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Local firm has the inside track on people-moving innovations
Sunday, July 04, 1999 By Joe Grata, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Because of space considerations, or because some information just doesn't fit into the story or because it's opinion, interesting tidbits and insights sometimes don't make it into print.
That was the case one month ago, when I wrote a two-article report on Adtranz North America, a transit design and manufacturing firm headquartered in West Mifflin.
If you've ridden the underground people mover between the landside and airside facilities at Pittsburgh International Airport's midfield terminal, then you've sampled the company's work.
Besides making people movers, Adtranz is overhauling 1,300 propulsion units for New York City subway trains, and working on transit orders for systems in Boston, Toronto, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities. It also is bidding to build 28 light rail cars for the Port Authority and trying to win an order from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to build self-propelled rail passenger cars that are to run in the "Keystone Corridor" between Philadelphia and Harrisburg.
What drew my interest more than any other thing during a tour of Adtranz facilities in preparation for the June 6 articles was "Innovia," a people mover that is the great-grandson of Skybus.
Skybus, if you are not old enough to recall, or if you weren't here then, was the moniker for the first people mover: Transit cars running on rubber tires, fixed to a guideway and moving along automatically from stop to stop. That is, transit without an operator. Skybus was conceived by Westinghouse Electric Corp. and proposed by the Port Authority to serve Downtown and the South Hills.
Skybus was, in essence, a horizontal elevator, intended to make Pittsburgh a world leader in new transit technology in the 1960s and '70s. But community opposition, a lawsuit which resulted in a 60-day court trial and other objections killed the plan. In its place, the Port Authority built the slow rail transit system that we ride today,
Arguments against Skybus included: It won't go in the snow, it would be too dangerous without operators, it would be unable to climb hills, it might fall off the track.
Now that Adtranz, the successor to Westinghouse, is operating people movers in more than a dozen places, the company is marketing Innovia. The aerodynamic design and car body shells made out of special composite materials give Innovia the look of a space shuttle.
Innovia can be coupled into trains and travel at speeds approaching 50 mph.
Is Innovia reliable? Adtranz technicians turn on the people movers on a West Mifflin outdoor test track Friday and go home for the weekend. When they come back Monday morning, the cars are still operating on computer commands.
Can it go in snow? Adtranz has a snow-making machine, like ski resorts, to simulate cold-weather conditions on the test track. The cars go in snow.
How about climbing? The test track incorporates not only a 10-degree hill but also a curve. The cars have no problem.
The ride? Faster than the T, with less noise or vibration.
Maybe there's a place in Pittsburgh for Innovia, in the eastern suburbs, where officials are yammering that they want light rail instead of an extension to the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway through Edgewood and Swissvale.
People movers are no more expensive than light rail, could co-exist on the same right of way as buses, and would support a Pittsburgh-based business that already employs nearly 1,200 people, about half of them degreed engineers.
Anybody out there listening or learning? Anybody out there bold enough to embrace Innovia for the millennium?
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