Accelerated Evolution of Transit through Scheduling and Ground Effect Flight Technology

The scheduling of highspeed single railcar vehicles on railway tracks can be introduced without disruption of active services alongside immediate benefits in reduced transit times and associated increased ridership. Incremental improvement of existing services would allow new technology to be demonstrated at high benefit and low cost, including new paths of transit evolution to ultimately exceed advanced transit concepts considered in recent decades. A new technology referred to as ground-effect flight transit (GEFT) is positioned as a vehicle-based technology capable of enacting this low-risk evolution, starting with improving transit capabilities on existing infrastructure. Ground-effect flight is inherently multimodal, using a cushion of air for seamless transition between highway/railway/waterway corridors as enabled by aerodynamic navigation. A series of refereed publications document the technology and computational studies on GEFT technology which describe how oncoming air’s velocity can be transformed into aerodynamic lift at high efficiency versus the low efficiency of hovercraft approaches. This paper describes and simulates scheduling methods which enable incremental transit evolution to exceed new-infrastructure high-cost alternatives capabilities, such as maglev and hyperloop. Scheduling studies include the simulation of service at seven sequential rail stations where GEFT service may be provided in parallel with current subway train service. The simulation and scheduling methods are generic in nature, broadly applicable to commuter and intercity transit to combine routing on vast railway/highway/waterway infrastructures including passenger, freight, and parcel transit.