Historical information about the origins of the dualmode concept and some major studies of the topic

Dualmode transportation was a hot topic in the 1970's in the U.S. One early paper was presented by Professor Dwight Baumann at an Advanced Transportation conference at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1970. The federal govenment funded several R & D projects which lead to a national conference on dualmode, held in 1974. The results from this conference can be found in Special Report 170, published in 1976 by the Transportation Research Board, National Academy of Sciences/Engineering, in Washington, D.C. The Table of Contents from Special Report 170 is available on-line.

The Urbmobile was the subject of a study at Cornell U entitled The Urbmobile- A Dual-Mode Vehicle System Design concept. It was featured as a cover story in Popular Science magazine. A 1968 SAE Technical paper is available provides considerable detail about the design.

A very interesting urban analysis of several dualmode concepts was conducted in 1973 by Peter Benjamin at the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in Cambridge, MA. The urbanized Boston region was used for his case study. The final report consists of four volumes and is very extensive. A summary paper by Benjamin (Analysis of Urban Dualmode Transportation) is available on-line that describes his analytical framework, methods and results. The conclusions are quite positive regarding the potential of dualmode for being very useful in helping to improve mobility and reduce congestion on a metropolitan scale.

An interesting paper by Larry Stern outlines an evolutionary approach to the development of a dualmode systems that would create a new industry as well as dealing with many of the difficult urban transportation problems and negative impacts now produced by the auto-centric system. It was written in 1994 but has been updated to reflect the current situation. Dualmode concepts are also prominent
in the Tomorrow's Transportation report.

For several reasons, mostly political, federal support and funding for this topic dried up in the late 1970's and so there has been little follow-on work done since then. However, during the past 3 years, a number of new dualmode concepts have emerged and have gained substantial visibility around the world so perhaps the topic is coming back into favor. The approaches being taken are quite diverse as are the funding levels available to the various inventors and project teams.

The best funded program was the American National Automated Highway System Consortium (NAHSC) - all other projects pale in comparison. However, this funding was recently (late 1997) terminated. See TRB Special Report #253 for some details. A book entitled Automated Highway Systems was published in 1997 and the full table of contents is available on-line.

The paper by Steven Shladover , published in June 2000, provides a recent view of the status of the AHS situation in the U.S. Current work on the topic can be viewed at the Cooperative Vehicle-Highway Automated Systems website. Most recently, a world-wide survey of AHS activities has been published by Richard Bishop, entitled "Whatever Happened to AHS?"

An overview paper by Francis D. Reynolds, entitled Dualmode, the Transportation of the Future, was presented at the New Visions in Transportation conference, held at Aspen, Colorado, in October of 2000. Reynolds has also published a 7-page, illustrated article in the September-October, 2001, issue of The Futurist magazine and an article in EV World, entitled The DualMode EV Revolution (March, 2005). In July, 2006, his ebook entitled The Revolutionary Dualmode Transportation System (22 Chapters) was posted at this website in July 2006. To read it, go to the Contents page.

The Future of Cars, is intended as a basis for derived works and presentations to legislators. It is intended to become authoritative through expert collaborative and continuous updates.

A MBA Thesis entitled "Customer Response to a Dual Mode Personal Rapid Transit System" by Yonas Jongkind is now available on-line. It was written at Simon Fraser University, located in Vancouver, B.C., Canada in the Spring of 2006.

Last modified: February 14, 2016