Urban Design Cities are our homes. Your neighborhood is part of a larger physical whole. How do you want it to fit together and interact with the larger metropolitan region and the world? We should design, manage and redevelop urban districts to be uplifting, durable, prosperous, healthful and attractive. To bring these goals into balance, a master plan with design guidelines is required. It should consider issues of density and building height and mass. It should assure adequate green space and easy pedestrian and vehicular circulation. Residential and common areas should be protected from heavy traffic. Parking should be thoughtful and tended. Local circulation should be established, and APMs can be incorporated to great advantage.

Station Integration

While it is guideways that often receive the most attention for urban design, it is the conceptualization and realization of stations that is more important. Where is service needed? Where is it desirable? How should a necessary number of stations be configured? How many passengers will need to be accommodated at each station?

Good design makes for aesthetics, durability, prosperity and unity.

Then there are guideways.

A sensitive design should be guided by sound technical guidelines.
(courtesy of Roxanne Warren, NYC Architect)

Analysis of shadows, wind, and vibration should be made. Detailing of the guideways should avoid surfaces that lend to drippings and droppings. If you are considering PRT, the design paradigm is more interesting and flexible, both for guideways and stations.

Underground guideways can allow innovative
station configuration at ground level.

If elevated guideways are unacceptable, the obvious but costly answer is to put them underground. If such funds are securable, your design problem becomes quite interesting. With underground guideways, stations can be placed at higher sidewalk level. This makes passenger access easy and comfortable. An added operating benefit is that vehicles slow upwards upon approaching a station platform, and then accelerate downwards upon launch with the energy-saving help of gravity.

Each station requires careful design to fit it into its unique context. Station land-take or footprint depends on the selection of technology and capacity requirements. For first-cut estimates of area requirements, the following figures may be useful. Stations in small-capacity APMs typically measure 10 x 4.5 meters. Moderate capacity systems require larger station dimensions: 25 x 12 meters. Driverless metros of high line-haul capacity have stations that measure about 110 x 19 meters. These are rough and flexible guidelines.

There are many options for guideway placement.

APMs can be run through buildings instead of along streets.

APMs can be arcaded by buildings,
and themselves provide shade and shelter.

Guideways Anywhere

Another design strategy is to integrate guideways into and through buildings. Small APM guideway dimensions and low vibration and noise levels allow this. If your project is in a district possessing a grid of rectangular blocks, an elevated guideway crossing a street -- as opposed to running its length -- is a visual event instead of block-long bulk. A street-spanning guideway with vehicles passing frequently and silently can positively enliven the urban environment and help create a mid-block activity node and sense of place.

A variation on this is to incorporate elevated guideways into building arcades or as stand-alone structures that provide sun and weather protection.

Another strategy for guideway placements is to run them in a protected band at ground level, perhaps slightly depressed into a channel. Although street crossings must be elevated or underground, at-grade stretches are a low-cost option. Fencing and border landscape can be designed to discourage intrusion by animals and trespassers as well as enhance the visual experience of those passing by.

Elegance

A structural guideway strategy deploys truss sections made of steel tubes that have a light, lace-like appearance able to support the weight of full vehicles. Doppelmayr has designed and built this kind of guideway infrastructure. One installation is at the Mandalay Bay-Excalibur casino on the Las Vegas Strip. The other is on the outskirts of the Byzantine splendors of Venice, Italy, to go into service next year. Still another is offered by the Austrian start-up company Coaster.

Materials for APM guideways range from steel tubes, beams and sidings to concrete and composite panels. Sections can be assembled in factories or off-site. It is up to your creativity to specify pleasant guideways that blend with or complement their urban context. Material, color and detailing should be sensitive to existing and future environments.

PRT guideways are considerably smaller than those of other APMs because PRT vehicle loads are lower. Their turning radius can also be tighter and higher gradients can be negotiated. These factors give great flexibility to delicately position guideways into the variety of urban contexts of your project.

The Advanced Transit Association (ATRA) has organized a seminar of the urban design issues surround PRT. It will explore issues of density, public spaces, building massing, integration of stations and guideways into buildings, and service parameters at a seminar on August 22 at Harvard University. To learn more and register, visit www.advancedtransit.org.

Lace-like Doppelmayr guideway.