Just hit pause on the west leg of the Valley Line LRT — that’s the message magnetic-levitation transit entrepreneur Dan Corns has for city council.

The world is on the cusp of a revolution — driverless on-demand shuttles that will make LRT look slow, overbuilt and onerous, said Corns. Build a $2.24-billion rail line to the west end and it might look obsolete before it opens.

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“When I started hearing those huge numbers, I started reaching out to the councillors to say, ‘Hey, there’s another option here,'” said Corns, the Edmonton-based founder of Magnovate.

Two of the four council members he met urged Postmedia to follow up. Mayor Don Iveson said council needs to keep an eye on this and other emerging technology.

Postmedia met with Corns Saturday.

What is a driverless on-demand maglev transit system?

It’s not a bus, not a train, not even a hybrid of the two.

It’s more like those new elevators in high-tech office towers where a computer programs a bank of elevators to get everyone to their floor as efficiently as possible. No more stopping at every floor or, in this case, every station.

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Maglev means magnetic levitation. High speed trains use this already, but with old, expensive switching technology.

Corns’ technology makes switching tracks easier. For the west line, he envisions cars the size of a bus. They would run along a thin, elevated guideway and come off the main line to drop down for each ground-level station.

The cars float roughly 10 cm above the magnets on the track, which makes the ride smooth and quiet, and more energy-efficient than LRT.

Photo by Greg Southam / Postmedia

How much would it cost?

Corns hasn’t done a detailed cost estimate for the west line but says it would be less than half the cost of LRT, allowing Edmonton to look at north or south extensions, too.

The elevated track only needs 1.2 metres of space on the ground. It can run on piers down the middle of a street with maglev cars on guideways above the traffic, minimizing the amount of land the city needs to buy or expropriate.

Maglev cars are also lighter than traditional trains, which means piers and guideways use a fraction of the concrete LRT requires.

Corns worked with Stantec engineers to estimate what this kind of high-speed connection between Calgary and Edmonton would cost. They calculated $25 million per kilometre including 500 small cars, or roughly $7.5 billion for the 300 kilometres.

Costs in an urban environment would be a bit higher. But the west LRT line is only 14 kilometres long.

How close are you to building this?

Corns works with a team of 15, including 10 engineers mostly with aerospace backgrounds. One, Lisa May, was the head of NASA’s Maven satellite mission to Mars.

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He founded the company in 2012 and won a contract from Transport Canada in 2014 to develop the switching technology. The next year, Magnovate built a short, six-metre demonstration track in California.

The company is close to signing a final contract to retrofit a five-km people-mover line at the Toronto Zoo. If they can get that built under rules for a theme-park ride, Corns said Transport Canada has agreed to use that to write regulatory standards for urban applications.

That’s the big hurdle. Then they have a long list of interested parties, said Corns, listing off airports, a city in Saudi Arabia and an American theme park. “Everyone wants to be first to be second.”

But it’s coming, he said. Think of how much technology has revolutionized every other part of life. “All this you wouldn’t dream of 10 years ago.”

Magnovate

What is your advice for council?

Corns isn’t asking city council to commit to his technology. He’s just asking them to slow down, look at emerging options and do their own cost and feasibility studies.

He’s planning to present to council in April when city officials bring their update on automated vehicles. They could do a pilot project here, he suggested. “They’re making a 100-year decision.”