s ytrain is one of the most accessile—in terms of barrier-free access for elderly and handicapped passengers—rapid transit systems in the world. Accessibility is not merely a feature of design, but also part of operations and education, safety, and emergency procedures. Skytrain was initiated by the British Columbia provincial government in 1980. Construction began in 1982, and Phase I went int...

Transport Integration and an Integrated Transport Policy have been widely espoused for many years, yet remain an ambiguous and ill-defined concept. After featuring strongly in the 1998 Transport Policy White Paper, recently transport integration has received less emphasis. However it appears it is set for a return under the new Transport Secretary, Lord Adonis. This paper explores the meaning o...

The local network medium is a pair of unidirectional fiber optic busses to which stations are conneted via passive taps. For this configuration, a new random-access protocol called RATO (randomaccess, time-out) is presented in this paper. This RATO provides random-access, fairness, and bounded delay access to all stations, and is particularly suited for ultra-high-speed transmission when the pe...

A new collision resolution algorithm called the Space Division Multiple Access protocol (SDMA) is presented. SDMA gains a performance advantage over similar protocols by using information about the positions of stations on the network. The protocol can operate asynchrononsly on a broadcast bus, allowing variable sized packet traffic. Through simulation the protocol is demonstrated to have bette...

Local Area Networks have been in common use for data communications for several years and have enjoyed great success. More recently, there has been a growing interest in using a single network to support many applications (e.g., speech, high-resolution graphics, facsimile, video, etc.) in addition to traditional data traffic. This leads to so-called Integrated S_ Local Ar_ Networks. These addit...

This paper presents a review of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems in Australasia. It describes the major systems operating in Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney, outlining their infrastructure, operations and development characteristics. The performance of these systems in terms of patronage, markets, operations and overall urban development impacts is described. Lessons learned in their implementatio...