New “personal rapid transit” electric taxis will be in operation by the fall.

PRT car designed by Zagato, unveiled in January at the World Future Energy Summit.

The designers of Masdar City, Abu Dhabi’s new post-petroleum city, are not bound by the usual set of rules and constraints. Money is not really an issue, and the political leadership is always willing to try out innovative ideas that the rest of the world regards as unproven, unorthodox or just plain fantasy.

One of them is PRT, personal rapid transit, a system of transportation featuring compact, driver-less “podcars.” In Masdar, where the streets will be entirely free of automobiles, a network of these compact electric taxis will provide clean and quiet transportation to the city’s residents, as well as commuters. The first PRT cars are set to begin running later this year. Admittedly intrigued, TreeHugger sat down with one of the system’s designers recently at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi to hear more about the project.

Luca Guala is a transportation planner with Systematica, the firm that drew up the plans for Masdar’s PRT system. According to Guala, Systematica’s planners spent months working with Foster + Partners, the city’s architectural planners, to integrate sustainable transport solutions into the city’s design.

In addition to PRT, he says, a light rail line will snake through Masdar, most likely running between Abu Dhabi’s international airport and the city center, some 20 km away. Although no cars will be allowed into Masdar City, nine multi-story parking lots will be scattered along its perimeter. Residents, commuters, visitors and buses will all have dedicated parking spots there, allowing them to own and use cars outside the city walls.

Jesse Fox: Would it be fair to describe PRT as a system of transportation which combines the sustainability of a light rail with the convenience of the private car?

Luca Guala: The PRT system in Masdar City will be a complementary system to the light rail, which will cross the city. PRT is not a system that can move huge masses of people, for that you need a light rail or a metro. A metro can move 60,000 passengers per hour – that’s equal to about 20 lanes of highway.

One of the differences between car travel and public transportation is the experience of traveling at rush hour. On the highway, you may be stuck, but you’re sitting in the comfort and privacy of your car. Meanwhile, on the subway you’re in motion, be you’re packed in with hundreds of other people.

Masdar City’s PRT system will have no rush hour congestion. When the computer sees that the network is approaching capacity, it will simply not allow cars to leave stations. This will not happen frequently, and when it does happen, passengers will be asked to wait for a few minutes.

Generally we foresee no more than a three minutes wait for passengers at a station, but there may be special occasions when the wait time is longer. If the Rolling Stones have a concert in Masdar, an event like that is bound to create congestion, and you may have to wait for more than three minutes. But we do not expect anything like that on a normal workday morning. You won’t be late to work in Masdar City because of traffic.

The PRT vehicles will travel at speeds of approximately 7 meters per second, with the longest routes in the city being perhaps 2.5 km. So let’s say you reach a station, wait maybe 1.5 minutes for your car to arrive, travel for 5 minutes if your destination is relatively far away, and then exit the station, which will take around a minute. So the longest trips in the city will be around 7, perhaps 10 minutes long.

PRT cars will move along rights of way, approximately 6 meters under street level. [Masdar City’s streets will be raised off the ground, but buildings will be built at ground level, with the first couple of stories serving as basements and space for technical equipment.]

We decided not to build elevated tracks in Masdar. Elevated tracks would put the cars between the first and second floors of buildings, and no one wants to see cars, even silent ones, zooming past their window. Plus a spaghetti grid network might not be so nice to look at from below, and could become a real visual issue in the city’s narrow streets.

What will it be like to travel on the PRT system in Masdar?

Guala: Passengers would descend a flight of stairs or an elevator to the station – perhaps an escalator in larger stations, but we decided to use only a few escalators, since they are more energy intensive. Elevators are necessary for the mobility disabled.

You will swipe a smart card through a machine, and a welcome message will appear. One option is that the system will recognize you and greet you personally: “Good morning, where do you want to go today?” Perhaps the system will remember your usual path, and offer it to you as an option. After you click on your destination, the system will say something like, “Your car is arriving in 2 minutes at platform number 3.” You may have to stand on a line, and you will be able to identify your car by its number.

The second option is that you will enter your destination into the system when you are already sitting inside a car.

Initially, the system will be very simple, with only a couple of stations. During this period, the system will function kind of like an elevator – you press a button and go to the third floor. Think of it as a horizontal lift. Later on it will be more sophisticated, and passengers will be able to get within 100 meters of any destination.

The cars will not run on tracks, but will operate within a kind of grid network, and take the shortest paths to get where they need to be. The cars will have wheels, and will be battery powered.

What kind of history does PRT have in practice?

Guala: PRT systems have had problems with things like cost overruns in the past. Few systems have actually been fully built and implemented. The one in Morgantown, West Virginia is the only one currently in existence. There is also one under construction in Heathrow airport in London.

Morgantown was built some 30 years ago, and was extremely expensive. They had to invent many of the components of the system from scratch, including the computer system. It was a prototype in every sense. Today, the computerization aspect is almost trivial. If your laptop had been around back then, it would have been powerful enough to implement Morgantown’s control system.

The only pure PRT systems going up today are the ones in Masdar and Heathrow – different systems which work according to similar logic. One of the companies involved in developing the system here in Masdar, 2getthere, has developed a system for transporting freight containers in the Rotterdam port in the Netherlands that works exactly like PRT. In Masdar, cargo will also be transported by PRT, using special freight cars.

How was the system planned out?

Guala: We used the same “predict and provide” models that are used to plan new roads. We had rough data about things like population size, arrival times, etc. We ran a few models and found that a few areas came out congested, so we interacted with the town planners and tried to get the best placement for various land uses.

For example, something like a conference center, which attracts a lot of people all at once, could become a local generator of congestion. So we said: let’s move it slightly to the side. The end result is a large patchwork of land uses, with none of the city’s districts clearly defined by a single use, like offices, residential and so on. That is ideal from a transit perspective, because it diffuses demand [traffic.]

In Masdar, you will be able to live very close to where you work. The districts will be in use at all hours. There will be nodes of activity at the intersections of routes, but the trick is that each nodes does not serve people doing the same thing and traveling at the same time – thus no traffic is created.

How did the specific cultural context in Abu Dhabi affect the planning?

Guala: Well, I am Italian. I bring with me a certain cultural model – namely the good parts of the Italian city. I think it is possible to apply the Italian city model in Abu Dhabi to a certain extent. But you can’t just transplant something to another culture and make it work.

The classic Arabic city has many similarities to the Italian city. There was a common way of living in the Mediterranean Basin, in Christian as well as Muslim areas. From a town planner’s perspective, the classic Arabic “medina” [dense Middle Eastern city with narrow streets and interior courtyards] and Venice are similar. Masdar City takes its inspiration more from the Arabic medina than from the Italian city.

There are other cultural preferences involved here as well. People in Europe are used to taking public transport. It’s not necessarily like that here. Plus there is more sensitivity here to the privacy of the family, which led us to suggest a different kind of system, more suited to the local cultural context.

Is PRT cost-efficient?

Guala: This will be an expensive system. It has to be that way, because it’s a prototype. From an energy perspective it’s extremely cost-efficient, which is what Masdar [the Masdar Initiative is the corporate body that is building Masdar City] wants. The maintenance of a system like this is more expensive than that of a system based on buses, but the level of service is absolutely unreachable by other forms of public transportation.

The huge advantage of PRT is that it is “on demand,” including during off-peak hours. During peak hours, PRT is less efficient than public transport. But PRT is a 24-hour service, just as available during off-peak hours as it is during peak hours. This is much more efficient than running empty buses all night. There are advantages in terms of personal security as well – no long waits in the middle of the night, for example.

I don’t really know about the financial aspects in detail, it’s not really part of our job as planners. It is technically possible to cover costs with ticket fees. A fee roughly equivalent to the cost of a taxi ride would cover the costs of the system. There is a huge investment cost in a system like this, but after it is prototyped, the costs will come down. The actual cost of PRT is lower than the costs for a light rail of the same capacity.

What kind of prospects are there for PRT in other places?

Guala: There is a lot of interest in PRT right now, especially in new developments. In existing cities it’s a bit trickier to make it work. The optimum place for a system like PRT could be in smaller towns and in contained, controlled environments, like hospitals, universities, new business districts, places like that.

Originally published at TreeHugger.com on February 1, 2009. Photos by the author.

Abu Dhabi is out to recast itself as the Silicon Valley of renewable energy technologies.

In Abu Dhabi, the richest city on the planet, life is good. The average per capita worth here is around $17 million, and business continues to boom. So it is perhaps surprising that this small emirate, which sits on top of one tenth of the world’s oil, should be interested in renewable energy.

But they are interested, very interested. In fact, the country’s leadership has made a strategic decision to invest enormous amounts of money and effort into building a whole new sector of the economy from scratch, based on renewable energy technologies. The leaders of this tiny emirate apparently understand that, regardless of how much oil remains to be pulled out of the ground, renewable energy is the future.

The second annual World Future Energy Summit, which kicked off yesterday, is part of that strategy. Some 15,000 delegates are here this week for the high powered, three-day conference, which will explore current and future options for renewable energy technologies, and strategies for their implementation. Also on display is Masdar City, Abu Dhabi’s futuristic ecological city project, and a testing ground for many of the ideas being discussed here.

With 30 governments and over 300 companies represented here, along with over 400 members of the local and international media, Abu Dhabi is hoping to cement its reputation as a global leader in the field of renewables. Topics on the agenda include the entire range of renewable energy technologies, as well as the economic and policy aspects of promoting sustainable power generation. Big name guests include Tony Blair, IPCC Chairman Dr. Rajendra Pachauri and a host of government ministers and royals from around the world.

The entire event is being hosted by Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company’s Masdar Initiative, which defines itself as “a global cooperative platform for the open engagement in the search for solutions to some of mankind’s most pressing issues: energy security, climate change and the development of human expertise in sustainability.” Masdar is building Masdar City here as a prototype for sustainable living and economy, as well as an entire spectrum of renewable energy projects in Abu Dhabi and elsewhere.

All of this is taking place in the shadow of the world financial crisis, and the hosts have been patiently fielding question after question about how the crisis will affect their plans. Dubai, Abu Dhabi’s neighbor to the north, is suffering a serious slowdown in its development, and this week it was reported that the crisis has cost Arab nations $2.5 trillion and seriously affected 60% of the Gulf’s development projects.

Despite this, the Masdar Initiative’s representatives insist that their plans are still on track, and have even suggested that the crisis has made Masdar City more attractive to investors and companies, due to a lack of business opportunities elsewhere.

The language spoken here is undoubtedly the language of business. The delegates to this gathering are not environmentalists, they are businesspeople, with varying levels of environmental commitment. However, they all seem to realize that renewable energy is an excellent business opportunity, and much of the discussion revolves around how to create the optimum climate for investing in sustainable enterprises.

Originally published at TreeHugger.com on January 20, 2009.

Masdar City: zero waste, no cars, carbon-neutral, and powered by renewable energy. Could this be the template for future cities?

Workers from the Indian subcontinent building a field of photovoltaic solar panels in Masdar City.

Whereas some of the big plans for new ecological cities elsewhere in the world have faltered of late, work on Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City is well underway and plowing ahead at full speed. A small army of workers and heavy equipment currently inhabit the 6.5 square kilometer site of the future eco-city.

Last week, a flock of journalists set out from the center of Abu Dhabi to get a peek at what will eventually be the world’s first modern ecological city. The tour, part of this week’s World Future Energy Summit, was organized by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company’s Masdar Initiative, the corporate entity that is building the project, with the goal of giving the world an early look at its flagship project.

Khaled Awad, Director of Property Development at the Masdar Initiative, gestures toward Masdar City’s first buildings. Behind him, Masdar’s perimeter fence and empty land on which the city will be built.

Work in Progress

On a surprisingly overcast day (the following day it actually rained, a rarity in this part of the world), Masdar’s builders explained their plans for this as yet mostly empty piece of land.

An entirely carfree city, multi-story parking lots will be built outside its walls. Masdar will be bisected by a light rail line, and a personal rapid transit (PRT – something between an electric car and a mini-light rail) system will take passengers to within 100 meters of any destination in the city.

Construction workers are already hard at work erecting “stage one” of the project, which includes a 10MW solar power farm, the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company’s corporate headquarters, and Masdar Institute, an academic institution, developed in cooperation with MIT, that will focus on sustainable energy research.

First Tenants Move in this Fall

Right: The Masdar Institute going up in Masdar City. By the fall, students will already be studying here.

With the understated confidence common to many of Masdar’s project managers, Khaled Awad, who oversees the city’s construction, tells us that Masdar Institute’s first class of students will already be living and studying here by the fall of 2009. No one here raises any doubts about this. In Abu Dhabi, decisions are made resolutely and carried out at lightning speed.

The rest of the city will be a mix of residential construction and office buildings, as well as retail and public spaces. Not just any company can rent office space here – Masdar is keen to attract cleantech companies and other businesses with an environmental focus. Employees of these firms will also be given first access to rental apartments as they are built.

Solar Rooftops

The next stop on the tour is an experimental site for testing photovoltaic panels. Forty one systems, from thirty three different suppliers, have been set up here in order to see how they stand up to local heat, humidity and soil. In a small building nearby, the productivity of each system is measured. According to measurements taken thus far, the solar panels being tested here have about twice the energy output that they would in a European climate.

Left: The media gets an early look at Masdar’s progress.

Inspired by traditional Middle Eastern urban forms, Masdar’s plan calls for a skyline of low, flat roofs, all of which will be utilized for solar energy production. The city’s planners estimate that by putting photovoltaic panels on all of the city’s roofs, around three million square meters, they can create just about enough energy to meet the needs of the entire city (an estimated 200-230MW of electricity).

Solar Energy to Power Construction

On the other side of the site, local company Enviromena is building a 55 acre, 10MW solar plant, the largest in the Middle East. Work is almost done, and the plant is expected to be connected to the electric grid in March. These panels will meet the project’s energy demands during the initial construction period.

The panels are mounted on stands made out of partially recycled concrete, locally made steel and reused wood. With the emirate’s leadership and massive funds behind them, the project’s managers have discovered their ability to demand products that are not even available on the market.

For example, explains Awad, Masdar’s builders decided that steel would significantly increase the project’s ecological footprint, and went looking for alternatives. To their surprise, the market responded, supplying 100% recycled steel that even beat the market price for conventional steel.

Aluminum, another construction material whose manufacturing process requires massive amounts of energy (Masdar takes all of this energy into account when determining the city’s overall footprint), was initially banned. However, after finding themselves shut out of the project, manufacturers approached Masdar with 95% recycled aluminum, which requires much less energy to produce, at the same competitive rates.

In the foreground, a sea of solar energy to power Masdar’s construction. Beyond the perimeter fence, another unsustainable real estate project goes up next door.

Revolution or Gimmick?

Sandwiched between an expanding airport, a new neighborhood of luxury villas , a golf club and various other real estate projects, Masdar City will be a self-contained island of sustainability – a city within a city. Just under a million people live in Abu Dhabi; Masdar will house only some 40,000. Another 50,000 commuters will work inside its walls.

Masdar and its partners are keen to market the project as a “manifesto for sustainable life” – the antidote to the outdated cities of the 20th century. This is the great potential of the city, as a testing ground for a variety of new and so far unproven technologies, and as a convincing argument for sustainable city design. If Masdar is a success, it will raise the bar for city planners, architects and elected officials around the world.

However, if Masdar City remains an isolated experiment in sustainable living, disconnected from the rest of Abu Dhabi (where rampant construction, wasteful energy use and the dominance of the fossil fuel economy remain the norm), its impact at home will be limited, and it will be seen by many as a green smokescreen, a gimmick whose real purpose is to draw attention away from some of the emirate’s less sustainable endeavors.

Coming Soon? A rendering of life in Masdar City (courtesy of Masdar).

One thing is clear: Masdar City is real, not just some paper fantasy. Whether a vehicle for Abu Dhabi’s transformation into a locus of green in the Middle East or merely a clever marketing strategy, Masdar City is already rising from the desert, the first large-scale attempt at ecological new city planning in the world.

This oil guzzling boomtown is pinning its hopes for the future on the success of this zero-waste, carbon-neutral, ultra-sustainable development. If it succeeds, Abu Dhabi could be on its way to positioning itself as a leader in green business, industry, and city design on a global level.

Originally published at TreeHugger.com on January 21, 2009.