Comparable Capacities Under Different Operating Assumptions
Provided below are some the vehicle and people-moving capacities for a single freeway lane, a light rail transit (LRT) line and a Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) line. There are no buses, carpools or vanpools on the freeway lane and it is not a HOV lane. It is operating under ideal "free flow" conditions which are often degraded by accidents, incidents and other capacity-reducing events.
As shown, PRT has an advantage over a freeway lane and LRT line if it is operated with minimum headways of 1 second or less and all the other assumptions for all three modes are valid.
| Maximum Vehicles/hour past a point | Min. Headway | % Empty Vehicles | Avg. Occup. of Used Vehicles (persons) | Capacity: People/hour | PRT Advantage over Freeway | PRT Advantage over LRT #1 | PRT Advantage over LRT #2 | |
| One Freeway Lane | 2,200 | 0% | 1.1 | 2,420 | ||||
| LRT Line #1 | 12 | 5 min. | 0% (all seats filled, no standees) | 152 (2- 90' cars) | 1,824 | |||
| LRT Line #2 | 12 | 5 min. | 0% (all seats filled, no standees | 304 (4-90' cars) | 3,648 | |||
| One PRT Line | 7,200 | 1/2 second | 30% | 1.5 | 7,560 | 3.1 to 1 | 4.1 to 1 | 2.1 to 1 |
| One PRT Line | 3,600 | 1 second | 30% | 1.5 | 3,780 | 1.6 to 1 | 2.1 to 1 | 1 to 1 |
| One PRT Line | 1,800 | 2 seconds | 30% | 1.5 | 1890 | 0.8 to 1 | 1 to 1 | 0.5 to 1 |
Last modified: March 28, 2001