UST: News

Today we come to the work place already tired and get back home even more tired. Almost every day a resident of a large city, and it is about 50% of the population of any industrialized country, spends almost half of his free time on the road. Standing in traffic jams and breathing in dirty air, taken into the interior of a vehicle from the asphalt surface, or, being in a crowd of such poor fellows as himself, stepping on his feet and sneezing right in his face, in subway cars and suburban trains, in buses, trams and trolleybuses. That does not add him health. On the contrary, studies have shown that, for example, you can stay only 3 seconds without harm to health in the Moscow subway, the best in the world. It is because of heavy noise, strong electromagnetic fields, claustrophobia, excessive crowding of people in a confined underground space, which is not designed for these purposes. After all, man is not created to stay underground and used the underground space for the burial of the dead over the millennia.

Even the most luxurious personal car does not add transport comfort, as it also stands in traffic jams, makes the driver (and passengers) nervous and brings about stresses and hypodynamia. Including the necessity to analyze tensely and every second the situation on the road and adjacent territory to drive the car safely.

Man's physiological features also create transport fatigue; his vestibular apparatus tolerates badly frequent brakings and accelerations, vibration, shakes and noise. Besides, passenger's fatigue depends not only on the modes of vibrations of the car body (acceleration and frequency) but also on the duration of such accelerations impact. For example, the effect of accelerations of 2 m/c², which is a usual thing for automobile and railway transport, is harmless for health only within 15 minutes.

To determine the level of transport comfortability a comprehensive criterion - smoothness of movement W - was defined. It takes into account both acceleration rate of such vibrations of and their frequency. At W=2 passenger's sensations will be as if he is not driving at the speed of 500 km/h, but is sitting on a sofa at home. That will be just the indicator corresponding to comfortability of motion in a high-speed unibus running along a rail-string overpass, built by SkyWay technologies. Comfort will be added by the feeling of a free flight, which everyone of us experienced in his most lucid dreams, - at the height of a bird' flight with a fabulous view of surrounding scenery.

The features ensuring high comfortability of passenger transportation on the SkyWay track network are:

high straightness and rigidity of track (constructional and dynamic unevenness is not more than 10 mm on a 50 m span), softness of suspension (static motion is not less than 300 mm) and low noise (maximum 50 decibel) while running;

low rates of acceleration and breaking of rolling stock (up to 0.5 m/c²) due to absence of obstacles for traffic;

absence of traffic jams, crossroads, traffic lights, crosswalks and dangerous sections with low speed of movement;

automated control system and lack of dangerous and unreliable transport interchanges;

short time of waiting and travelling as well as possibility of a "door-to-door" ride when using private individual and "family" rail cars.

The direction of development will be determined by the SkyWay, not by public transport.