Solar Powered Mining and Logistics by Futran Milotek Swenson Solar

100% Solar Powered Mining and Logistics is market-ready through Futran, Milotek, and Swenson Solar.

The 1 km oval test track has proven the mechanics and control system for mining and logistics.

This half-megawatt Solar Canopy has proven performance over a decade.   

Transportation Systems Engineering

System Engineering: Decision Making in Systems Engineering and Management

Gregory S. Parnell, Ph.D., Editor
Patrick J. Driscoll, Ph.D., Editor
Dale L. Henderson, Ph.D., Design Editor
2011

"In fact, one of the most significant failings of the current U.S. transportation system is that the automobile was never thought of as being part of a system until recently. It was developed and introduced during a period that saw the automobile as a standalone technology largely replacing the horse and carriage. So long as it outperformed the previous equine technology, it was considered a success. This success is not nearly so apparent if the automobile is examined from a systems thinking perspective. In that guise, it has managed to fail miserably across a host of dimensions. Many of these can be observed in any major US city today: oversized cars and trucks negotiating tight roads and streets, bridges and tunnels incapable of handling daily traffic density, insufficient parking, poor air quality induced in areas where regional air circulation geography restricts free flow of wind, a distribution of the working population to suburban locations necessitating automobile transportation, and so on. Had the automobile been developed as a multilateral system interconnected with urban (and rural) transportation networks and environmental systems, U.S. cities would be in a much different situation than they find themselves in today.

What is important here is not that the automobile could have been developed differently, but that in choosing to design, develop and deploy the automobile as a stand alone technology, a host of complementary transportation solutions to replace the horse and buggy were not considered.

Envisioning Solar Skyways in Silicon Valley

At the request of the City of San José's Department of Transportation, the General Transportation Fund, Rodzmas, INIST, Spartan Superway, Southern Illinois University, and Swenson Solar have collaborated to present a vision for Solar Skyways in Silicon Valley.

We envision an unobtrusive guideway above the streets with small podcars for you and your family, friends, or colleagues. We offer to liberate the landscape at street level for people, pets, flowers, and sidewalk cafes.

Riding high above the streets!

With many stations, small and large, we can get you there quickly, right where you want to go.

Station at the Shark Tank

Authorized riders will be able to take a podcar right to their office or high rise apartment building. With offline stations, folks en route to other destinations will go right past the building without stopping.

Station on the upper deck of a Landmaker highrise

Where freeways have cut through neighborhoods, separating former neighbors, podcars can restore connectivity without the expense of high overpasses.

Getting around town at night, riding under the freeway

This map shows how the podcar network navigates the streets to quickly get you to your destination.

Navigating the maze so you can slip under the freeway

Though it's not the first choice, where at-grade barriers are too daunting, it is after all possible to build the guideway over freeways.

Going higher and higher to cross over the freeway

Automated cars invading our cities, creating even more congestion, noise, and danger at every turn? Or a smart city restored for people -- the technology for our transportation system to rise above the streets is now at hand -- and the choice is ours again.

Our formal presentations to the City of San José Department of Transportation can be seen here:

• General Transportation Fund
• Spartan Superway
• Southern Illinois University 
  

 Stay tuned for more!

The Superway | Daily Planet

Soon to exhibit at the annual Maker Faire in San Mateo, the Spartan Superway team is in the news!



Even though big cities have rideshare programs, buses, and trains, we all know it can still be hard to get to your destination. Enter the Spartan Superway from the engineer students at San Jose University! Daily Planet airs weeknights at 7E/4P only on Discovery Canada!

The Urge to Green

Design professionals recognize the sterility of the modern city; they want to embrace the natural world's appeal. And yet it is so hard for them to challenge the dominant species –  not humans but the automobile. Their street is incomplete without cars at grade.

Student Landscape Architecture • one of 88 designs

So instead of inexpensively transferring mobility services to a narrow guideway above the ground, Mexican designers here have created a costly walkway for people which would be safe – and accessible at grade – resulting in pedestrians still subordinate to the automobile.

Mexico City’s busiest avenue returning to residents as a stunning elevated public park
also
YouTube Animation

Even where natural spaces are envisioned for the street at grade, designers still feel the necessity to create intersections between people and cars. (Note the street at the center.)

Hammarby, Sweden

Reclaiming streets

I transcribed part of a video I saw today, to bring to light one of the most fascinating benefits offered by podcars for urban living. 

Background

When this Southeast Asian fishing village and trading post became independent in 1965, the founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew committed to transforming Singapore from "mud flats to metropolis" in 10 years. It came to pass, not the least by "reclaim[ing] land in a useful way." With a density of 8,000 people per square kilometer on a small island, land management is indeed crucial.

Rethinking Urban Infrastructure: Global Perspective (Video)

Fast forward to the present day and let's find out what's in store for Singapore.

Now mobility we touched on very briefly, but we have the same demographic as other countries. We have a limited amount of road surface and a limited amount of housing area so we have to prioritize housing because that's the way things are.

And so we'd like to build fewer roads going forward, and in fact have started to build almost no new roads and in fact all of the money is going into public infrastructure – more underground tunnels and so on.

But what we need to do is rethink the whole movement of people – not simply building more buses on the road – because that just keeps the congestion high.

Now this is a picture which we haven't shown publicly very often which is the Land Transport Authority in Singapore, the government agency with whom we partner, is thinking through a multilevel platform in Singapore that would allow several things to occur.

So if you can kind of read it from the bottom up, the underground system or mass rapid transit which is in place today and continues to expand. Then there is a level which would be primarily for goods delivery and freight and trying to keep that out of people's way. And so some of that would be autonomous, ideally more and more autonomous.

You go up a level and you have some of the last mile autonomous pods that would allow people to go from a central point to their final destination (love for more of that to be electric) and then on top what is currently a paved road surface would be reclaimed and thought of as parkland and areas in which there would be a quality of life because nobody wants to live in an increasingly dense environment in which you simply survive until you get home and so from this perspective we want to reclaim land.

So Singapore already has a high rate of trees, and planting and gardens but we want to make it more, and it's also a green aspect, which is of course the more we can do, the more we can contribute positively to the climate issue.

So we think of this as: We have to ... and so we will.

Steve Leonard, Executive Deputy Chairman
Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore

Podcars

Well, Steve, your heart's in the right place. We do want "a quality of life," and I appreciate that you pointed out the obvious – that current city streets can't possibly deliver "a quality of life," period. 

With a couple of simple steps, you can have this now in Singapore at perhaps 5% or 10% of the cost and 1% of the aggravation that your Land Transport Authority is contemplating:

• Establish a podcar network above the streets
• Keep the sidewalks intact 
• Jackhammer the pavement – except for a bike path meandering through the middle.
• Add soil, then plant trees, shrubs, flowers, and lawns where cars used to transgress

What will you have now?

• Instead of dark tunnel walls, podcar passengers will have a view of the natural landscape.
• Instead of spending their days in unhealthy bleak tunnels, commercial personnel will load their wares on freight carrying pods that will enter seamlessly into and out of buildings.
• Likewise, recycling will be handled in recycling pods equally accessible. 
• Construction machinery and objects to be carried that are too large for pods will utilize the bike paths, transiting through the landscape at sub-lethal speeds (5-10 km/hr).
• And then...

Join the solarevolution and celebrate "a quality of life!"

Spartan Superway Academic Program Basic Class Objectives

This slideshow explains the basic objectives of the Spartan Superway Academic Program.

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