I did a video about Seoul last year, and one of the elements that I think is most interesting is how many “people movers” — really automated light metros and frequently locally-called “light rail” — exist across the region.
As I’ve talked about before, people movers often feel like they are used by cities as a crutch, connecting places that should be on the rapid transit network but were missed for one reason or another, be it a rapid transit line that didn’t stop where it should have, or a major development sited off of the transit network.
Acknowledging that people movers often exist to try and mitigate problematic conditions, I think it’s interesting to ask what we could do if we had more! While I certainly would rather major universities, hospitals, airports, and shopping centres be directly served by rapid transit, if they are not, a people mover could still be a serious improvement on the status quo.
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No American city seems poised to highlight this more than LA, which is in the process of building two different people movers, one connecting LAX to the LA “Metro” light rail system (it’s worth noting that rail to airport is a very common people mover typology in America), and another connecting SoFi stadium and other destinations with another light rail stop. While in both cases I think the people mover is a band-aid solution for poor planning (like putting an event venue the size of SoFi away from rapid transit — many cities most impressive stations are at major stadiums), the connections will be much better that what could have been offered by buses, and arguably higher capacity than the light rail service, since people movers should be able to operate at extremely high frequency.
Now, what I think makes Seoul’s “people movers” particularly interesting is that they are not all strictly there for the purposes of connecting remote destinations. These such routes (like the Everline) do exist, but many of the lines actually act as infill urban transit, operating like a light subway line in an area that is poorly connected or dense enough to justify even more service. Since Seoul is extremely dense and hilly, this kind of role would be a struggle for trams, and while the city does do buses at an almost unbelievable scale (Seoul is easily the most underrated BRT city), once you experience a constant stream of diesel buses along a street you realize it is an imperfect solution.
And to be clear, cities in Asia in general have a lot of people movers. Bangkok has its Gold Line (nicely incorporated into the BTS system), I can think of loads of examples in Chinese cities (often using bespoke domestic tech), Singapore has its suburban “LRT”, and more than any other country, cities in Japan have all manner of monorails and people mover lines augmenting the conventional heavy rail and subway systems (it’s also one of the few places where these systems have been running long enough and have become busy enough that multiple generations of rolling stock have been introduced). In Asia, people movers feel like less of a crutch and more a flexible tool that can bring fixed guideway transit to places where it would be challenging for conventional rail. Of course, while a people mover is less convenient or capacious than a direct high-capacity rail link (likely delivered by shifting an alignment to hit a major destination), they still do offer a big boost for transit as a lightweight connecting service that can provide high frequency, and thanks to automation usually has low operating costs.
To some extent, the role played by these lines is similar to the “shuttle”
lines in some traditional metro systems like Paris, London, New York, and Madrid — it’s just that like with light metro, people movers let you emphasize frequency instead of vehicle size, creating a better system — especially for inevitable transfers.
In a series of future posts, I am going to talk about how we can design and plan people movers to improve as opposed to simply fill in gaps in our transport systems, and I might even include some concepts for places in various cities where one (or several) might be of use.
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