Topics
|
||
|
||
Remote sites often have great beauty, but access can be difficult. This may be due to nature’s topography or from manmade barriers such as wide highways accompanied by access ramps and marginal roads. Sometimes it is purely a matter of economics – a hectare of developable land a kilometer away from a prime site (e.g. next to a train station or a popular facility) may be one-fifth the on-site price. It is cheaper because it is inaccessible. An APM provides high-quality access.
 Highways create wide barriers that make sites only a hundred meters across from one another feel like kilometers apart. APMs can span them. |
 An APM can bring a remote site into virtual proximity, as to a town center and its rail station. |
When faced with the need for a large block of parking, APMs can save millions of dollars by giving a remote site virtual proximity. A garage with over a thousand spaces is rare in Europe but not in the U.S., where it is not difficult to find garages that take 2,000 vehicles. The largest may be at Detroit’s regional airport where one sprawling facility that can accommodate over 10,000! A modest APM shuttle can cost under $5 million with O&M costs of less than $200,000 per year. The cost savings of using a cheaper remote site may more than make up that.
|
Where topography is steep, an inclined APM can create access to a remote site on an exciting beachfront or with magnificent vistas. Examples can be found in Laon, France; Serfaus, Austria; and Arosa, Switzerland. Many more examples of Alpine devices are found – gondolas, aerial trams, funiculars, and inclines – in both resort and urban settings. These have no vehicle conductors and they are functionally equivalent to APMs. (Because staff is required for close passenger supervision at their “stations”, they are not counted as APMs in Trans.21’s annual Count.) Several Las Vegas mega-resorts use APMs to make one facility easily accessible from another. Circus-Circus did it first. Mirage-Treasure Island followed, and then Bellagio and the more sophisticated Doppelmayr installation at the Mandala Bay-Excalibur. Landside use of APMs at airports makes remote parking possible. Excellent examples can be found in Chicago, Newark and Toronto. Long-term parking is located a good distance away, easing curbside congestion at the terminals. In summary, there is growing experience with making remote sites accessible with an APM. To span distances of half a kilometer (2,000 feet) for passenger flows of only a few hundred per hour per direction, a few million dollars may be sufficient. For flows of a thousand or so per hour, several million dollars may be required. For longer distances – say a full kilometer (0.6 mile) or more and substantial flows, an estimate of $10 million/km as a ballpark fugure can be used to will help determine if the an APM is economically feasible and deserving of serious planning and engineering study. |
 An APM makes the hilltop Getty Museum easily accessible from the underground parking garage below. |