A San Jose State team of researchers and students are designing a new public transportation that’s entirely automated and solar powered called the “Spartan Superway.”
Burford Furman, Spartan Superway co-creator and mechanical engineering professor, said the long-term project is an “instantiation” of an above-ground system connecting the main campus to South Campus, which is less than a mile away from SJSU.
Furman said the “bold” and “radical” transportation system would largely mitigate two of California’s urgent problems: traffic congestion and climate change.
The Spartan Superway’s initiative is a network of guideways that’s elevated to transport people in pods or, what the team calls, “bogeys” about 20-30 feet above the streets. The guideways would be generated by solar panels.
The bogeys would be programmed to destinations and electronic sensors would dictate speed to maintain distance between other pods.
The Solar Powered Automated Rapid Transit Ascendant Network (SPARTAN) Superway research and development program started in 2012 by Furman and Ron Swenson, executive director of the Santa Cruz-based International Institute of Sustainable Transportation.
“With the pod car, it’s very simple: we go right over the top of all that traffic,” Swenson said in a Zoom call. “It'd be a slick way to begin connecting the university to the outside world and then project that image out to the whole world. Everybody looks up to Silicon Valley and we can be a model on sustainable transportation.”
Furman said the idea of an above-ground transit isn’t a new concept.
“This whole idea of an infrastructure on a network of guideways . . . dates back to the 1950s. There's congestion in the city, everything's interacting wherever we put it,” he said.
Furman and Swenson said the design of automated transit has gotten better over time, akin to most technological innovations.
“We’re working on the evolution of software: full automation,” Swenson said.
The team
Since the Spartan Superway’s establishment 10 years ago, more than 300 students have contributed to the project, creating a continuity of work for the team to build on each year.
“The project largely has continued out of mechanical engineering as a senior project. So in mechanical engineering, we do a two semester sequence in the senior year . . . it's kind of like their practicum,” Furman said.
Carlos Ortega, an industrial technology Spring 2020 alumnus, joined the Spartan Superway for his senior project in Fall 2019.
Between 2019-20, he worked on the prototype track and other specific projects that required mechanical engineering. However, many students including Ortega weren’t able to complete their work when shelter-in-place mandates began during the coronavirus pandemic.
“When I graduated . . . there was still work to be done,” Ortega said. “I was able to throw something together for my term project, but what ended up happening is me and someone who's now my coworker came in to finish the [sub-project] that summer.”
Swenson said students panicked when they couldn’t finish their work, so he asked Ortega and four other Spring 2020 alumni to work in-person during Summer 2020. He said these alumni and five other students from various U.S. universities became the “core team.”
“Next thing you know, we have a team that has given us continuity from one academic year to the next,” he said, adding that he pays part-time wages to each member of the core team.
The progress
Swenson said the program has completed small to half- size models and multiple revisions to said models throughout the years to perfect the pods, guideways, automation, electronic sensors, software and other technological aspects.
He said the team creates scale models because the whole project is “different enough” that it needs visualization.
Swenson said the Spartan Superway team has collaborated with various professors and experts from universities within the U.S. and internationally, including Mexico, France, Sweden and South Africa.
Some experts helped Furman and Swenson author the 144 page report on the transportation system’s feasibility and visualization that was published on Dec. 21, 2021 by the Mineta Transportation Institute, a research and training nonprofit organization in partnership with the Spartan Superway program.
The Spartan Superway and Mineta Transportation Institute report came after more than five years of research and development.
The automated transportation network energy system would cost less than the existing SJSU Park & Ride service, according to the report.
The shuttle service provides transportation from Duncan Hall to the new South Campus Garage Monday through Thursday, according to its website.
Additionally, its solar-powered network has carbon dioxide emissions that were 86% lower than those of a purely electric grid-powered version and 98% less than those of the SJSU Park & Ride diesel shuttle system, according to the same report.
Swenson said climate change has become a serious threat to human survival and there are two things the world can do to address it: reduce carbon dioxide emissions by pulling it out of the atmosphere and stop the burning of fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels include natural gas, petroleum, coal and other gasses, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration Fossil Fuels webpage.
Even the sources of electricity are 61% of fossil fuels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration Electricity Explained webpage.
Swenson said there's a growing number of people working to discover ways to directly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere but the Spartan Superway team is working on the side of reducing, and hopefully eliminating, carbon dioxide emissions.
“About 30% of current carbon dioxide emissions worldwide is from burning fossil fuels for transportation,” he said. “It turns out, though, that in California, it's over 50%. We’re a very mobile community at large.”
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced on April 4 that the world is firmly on track to becoming an “unliveable planet,” according to its report.
The report showed climate change will make the world sicker, hungrier, poorer and more dangerous with intense weather damage in the next 18 years with an “unavoidable” increase in risks.
The world’s top body of climate scientists called out global leaders during its report, saying the consequences will be irreversible unless greenhouse gas emissions fall at faster rates than countries have been committing to.
Furman said the Spartan Superway transit system is the future of transportation because it’s fully sustainable, low cost and realistic.
“We’ve got to do something else [besides electric cars or electric transit] to combat climate change and our approach can do it . . . it's feasible,” he said.
Furman said the team has been working on multiple small and half scale models because it’s much cheaper and more efficient when working out defects or mistakes.
Gregory White, engineering project manager for the core team and Spring 2020 alumnus, said the Spartan Superway had its first major advancement in 2020-2021 with the ten meter full track model, which is based on most of the core team’s development and design work.
“There have been several attempts in the last eight years to demonstrate the capabilities of solar power . . . but none of the projects are full scale or full tracks,” White said. “Our ten meter track proved the concept of solar power, which is huge.”
The future
Furman said the team still needs to do mechanical design to develop control, which will happen when they begin working on full size models.
He said the Spartan Superway team spends hundreds of dollars a month with smaller and half sized models.
Furman said when the team begins full scale models, which require materials including steel and concrete, they’ll start developing test tracks to run loops on the bogeys and run the guideway for hundreds of hours to ensure the software and sensors are perfect.
“There’s still much work to be done . . . we are years away from [full size] but that assumes we have the money to do it,” he said, adding full-size development requires a budget in the low millions.
Furman said he and Swenson are still monitoring the business side of the project including its need for industrial partners and sponsors, but there’s “only 24 hours in a day and four people working on this.”
White emphasized that sentiment and said five core team members have left since the creation of the nine-member group in Summer 2020.
But he said as the Spartan Superway is collaborating with various cities and countries, he has faith in the future of this automated solar powered transportation.
“I know it takes a lot to move mountains, but the thing is, if it doesn’t work here [in San Jose], then it’s going to work somewhere else,” White said.
Swenson said in October 2021, the team submitted a proposal to the university to be included in the new Campus Master Plan framework, which is a 20 year plan for future campus developments that was announced on April 7.
He said while they are still developing the Spartan Superway network, they’re asking to be included in the plan, especially as the budget they’d need is low cost – less than the cost of the recently completed parking garage near South Campus.
Swenson said he hopes to see the student community rally behind the project to encourage the university to include it in its new revised campus development framework.
“Younger people in this generation understand more of just how serious climate change is,” he said. “Think of the future.”
