March 20, 2011 - 4:38pm
Students design proposed monorail system to connect North, South, Central and Medical campuses
BY DEBJANI MUKHERJEE
Ever imagined campus with a spider network of overhead monorails? Industrial Operations lecturer Patrick Spicer’s students did.
In an event held at the Stamps Auditorium on North Campus last night, Spicer and a panel of engineers from various organizations outside the University presented their ideas for a creative, rapid, efficient transportation system on campus.
Jim Kosteva, director of community relations, said the goal of the event was to generate discussion about the University’s transportation system.
“Our purpose was to make the people think about the ideas proposed,” he said.
Every year, Spicer’s IOE 424 class — made up of seniors in the College of Engineering — apply their engineering skills to real world situations, working closely with organizations that are mostly from outside the University to better develop their industrial systems.
The students in the Fall 2009 class asked students to develop a transportation system that would link the University’s North, Central, South and Medical campuses.
The class was split into six groups – each assigned a specific area of the transportation system to tackle. At the beginning of the semester, the groups were encouraged to work together to mutually decide on one transportation system that they would work on developing. After looking at various systems across the country, the students decided on a monorail.
The consumer insight team identified the areas used the most by students — the bus stops in front of C.C. Little and Pierpont Commons — and found that students were mostly dissatisfied with the frequency of service at these locations.
The system level design team developed the overall layout of the monorail network, which consists of the routes and station locations.
The proposed model has a route that is four miles in total, with nine stops. The entire round trip would take twenty-four minutes. The students decided to use the Bombardier Mart VI driverless train on an elevated track to move students from stop to stop.
Students chose the elevated track because it would eliminate traffic issues, and make the roads safer for pedestrians.
The budgetary cost estimate for this model was proposed to be $360 million.
“We didn’t give them a budget for this project,” Spicer said.
With the new monorail system, the blue buses students have grown accustomed to seeing on campus would be focused on moving within campus rather than from campus to campus, according to the proposal. This would lead to a reduction in the operating costs for the bus system.
The systems operation team found that to fund the monorail an 29.7 percent increase in total operating costs would be necessary, but also found that the system would reduce bus operating costs by 54.3 percent.
The station planning and design team created an animation illustrating a state-of-the-art open-air station with a large retail space. According to the proposal the stations would cost $31 million to $50 million.
The revenue generation and financial analysis team looked at advertising, and opportunities for federal funding as ways to finance the project. They found that enlisting outside organizations to use the retail space, moderate advertising, and the revenue from the new parking structure at the North Campus Research Center would contribute towards financing the project.
Finally, the regional transportation linkages team looked at ways to connect the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority bus route to the monorail system, to make it available to non-University users.
