-speed inter-city routes. Fastransit does not require new rights of way, because it is fully inter-operable with existing steel rails or roads, and a single lane can carry five lanes of trucks and cars. It is the most energy-efficient land transportation system (BTU/ton-mile).
Fastransit looks like a railroad, with thin rails of magnets set at a two meter gauge on rail ties, on gravel, or embedded in a roadbed. The rails react to larger magnets underneath the vehicles to create permanent levitation – which means no ground contact, ever – and requires no power at all. Permanent levitation allows for instant, road-like lane changes, via electronic signals, creating a “packet-switching” network with many times the effective capacity of a circuit-switching steel-wheel rail line. High-efficiency linear motors in each vehicle allow for point-to-point routing of individual vehicles – no need for cars to run “in train” or make unnecessary stops. The result is a superior value proposition for a variety of markets:
• Trucks and intermodal freight can make just-in-time deliveries over a congestion-free “electric highway” for $1.50/mile – less than the current cost per mile of trucking.
• Port facilities can increase their throughput, offering just-in-time deliveries from zero-emission docksides to intermodal yards or stations near the customer’s location.
• Mass transit riders can have faster, more frequent rush hour service and on-demand point-to-point service at off hours, for the same cost as current mass transit systems.
• Inter-city passengers and cars can travel up to 600 miles faster than by flying, for less than the cost of driving – $.20/mile for cars, pennies per mile for passengers.
Fastransit can offer these services because its capital costs are similar to a railway’s: the magnets cost $2.5M/mile, and site costs are less than those for steel rails because the vehicle’s weight is spread over long “skis”, reducing ground pressure to 0.0007% of that of a conventional rail car. Fastransit’s operating costs are much, much lower than those of rail or roads borne vehicles, or even other maglev systems. Prototypes indicate that moving a full, 68,000lb. freight container at 50mph uses about 0.5kWh/mile – at 10 cents/kWh, five cents per mile.
The Fastransit technology was developed by LaunchPoint Technologies in the United States, an established technology incubator founded by the University of California, and has been validated in two prototypes and other devices using the same proprietary systems. The technology is protected by dozens of claims in two issued patents and one pending application.
This article was originally posted on Southern Africa Business Communities
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