Urban.MASS' Floc Duo Rail System brings public transit to a whole new level

Have you ever wondered what public transportation would look like in the future? Well, no need to wait any longer: the British Urban.MASS has designed the Floc® Duo Rail™, a solar-powered, driverless and lightweight smart-train. This project perfectly encapsulates a new era of urban mobility, and is providing us with technology that might change our cities forever. 

Urban.MASS

Urban.MASS is a company that develops, licences and sells advanced technology that addresses transport needs in the urban environment. In cooperation with world-leading engineering groups, it also builds green, near net-zero, and affordable transit projects.

Its proprietary flagship technology is a revolutionary off-road mass transit system, Floc Duo Rail, and its directors are former directors of leading international architecture, engineering, and technology companies. In short, the perfect group to bring a technology like this to life. 

The goal of Urban.MASS

Many of our cities have a goal – Net Zero by 2050. This also comes with its own set of challenges, as more and more cities cannot handle the constant traffic and congestion they harbour. This is exactly the type of issues that Urban.MASS wanted to address with the Floc Duo Rail transit system, which will free up our cities from congestion and pollution in one fell swoop. 

What is the urban transit of the future if not affordable and green technology that ensures frequent, smart transport through, over and under your communities? It is certainly ambitious, but certainly feasible in the not-so-near future – and if so much of the mobility sector can be energy efficient, then why shouldn’t our public transport be too? 

How it will work

One huge advantage of the Floc Duo Rail  is that its lines can be installed more swiftly than building a traditional transit system or even a new road, mainly because of its light infrastructure, which consumes far less concrete and steel than light rail.

Its solar panels provide much of the energy required for operation, making it a much more sustainable alternative to our current transport systems, and the driverless Floc Duo Rail trains are smart - designed to match capacity to demand, reducing unnecessary energy consumption.

The perhaps most exciting aspect of the Floc Duo Rail is that it will be possible to install it on the ground, above ground, and underground. In outer suburbs where land is more available, the transit line can be on the ground behind barriers. In denser urban areas, it can instead be elevated above traffic and other obstacles. And, if necessary, in the busiest part of downtown it can go into small-bore tunnels. That’s not all – given that installation is modular and easy, the track can even be dismantled and moved, for example from one world fair to another.

Let’s get technical

As far as scalability goes, the Floc Duo Rail system can be scaled from a small local link to a city-wide network, and expanded as needs grow and budgets permit. Long trains in the city centre can be divided into shorter trains to serve outlying suburbs, matching capacity to demand, and providing high frequency services throughout the network.

The system is ideally suited to moving between 1.000 and 16.000 riders per hour per direction. As a rough guide, it is potentially suitable for cities with populations between 200.000 and 10.000,000. 

Pictures: Urban.MASS