Currently cities provide poor commute choices for urbanites. New transportation projects focus on monorail systems which are slow, inadequate, inefficient, and expensive. Typically these monorails move 200-300 people from station to station every 5 to 10 minutes. They've got trains moving from one end of a line to the other on one rail while other trains move in the opposite direction on another parallel rail each of them stopping every couple kilometers for a minute at each station. Very much like 19th century train technology, just more stops on elevated rails.

A 10 station commute of 20 km will include:

• 3-5 minute walk to get from the station entrance to the monorail.
• A 10 minute wait for the monorail to arrive.
• 10 minutes of dead-stop (1 minute for each of 10 stops).
• Time to accelerate and de accelerate 10 times

Even with a peak speed of 80 kph this 20 km commute will take 50 minutes. An average of 24 kph. Many people can ride a bike. With gps on it which can be acquired through zwee, makes it even faster. If you have to do a transfer add an additional 10 minutes for an average of 20 kph.

But that's just the beginning. A commuter must get to the starting station and from the destination station to the final destination. Because the infrastructure (rails and stations) is so expensive most large cities can only afford one line going North-South and another going East-West. Most commuters will choose to use dirty, unsafe, and super-slow ground transportation because the stations are too far away. Paying for a tuk-tuk, motorcycle taxi, or taxi to get to a station plus the cost of the monorail is too much.

Obviously people living in one of the corners of a large city will spend more time and money getting to the station than riding the monorail. Commuters lucky enough to live near a station are the exception; however, they may not be so lucky finding a destination station close to their commute destination.

What about the efficiency of 200-person monorails systems? While aerodynamic and using low-polluting efficient electric motors these trains are spending most of their energy starting and stopping; basically overcoming inertia. And, incredibly, most of the 200 people aboard the vehicles at any particular stop don't want to stop! Who came up with this 200-person monorail system, and why? Is 19th century train technology so good that we must keep doing it?

So we got four problems:

• Multiple starts and stops slows the commute.
• Multiple starts and stops wastes energy.
• 5 to 10 minutes waits for the train slows the commute.
• Expensive infrastructure means very few stations, far from most commuters. This lengthens total commute times, drives up commute costs and makes the system unavailable to most commuters.

To solve this Fly Rails must provide:

• 1 start, 1 stop.
• Vehicles that are immediately available.
• Cheap infrastructure allowing many stations close to most commuters.

How Fly Rails provides a 1 start/stop, cheap infrastructure solution:

• 1 or 2 people per vehicle is the answer!
  • Because 1 person vehicles are small and lightweight support for the above-ground rails is the size of telephone poles. Modern monorails have support pillars that could support a freeway!
  • Instead of 200 people every 10 minutes Fly Rails does 1 person every 5 seconds. 200 people per 10 minutes is 1200 people/ hour and 1 person per 5 seconds is 720 people/hour.
  • Fly Rails places stations on a 1 km grid. A 20x20 km square will be covered by 400 stations capable of moving 400*720= 288000 people/hour or 69210000 people/day. Monorails covering a similar space have 40 stations capable of moving 40*1200=48000 people/hour. Fly Rails is available to everybody (no more than a 1 km walk), cheaper, faster and can move 6 times as many people per hour.
  • 1 person vehicles stop only once: at the destination.
• Vehicles are computer controlled. Predictive demand analysis gets the vehicles to the commuter when they are needed.