The first time I walked into the shop I looked at the rail and the first thing that came to mind was it was not particularly pleasing to look at. I then read sections from the previous two years on the rail design and I still don't know what they are going after. This is one of my largest concerns because they spent over two years on this design, and they went with it. In the 2014 report figure 3 shows a rail where the the shape seems to be completely closed off, if this is needed why should the entire rail system be designed such that it looks uniform? Our current design requires too many wheels, and a rail system, when designed with fail safes, is mechanically sound, but still looks incomplete.
Since we are designing a system for the public, why isn't it designed for the sake of public interest rather than 'lets see what we can pull off'? When I was in CE95 with professor Maaz, he once said "Today we can build bridges without supports, but we don't do it because it doesn't look good.. put some supports under there!". I'm paraphrasing of course, that was around three four years ago. But what he said still stands. Why are we still using this design if it doesn't really work?
After the first day in class I just thought of something else, the current track design can only go in two directions, last time I checked our streets were designed in a grid pattern meaning there are three directions in which we can go to. If we are going to use a similar system to our current VTA system, why not just use that? Because if we are going to make this more efficient we are going to need more rails built into the city, and that means we would need more options at intersections so a cart does not have to travel half a mile minimum in the wrong direction while it takes its fastest route. Another option would be to have less rail that would have to go through obscure locations so it gets to maximize efficiency, but this may also run into the problem of putting rail through someones backyard and this would not please the public.
This is one of my largest criticisms of this project so far. I understand that this is a big project, and one year and a new group is not going to get this idea to take off by the time were done but maybe we should stop, look around, and take a new step in the right direction, even if it means going backwards. Man if anyone reads this I am going to sound like such a jerk, but I feel for this project to actually work some things need to change. In my opinion, this rail design is more trouble than its worth. I guess that's the end of my rant, I hope I didn't offend anyone this early in the game.
