We have known for decades that our dollars spent on imported fossil fuels goes to a select few in the Middle East. Yet in a bizarre twist of fate, some of those dollars are going towards the creation of a “green city” in the United Arab Emirates.
Masdar City, Abu Dhabi’s carbon neutral experiment, is one step towards the development of a post petroleum city that has been funded in part by filling up your gas tank.
While its nearby rival Dubai has gone through boom and bust in becoming a 21st century Babylon, Abu Dhabi has contemplated life in a post-petroleum world. Flush with money, Abui Dhabi’s leadership is generously spending lavish sums on technologies and contraptions that most of us would find wasteful, kooky, or just impractical.
One of Masdar’s innovations is the Personal Rapid Transit (or PRT)
podcar. Looking like a distant relative of R2-D2, the cars, which have no driver and can hold four people, will complement Masdar’s
public transportation network. The podcars will run underground along paths resembling a grid, and will allow passengers to get within 100 meters of any destination. In a perfect world, no trip would be longer than about 2.5 kilometers, and passengers would never wait longer than 3 minutes for a car.
For now only a handful of podcars operate between
stops that are about a quarter mile apart. The system comes across as part bumper car, part light rail. For now the system is very expensive, but as battery technology improves and becomes more scalable, watch for these to gain traction in new developments, universities, or business campuses. In the meantime, they are quite fun. Welcome to the future of
transport.
[...] Jan 04, 2012 No Comments by Leon Kaye With all the attention that Abu Dhabi scores for its Masdar project and the emergence of Qatar on the sustainability scene, there is another emirate that has [...]
[...] in which I am staying. Dubai and the United Arab Emirates ooze wealth, audacity, ambition and confronting the impossible. Stay tuned for more observations of a fascinating place. The visits to the coast, business centers [...]
[...] here on a daily basis. Masdar’s channeling of traditional Arabian architecture, its underground personal rapid transport (“PRT”) podcars and reliance on solar energy–not Abu Dhabi’s abundant supply of [...]