Alden staRRcar
The Alden staRRcar, short for "Self-Transport Road and Rail Car", was a personal rapid transit (PRT) system designed by William Alden in the 1960s. It originally envisioned small electrically powered cars suitable for short-distance trips at low speed within urban areas, which could optionally merge onto tracks that would provide power and guidance for high-speed travel over longer inter-city distances. It was one of the earliest dual-mode vehicles to be proposed, and one of the earliest to be actually built.
Original design
William Alden, a graduate of the Harvard Business School, started Alden Self-Transit Systems Corporation around 1955. His idea was to design a "dual-mode" transit system – small cars that operated like traditional electric cars when driven around town for short distances, but allowed long-distance travel via automated guideways that provided power. The vehicles were quite lightweight because they could only travel at low speeds when manually guided and didn't need full crash safety or large battery packs. On the guideways they travelled much faster; they were protected from collisions by the automated guideway, and conductors on the guideway provided the power needed for high speeds while also recharging the batteries for local travel at the destination. Alden envisioned guideways being built in place of the existing interstate roads, but the automatic guidance allowed for much shorter headways and thereby increased route capacity, reducing the need for multiple lanes.
Proposal for 'Expo 76' in Boston
In 1969, as the transportation system for the Boston's bid to host "Expo 76" for the United States Bicentennial, Alden Self-Transit Systems proposed a PRT system with 5,500 vehicles and 33 stations. Vehicles were 6 feet long, carried 6 passenger and ran at 15mph with 2,537 cars per guideway per hour. There were also 200 special purpose vehicles for police, medical and VIPs. System capacity was estimated at 360,000 passengers per hour. There were to be 6 route miles in a large, X-shaped network – but each route was composed of parallel guideways with the widest route being 70 feet across with 8 parallel vehicle paths. To speed loading and unloading stations would have had platforms that moved at 1.5mph to increase capacity. The largest central station was supposed to handle 133,100 passengers per hour. Stations would also have some stopping platforms. The design for the expo – to be built in Boston Harbour – was developed using the PRT system; however, it was never built as Boston lost the bid to Philadelphia.
Morgantown
Professor Samy Elias of the Industrial Engineering Department at West Virginia University in Morgantown had been pressing for the development of a PRT system for their campus since the late 1960s. Elias was able to obtain $50,000 from UMTA for a comparative study of three different types of PRT systems: Monocab, Dashaveyor and the Alden staRRcar. The staRRcar won the selection contest and the newly formed Department of Transportation (DOT) chose the Morgantown proposal as a testbed system. At the time the Apollo Program was winding down and Richard Nixon was in the process of extracting the country from the Vietnam War. There was considerable concern about the health of the aerospace industry, which would be losing two of its major funding sources at the same time. As a result, the newly formed Department of Transport was under intense pressure to build a working system before the elections of 1972.
After Morgantown
Interest in PRT systems "dried up" after Morgantown, due to cutbacks in federal funding and huge budget overruns in the Morgantown installation. Alden moved his company into automated machining systems, working with large companies like Corning. He sold this company to an employee in 1983. After a short time in retirement, Alden "got restless" and decided to re-enter the mass transit world. His latest company, Alden DAVe Systems ("Dual-mode Autonomous Vehicle"), is pitching a new dual-mode vehicle to local universities and as a transit system for a large movie studio in California. Unlike older systems, DAVe does not require a separate guideway for low-speed portions of the network and can self-guide amongst pedestrians.
