Ultra (rapid transit)
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| Operation | |
|---|---|
| Number of vehicles | 22 |
| Technical | |
| System length | 3.9 km (2.4 mi) |
Ultra (Urban Light Transit) is a personal rapid transit PODCAR system developed by the British engineering company Ultra Global PRT (formerly Advanced Transport Systems).
The first public system opened at London's Heathrow Airport in May 2011. It consists of 21 vehicles operating on a 3.9-kilometre (2.4 mi) route connecting Terminal 5 to its business passenger car park, just north of the airport.
To reduce construction costs, Ultra largely uses off-the-shelf technologies, such as rubber tyres running on an open guideway. The approach has resulted in a system that Ultra believes to be economical: the company reports that the total cost (vehicles, infrastructure and control systems) is between £3 million and £5 million per kilometre of guideway.
The system was originally designed by Martin Lowson and his design team; Lowson had put £10 million into the project. He formed Advanced Transport Systems (ATS) in Cardiff to develop the system, and the site was later the location of its test track. Ultra has twice been awarded funding from the UK National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA). Much of the original research on Ultra was done by the Aerospace Engineering department at the University of Bristol in the 1990s. Recently, the company renamed itself to "Ultra PRT Limited" because of its primary business, and it moved its corporate headquarters to Bristol.
Personal rapid transit was originally developed in the 1950s as a response to the need to move commuters in areas with densities too low to pay for the construction of a conventional metro system. Using automated guidance allowed headways to be shortened, often to a few seconds or even fractions of a second. That increases the route capacity, allowing the vehicles to become much smaller but still carry the same passenger load in a given time. Smaller vehicles in turn would require simpler "tracks" and smaller stations, which lowered capital costs. Smaller towns and cities that could never hope to fund a conventional mass transit system could afford PRT, and the concept generated intense interest.
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