Well, the reason I believe that studying PRT for Minneapolis is a waste of time and money is because, plenty of studies have already been done by almost every city in the U.S.
Ken Avidor refers us to these:
Ken, being the well-known transportation expert that he is.
...Cincinnati spent $625,000 on a study of PRT:This article mentions no such study. It mentions a committee of a few government officials voting on it, and narrowly defeating it. Reasons given are not lack of practicality or feasibility, but a desire to keep people-traffic at street level for businesses.
http://www.cincypost.com/2001/sep/26/oki092601.html
and then there is:There are a valid concerns raised here, but who is this guy? For all I know it's just some pro-light rail guy who bought himself a website and wrote down his anti-PRT opinions. I see some obvious flaws in this article. For example, the writer claims that PRT was the same thing as the "people mover" experiments of the 70s, including the one described in the 1972 U.S. News and World Report. Unlike the writer it seems, I actually attended the 1972 US International Transportation Exposition (Transpo'72) held at Dulles International Airport where a variety of people movers, monorails, light rail and more were demonstrated. No mention of PRT. Few, if any, 2 or 3 passenger vehicles. Unlike current PRT thinking, the people mover held roughly 20 to 40 people per car, closer to light rail, but on a monorail or other unusual guide way, and many robotically controlled. The first reference to PRT I can find in the literature is 1975, and it's not prominent like one would think a buzzword would be. So I wonder if the writer of this article really has the facts to back up his many assertions.
http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_prt001.htm
Here's a book that looks like a must-read for those interested in the pros or cons of PRT, or just solving our transportation problems in general:
http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/burke.htm
It mentions that Minneapolis-St. Paul was one of the case studies in 1979. Funny how we refused to face or understand the problem back then. Imagine how much better off we would be today if we had invested properly then.
http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/vuchic1.htmProfessor Vuchic gives an incredibly shallow and simple-minded critique. I was astounded that a professor wrote this essay. It read more like an undergraduate essay.
Prof. Vuchic does give 3 links at the very top of his article wherein 3 other professors refute what he wrote. Did you read those? For those interested, they are:
http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/jeander1.htm http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/ander2.htm http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/manrebt.htm
http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/vuchic2.htm
Prof. Vuchic defends himself. No surprises here.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/2714309.stmSo Cardiff decided not to go ahead this year with a system similar but unrelated to Taxi 2000's system. How many times did other good ideas get turned down before taking the world by storm?
PRT is a people mover, it's a maglev, it's a monorail, it's the L.What nonsense. Those cars, buses, trains and airplanes we rely upon now don't require any maintenance? Never break down? And when first invented, were thought they would never "function in the first place?" Incidentally, the L happens to work well and move a lot of people.
It's an amusement park ride, with an ugly, world strangling
structure and mechanics that will continually break down,
if they ever function in the first place.
Besides it's "gasp!" O-L-D technology, at least 50 years old accordingThe key piece of Taxi 2000's work is the ability to schedule, route and control the vehicles -- and that is new technology and a significant advance. Did you bother reading about that and making the effort to understand it?
to this paper from Edward Anderson's Alma mater:
http://www.advancedtransit.org/historyofprt.htm
Old technology? Yeah, I guess so. Guess we better stop using all of the forms of transportation that we use today since they are all MUCH older than 50 years old. What kind of argument is that? It's old so it can't be good? It's old so we shouldn't use it? Except for the Segway, nothing you've mentioned or in current use is newer than 50 years.
Contrary to what one might think, I am not a big booster of Taxi 2000, or other PRT in forms similar to what is proposed today. But to simply ignore it or condemn it in its entirety is grossly shortsighted and narrow minded.
There are some major problems with their PRT designs for Minneapolis -- but then, the LRT is suffering from some similar problems, that is, ice and snow on the tracks during the winter and clearing it adequately. The biggest problems I see with this PRT are both a result of its elevated nature: the problem with "drippings" -- oil, snow, parts, whatever -- requiring catch pans of a sort when over anything of risk, and visual clutter. Lesser problems, like clearing the guide way or track of snow and ice are common with ground-bound transportation, buses and trains both. The elevated track is also a big advantage. It greatly reduces the right of way costs, which for any road or new train track project like LRT are sky high and going up like a rocket. It eliminates surface hazards and interference -- no crossing gates or collisions with cars, etc.
Regardless, knee-jerk reactions to PRT don't help us solve our transportation problem. No system is perfect from the start. No initial designs are perfect. Why not take the good ideas and features away and see what else can be built with them? Refusal to even look is a guaranteed way to fail.
Make my internet wireless and my transport rail-less!
Good luck. Until we make some major hurdles in cheap energy production, or astonishingly light strong materials -- well actually both, since human bodies aren't getting lighter -- rail-less mass transit means rubber wheels.
Give me my Segway and my VTOL http://www.millenniumjet.com and I'm good toAnd you think PRT is a crock? VTOL? You think cars are fuel inefficient, try LIFTING a person and vehicle off the ground through sheer fan power. If you think there are bad drivers and road rage out there now, try letting the rush hour be filled with average Joes, flying machines like this. I'm a helicopter pilot, so I do have some clue about these things, so trust me when I say that most people would be more dangerous than a lit stick of dynamite. How'd you like to have one of those things crash through the windows of your 4th floor apartment?
go!
I like Ken's Road Kill Bill cartoons. But I don't think he's the go-to guy for expertise on the PRT.AND if you are STILL not convinced that PRT is a Rube Goldberg solution that the people who sent those remote controlled driver-less cars into the desert would love, take a look at this.
http://www.roadkillbill.com/PRTisaJoke.html
Madeline Douglass
Kingfield (MPLS)
To reiterate: I'm not a PRT promoter. I'm simply an advocate of vastly improved transportation, paid for on a level playing field. It needs to be above the board and obvious to the public what they are paying for and what each option costs. I want the selection of technologies and systems to be based on rational, quantitative evaluation, without excluding any potential solutions simply "because." The problems are big enough that we absolutely need to color outside the lines to solve them. The status-quo methods are simply not going to work here, because they haven't been working here or elsewhere for quite a few years.
PRT offers some interesting and intriguing benefits and technology, which can be used in a number of ways. To simply blow it off in a flippant manner is to not do justice to the problems at hand. It belies an unwillingness to consider all solutions or to look for the best system of solutions. Technology evolves in interesting ways. Things which have been dreamed up and made to work in completely impractical ways suddenly become the jump-off point for a new variant when some other new enabling technology comes along.
For example, this Internet and e-mail thing. This is not new. This is not rocket science. I've been sending e-mail and chatting and conversing in electronic forums like this since 1977. Yes, 1977, no typo there. And there's folks around Minneapolis who have done so longer. But a variety of things came together between 1990 and 1994 to launch this Internet thing into the public, none of which were earth-shattering at the time or even obvious. Maybe we (the early users and technologists working on it) should have pooh-poohed it back then so that you all wouldn't have to suffer through using this Rube Goldberg communications medium.
Someone suggested that buses be private businesses. That might work -- if we stopped subsidizing automobile travel 12 to 14 times as much as we currently subsidize bus travel. The street cars lines were competing private businesses, but then most people did not have cars during the decades they operated. Unfortunately, to solve that problem, we need to get both the state and federal governments to collectively pull their heads out of the sand. Parts of the federal government are actually closer to this realization than our current state government and Met Council. But with Big Oil in the White House, it's not looking good there, either.
That puts Minneapolis in a tough spot. We can't afford to do without public transit, we have a hard time paying for the poor system of bus and LRT that we have, and PRT is apparently not the solution that we can afford, either.
Let's not arbitrarily throw out any potential solutions or ideas.
Chris Johnson Fulton
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