Pod People Wage War on Light Rail, Other Reality-Based Transpo Projects
Writer, cartoonist, cyclist and transit advocate Ken Avidor points us to this video, which he used in a recent Daily Kos diary entry. Writes Ken:
The Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) Pod People are always challenging me to prove that PRT promoters are anti-Light Rail Transit (LRT). Here is a video by one of these libertarian, "free-market" guys claiming LRT is old and expensive and PRT is more modern and won’t cost the taxpayers a dime. The fact is PRT is a Nixon-era concept and there is no evidence to prove it can pay for itself.
PRT, Avidor says on his "PRT Is a Joke" website, is often used as a "stalking horse" to undermine the funding and build-out of real-world mass transit projects. Its supporters include Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who, among other transgressions, opposes the expansion of that state’s Northstar commuter rail line.
Judging from the above video, trashing new light rail service in Phoenix, the thrust of the pro-PRT argument goes something like this:
Dude! It goes like a hundred miles an hour! You wouldn’t have to read books or sit beside weird people — AND you could listen to AC/DC!
On your iPod, of course.
Heathrow airport just opened a PRT system. WVU has also had one since the ’70s. It actually looks remarkably like LRT, except the cars are smaller and run on-demand instead of continuously. Availability is thus still maximized while wasted resources (running a mostly-empty car in the middle of the night for the sake of the few passengers that need it) is minimized. A company in California is developing a similar system but with larger vehicles, which looks more like light rail but is automated, on-demand and nonstop, and could be useful as a commuter rail replacement.
You guys bashing PRT is just as unwarranted as is their bashing LRT. The fact is that PRT could actually be preferable to LRT in many circumstances. The only real problem with it is the higher initial capital outlay, but that is also a problem with LRT. PRT done right can actually augment LRT, commuter and heavy rail systems, providing that “last mile” of transit coverage that is necessary to finally remove the burden of auto dependance from people’s lives. PRT is not the answer to every problem but it is another possible tool that should be discussed along with conventional transit solutions.
The most revealing stuff in all of Avidors Daily Kos PRT diarys are the comments. Read them all the way through, and see Avidor can’t defend any of his positions. The guys for PRT play with him like cat nip. Especially good is when Avidor names some guy no one’s ever heard of, like he’s a republican tool. But turns out the guy worked for Al Lowenstien, and Eleanor Roosevelt wrote good things about him. Avidor may be a good artist and right on alot of stuff, but he’s a clown about transit.
That’s great, anonymous. A company in California used 3DSMax to build some pictures in 2007, and another crank in Alameda welded up some piece of crap that looks like a crazy soapbox racer and was somehow able to get airtime on a ninth-tier cable TV station. The new system at Heathrow is an ordinary automated people mover.
There does not exist anywhere on earth an example of a functioning PRT system. It does not, and cannot, efficiently solve the “last mile” problem as you claim.
In other headlines, Ron Paul is an idiot, hardly anybody belongs to the Libertarian Party, the gold standard was not better, and there are no captured UFOs at Groom Lake.
The only thing I learned from reading that DailyKos thread is that there’s a whole pack of loonies who go around the Internet trying to shout down people who point out the inconsistencies in the PRT story.
Ken Avidor has been an obsessively anti-PRT for a full decade, you can’t post anything about PRT on the internet without him eventually showing up. Frankly it’s weird. He frequently misstates his case, and alludes to large groups of dissenters when it’s just the many faces (and sites) of Ken Avidor. I think he sees conspiracies in everything PRT, and its true that it’s been a political pawn at times (what form of transportation hasn’t? Raytheon’s involvement was pretty poisonous for a while) — but the kind of conspiracy Avidor sees just doesn’t jive with reality.
PRT advocates would like to see just a *little* funding going into research and development of newer forms of transit. For 1% of the cost of single light rail line, you could probably double the research into PRT. And certainly PRT shouldn’t be the only recipient of that research funding. It would be great to see more research into automated rail (which has had a lot of successful deployments) or into improving transit energy efficiency (which isn’t very good: http://blog.ianbicking.org/transit-and-energy-intensity.html), or scheduling, or any number of things. “Reality-based transit” isn’t good enough; it’s slow and costs too much to build and costs too much to run. PRT offers one attempt to improve transit. I don’t think any serious effort to research transit improvements would be complete without it. But any serious effort wouldn’t be complete without trying many techniques.
“The new system at Heathrow is an ordinary automated people mover.”
That’s what PRT is.
The fact that you keep equating PRT supporters to libertarian wingnuts amazes me–that California company specifically states its support for Transit-Oriented Development, which, last time I checked, isn’t part of the libertarian party line. The fact that you pass judgment on something without any discussion of the merits makes me think that you’re actually One of Them. I can’t guarantee you that no supporters of PRT are in fact libertarian LRT-haters, but I can guarantee you that most of them aren’t, and alienating them certainly isn’t going to help your cause.
I don’t know if you consider Gar Lipow of Gristmill a libertarian wingnut, but he has praised the CyberTran ultra-light rail project in the past. TreeHugger (those Mises-loving Ron Paul fanatics) also profiled a proposed PRT project in Abu Dhabi.
Some PRT proposals are indeed a bit wacky and impractical, but the same can be said of many of the early proposals for human flight. It took many failed attempts before someone actually produced a solution that worked, but once it was found it flourished quickly, and now air travel–an idea pooh-poohed by many in its infancy–is an essential part of modern life. I’m not saying PRT is guaranteed to be equally successful, but one can’t simply dismiss it out of hand because it’s an as-yet unproven concept.
Attack the messenger… notice the PRT guys don’t have a word about the video.
Here’s another video showing the PRT guys doing their anti-transit thing at the Living Green Expo last year.
And what to make of the 100-plus people in Daventry, England who showed up at a town meeting to tell the PRT guys to “Pod Off!”?
PRT is transit. Pro-PRT people are pro-transit by definition.
From the video:
“Actually, the light rail system’s kinda nice here.”
“We can connect this to our existing infrastructure; we can connect this to the light rail lines, to the bus routes, to things like that.”
“It can connect up with the systems we’ve got.”
“This is going to make it much more cost-effective to run the system we’ve got, and also serve a lot of the places that we couldn’t afford to build out light rail or bus routes”
The guy does indeed criticize the light rail system. But all of his criticisms are indeed true:
“We subsidize the light rail system a lot.”
“The fuller that system is, the less money we lose operating it.”
“Every time the train stops, no train can go past it. So our present light rail systems in Minneapolis can’t run expresses.”
“The metropolitan transit commission is saying that it will actually be faster to take a bus from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul, an express bus, than it will be to take the rail.”
I don’t see the problem with people presenting factual critiques of LRT. They’re not saying LRT is bad, they’re just saying it’s not the best system we could come up with.
PRT is not a panacea, and obviously these guys are promoting it so are not going to go out of their way to tell of its shortcomings and unresolved issues. But that doesn’t excuse LRT promotors from glossing over LRT’s shortcomings either, which is what Avidor seems to be doing.
As for people opposing PRT, perhaps Avidor is unaware that there are also plenty of people who oppose LRT. The fact that some people oppose some proposal doesn’t mean the proposal doesn’t have merit.
I’m all for a LRT vs. PRT debate on the merits. So I ask Avidor to please provide his criticisms of PRT itself rather than the people promoting it.
First, the CPRT was NOT at the Living Green Expo this year… very likely because of that video.
Merits?… what merits? After 30-plus years and hundred of millions of dollars pissed away on dozens of PRT projects the PRT guys still don’t have a working system up and running… how many chances do the PRT guys get?
As for me being a conspiracy freak, nothing compares to the wacky theories the pod people cook up… check out this video.
Ken Avidor is anti-transit. He opposes every form of public transit except light rail. He also professes to be anti-highway, but that’s highly suspect since his open support of “the highway man” in Minnesota, El Tinklenberg.
Avidor also happens to have a long association with “Lightrailnow.org”, a rail advocacy site that just happens to be underwritten by rail consultants and construction interests. Ken has spent the last 4 years (at least) posting links lightrailnow’s anti-PRT literature all over the web, and he’s also written several anti-PRT articles for them.
Is it any coincidence that Avidor is associated with corporate rail entities and also campaigns heavily against PRT, which would compete directly with rail for lucrative city transit projects? I’ll let the reader decide.
In this particular post, Ken Avidor posts videos of a handful of anti-rail PRT supporters, and tries to pass them off as representative of the entire “PRT industry” (as he likes to call it). He neglects to mention the THOUSANDS of transit loving PRT supporters who view PRT as one piece of the transit puzzle. I have openly spoken out in favor of a multimodal transit landscape which includes all modes where appropriate: rail, buses, metro, AND PRT.
Here’s a list of groups actively working on PRT projects: MIT, Foster & Partners, engineering giants Arup and C2HM Hill, Korean steel producer POSCO, Heathrow Airport (UK), and multiple groups in Sweden and Poland. It’s been endorsed by environmental groups Bioregional and World Wildlife Fund. But Avidor ignores all this and picks out one random nobody in Phoenix as representative of PRT. It’s pure propaganda.
Shorter Ken Avidor/Jeffrey W. Baker: Nazis loved trains, therefore everyone who loves trains is a Nazi. Light rail is more expensive than walking, therefore it’s not worth pursuing. There was no successful heavier-than-air human flight in 1800, therefore there will never be successful heavier-than-air human flight, and all the people experimenting with heavier-than-air flying devices are just wasting their time and money.
Oh, and personal, independent vehicles travelling nonstop and direct-to-destination on their own rights-of-way is totally impractical and pie-in-the-sky. No one will ever make money on that.
Private vehicles are a disease. Proven rail technologies are the cure. This is just one more attempt to perpetuate the delusion that transportation works best when it doesn’t involve proximity to other people.
Mark Walker: you don’t know what you are talking about. PRT is more cost and energy efficient than buses or rail, by a factor of at least two, even while providing 24×7, safe, on-demand, point-to-point, fully accessible, nonstop service. Trains could never provide the service level of PRT efficiently because they must run during off-peak times when there are few riders. Those inefficient off-peak trains drag down the efficiency of the entire system. PRT doesn’t have that problem because vehicles move only in response to demand.
A combined PRT/rail system is the best of both worlds: trains that efficiently handle the rush traffic and then can stop running entirely at night, because the PRT efficiently handles the full off-peak load. PRT might even be the technology that allows other forms of transit to run nearly subsidy free, by freeing them from inefficient schedules.
It has nothing to do with “proximity to other people” – that’s just a side effect of the design which maximizes efficiency. In the future, perhaps you should learn about something before criticizing it.
There are systems related to PRT but that have shared vehicles and that use steel wheel on steel rail instead of tired vehicles. This is in fact exactly what eTranzUSA is proposing. It operates just like light rail except it’s even lighter, on-demand, has automated vehicles, uses off-line stations, is grade-separated, and has fewer stops per trip without sacrificing availability. This all results in higher fuel-efficiency and shorter travel times, which makes the cost of operation cheaper and the service more desirable.
It’s hilarious when you keep throwing out that eTranzUSA garbage as exemplary. It does not exist. That seems like a simple idea for anyone to comprehend. The supposed company behind it doesn’t even list an official telephone number, and their website hasn’t been updated in two years. Please, stop citing this phantom of a company as though it were proven technology.
eTranzUSA, Inc.
202 G Street, Suite 1
Antioch, CA 94509
Leonard Catanzaro, President, Chairman of the Board
lcatanzaro@etranzusa.com | 925.437.4203
Allen Payton, CEO, Vice Chairman of the Board
apayton@etranzusa.com | 925.457.0414
Robert Chew, Vice President, Business Development, Board Secretary
rchew@etranzusa.com | 510.508.6060
Haywood Hawkins, Jr., Vice President, Finance, Board Treasurer
hhawkins@etranzusa.com | 510.712.7222
The fact that something doesn’t exist right now doesn’t mean that it’s not possible for it to exist. That seems like a simple idea for anyone to comprehend.
Baker and Avidor: give one concrete, technological reason why such systems are not possible. The only reasons you have given so far are 1) it hasn’t been done yet and 2) some of the people promoting it are bad people. What about the technology itself makes it unfeasible?
One concrete, technological reason why your pod system can’t work: backups of vehicles waiting to unload at popular stations will stall the through track.
Next question?
anonymous:
Baker and Avidor: give one concrete, technological reason why such systems are not possible. The only reasons you have given so far are 1) it hasn’t been done yet and 2) some of the people promoting it are bad people. What about the technology itself makes it unfeasible?
First, get your facts straight. the ULTra PRT system at Heathrow is not currently in revenue service. The developers claim it will be in the “4th Quarter” of 2009, e.g., sometime between October 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009.
Second, for “concrete, technological reasons” that PRT is extremely unlikely to work as advertised, see my recent post at http://www.publictransit.us/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=206&Itemid=1.
Michael Setty is a long time PRT opponent, even though he doesn’t really understand the technology. He recently posted his “analysis” of ULTra PRT on his blog. This analysis basically amounted to “I don’t see how this could possibly work reliably”. When the makers of ULTra responded with a thorough explanation of their approach, complete with several real-world analogies which validate their assumptions, Setty responded by *repeating* his vague, unsubstantiated claims and exiting the debate with the excuse “I don’t have time to debate”.
Despite this claim of “no time”, a few days later he did find the time to analyze a 20-page PRT paper by another ATS employee, and to provide more uninformed and misleading criticism. This is typical of the anti-PRT crowd: they pound away at their pseudo-skeptical analysis until PRT experts challenge them; then they back off, wait for the dust to settle, then throw out some other pseudo-skeptical crap. It’s all a big game for them as they try to protect their turf.
Setty has been doing this for a long time. He wrote the infamous “gadgetbahn” article, which lumped PRT with monorails and maglev. PRT has almost nothing in common with monorails or maglev: Monorails and maglev are basically elevated trains that have most of the same operational characteristics as traditional rail systems, which Setty advocates; PRT is completely different (small vehicles, on demand service, offline stations). But Setty lumps PRT in with the other two modes.
I think the only thing that PRT has in common with the other “gadgetbahn” is that Setty’s transit consulting company doesn’t work with any of them. So, in a sense, the term “gadgetbahn” really means “transit technology which Michael Setty doesn’t understand or profit from”.
By the way, Heathrow has been fully constructed for months, and many people have ridden the vehicles during the current test phase. Setty would have you believe it’s still vaporware. And then there’s Masdar City in the middle east, which is also opening a starter PRT network this fall. These two projects are engineered by Arup and C2HM Hill, respectively: two giant engineering firms that have worked on hundreds of transit projects. Does Setty really believe they are building something that won’t work?
It looks cool from the first glance. But actually this system is just like ordinary cars. It has all the disadvantages of cars like possible congestion, possible parking problems but it isn’t as good as a car in taking you wherever you want to go. So, why change cars for something more expensive and less efficient? Especially when we’ve all kinds of proven transit solutions.
Not to mention the visual pollution of the cityscape/landscape PRT causes with all these rails in the air.
Vladimir: that’s actually a common argument, that PRT is just like ordinary cars. And it’s partially correct: PRT is like cars in nearly all the good ways:
– always available
– little or no wait
– point to point travel
– no schedules or transfers.
However, that’s really where the similarity ends. PRT is fully electric, so it runs quiet and emits no local emissions. It is much more energy efficient than cars: ULTra PRT vehicles run at 100mpg equivalence, achieving Kyoto mid-century sustainability targets *today*.
Other benefits over cars:
– safety – Morgantown has run an automated PRT-like system for 30 years, carrying 15000 passengers per day, with zero accidents or injuries. The segregated guideway and automated control make it the safest form of transportation.
– parking – PRT consumes a tiny fraction of the storage requirement of cars. Each PRT makes 5-10 trips during the typical morning commute, so the number of vehicles is immediately reduced by 80-90%. PRT vehicles can be packed together more closely than cars because they do not need to be accessed individually and don’t need room for the door swing. That’s another factor of 2-3 times space savings. An PRT vehicles don’t have to park near their destination, so parking can be spread out through every nook and cranny in the city, even outside the city. Cars not only need more space to park, but the lots need to be *close* to the destinations, meaning the largest city venues require huge lots. The savings in parking requirements is potentially *huge*, and is one of the biggest arguments in favor of PRT.
– accessibility – every vehicle is fully disabled accessible: just roll the wheelchair on and go.
– lack of congestion – automated control reduces most forms of congestion, maximizing the utilization of guideway by spacing vehicles optimally and automatically routing around traffic. Congestion due to high volumes is still a potential problem, but if the system is so popular that it can’t handle the volumes, that’s a rousing success for a transit system. In that case, perhaps fares could be increased to generate more revenue and add more capacity. That’s a nice problem to have.
– nonstop travel – no stop and go during the rush
– no danger to pedestrians – the PRT guideway is safely out of the way of pedestrians, and a successful PRT network could reduce the need for high speed traffic arterials running through neighborhoods. Cars would not be eliminated, of course, but that 6-lane 45mph traffic mess slicing through your neighborhood could, in the long term, turn back into 3-lane, 25mph local road. The through traffic would be passing by quietly above.
Elevated obstruction is always mentioned as a drawback, but these systems have guideways that are much smaller than even a pedestrian crosswalk. With good design, guideways that small can be nicely integrated into the surrounding aesthetic. And we must consider always the *alternative*: 6 lanes of noisy, smelly vehicles operated by tired, frustrated commuters. Give me back my walkable street and I’ll live with a tiny bit of overhead obstruction.
One last point: PRT is not door to door like cars, that is true. But a mature network can get pretty close to that. In Masdar City (UAE) no spot in the entire city will be more than 100 yards from a station. Some PRT destinations in cities will be *better* than door to door – stations inside buildings will literally deposit you to the lobby of your office. For the longer walks to stations, you can bring your bicycle or scooter or Segway and roll it onto the PRT vehicle. And then, there’s always park-and-ride. But remember, as the system matures it gets *more* dense and this issue will tend to subside over time.
So, your belief that PRT is just like ordinary cars but not as good is actually the opposite of the truth. PRT is much like cars in almost all the good ways, but very unlike cars in almost all the bad ways.
Ian, is your dad, Minneapolis 9th Ward City Council candidate Dave Bicking still saying former Mpls Councilman Dean Zimmermann is innocent of accepting gratuities (bribes) while in office?
Also, here’s a video of FBI witness, Gary Carlson talking about the time Zimmermann asked him for $250,000 for PRT.
Ken, nobody gives a crap about Dean Zimmermann! He has no role in the PRT or transit world other than the fact that he happened to support a PRT system in Minnesota! Will your attempts to smear PRT NEVER END?
I repeat: nobody gives a crap about Dean Zimmermann. He’s irrelevant to this discussion.
Here’s the problem: In the US alone, transportation contributes 34% of greenhouse gases, uses more oil than other uses combined, devours real estate and kills over 40,000 people daily. If you look at statistaics provided by the US DOT you will find buses and rail are no solution – they use similar amounts of energy as cars per passenger mile, are just as dangerous and few people actually want to ride them. Clearly we need better solutions. We owe it to ourselves and our children to seriously investigate all possible alternatives to accessibility. Please visit our website http://www.prtconsulting.com to learn more about PRT and to make up your own mind. P.S. I will soon be blogging about serious PRT papers presented at the recent Automated People Movers conference in Atlanta.
I seriously doubt that there won’t be congestion and parking problems. As soon as we’ll have enough of these pods to move around considerable amouts of people (if we try comapring PRT and LRT here) we’ll encouter the same problems as with cars. At least I don’t see any reasons why we wouldn’t. Except maybe for the fact that the whole system is computer-operated which would reduce the mess a bit.
I define transit to myself as ‘moving more people in less time using less dynamic space’. A point of compromise here is that we can’t get all the people door-to-door, so the cities should be walkable to let people get to stations.
As for PRT, I see that it is fast (less time) but don’t see any serious advantages over cars in space-saving and capacity. It more looks like an environment-friendly rethinking of elevated freeways. So it hardly seems reliable to me.
Tranpo Enthusiast:
As someone who really doesn’t have a dog in this fight I’ve gotta tell ya that your arguments are really unconvincing.
First off, you are afraid to put your ideas behind your real name and Ken Avidor is not. Are you really willing to stand behind your PRT arguments or not? Ken is clearly willing to stand behind what he’s saying even though people keep attacking him for that.
Second, it seems pretty intuitive that, if a PRT system were really to work as a citywide mass transit network, you’d need a pretty massive infrastructure to run that. You’d have elevated guideways running all over the place and pretty massive stations with lots of “pods” parked and stored for peak times like rush hour and the Christmas shopping rush to the Mall of America. So, this notion that PRT isn’t going to take up any physical space just seems completely absurd.
Anyone who has ever walked around anywhere near any form of elevated transportation infrastructure, whether it be the Disney monorail, the F train out to Coney Island, the AirTrain to JFK or, heck, even the West Virginia PRT thing that you cite, can tell you that these things, when built for real-world conditions, are inevitably noisy, dirty, big and steel. It seems pretty clear that PRT would require a pretty massive infrastructure.
As for this notion that PRT will somehow eliminate traffic congestion — that also seems just absurd on the face of it. What happens when a person in a wheelchair or a mom with three kids or someone with eight bags of groceries takes an extra few minutes to load into their pod? Every other person will have to wait behind them. It will be incredibly easy to congest this system.
Have you ever been on that big ferris wheel on the Thames River in London, the London Eye? This, in a way, seems like the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to a PRT system except the pods only go in a circle straight up in the air and back to the ground. There is ALWAYS a minimum wait of at least 10 minutes to get into a pod on the London Eye, and often the wait is more like 25 minutes. The pods hold 20 people too. But if you require people to queue up to wait for their ride, that’s where the congestion is. OK, fine, maybe some PRT system is feasible where the pods all run smoothly once they’re running. All you’ve done is move the congestion into the station.
I say let’s let the dopes in Masdar figure out if PRT is workable. Thanks to our oil-based automobile system, they now possess all of our nation’s wealth anyway. Get back to us in 2050 when you have some test cases in other cities. Til then let’s focus our energy on reality-based transportation systems and transportation living patterns that don’t require anything more than walking or biking to get around.
There needs to be a term for this phenomenon, because I see it happen all the time. A blog posts negative opinions about one of a small number of subjects (Ron Paul, libertarians, MRA’s and pod people, apparently) with especially militant, preachy supporters. The blog is then swarmed by a bunch of people who have never read the blog before and are not part of its community, writing indignant protests (half of which are clearly copy-pasted arguments that they’ve posted dozens of times before). A few of the regular readers might argue with the trolls, but the method pretty much turns off everyone who isn’t fighting the valiant battle against Wrongness on The Internet. Maybe we could call it stepping on an anthill?
On topic–show me a public mass transit expansion that’s planned and funded, or has a decent chance of getting there, and I’ll show you one that I support. We need this stuff too badly to get bogged down in pissing matches between light rail and street cars and BRT and whatever else. It just adds one more obstacle among many between the transportation system we have, and the one we need. Lay the tracks, dig the tunnels, and paint the lanes.
PRT enthusiasts are perhaps the worst enemies of advanced transit. There’s no shortage of underfunded inventors and visionaries who claim that small lightweight elevated automated vehicles will solve every transportation problem.
Those who have looked at PRT more seriously see it as a complement to transit, and as a feeder system that makes traditional rail far more effective. It’s also a very good potential solution in edge cities, where traditional hub and spoke development patterns never developed. Combined with walkable neighborhoods that increase human-powered transportation in higher density developments, there’s a very real need for systems that extend the range of transit from dense urban neighborhoods to the type of development that has prevailed in the US since the sixties.
Any real world deployment of personal rapid transit will begin with pilot systems, go to implementation in small markets, then into larger scale systems.
As with much technology nowadays, Americans have lost any innovative edge, and vendors from Europe and Asia will provide leadership while we continue to invest in roadways and parking structures.
“One concrete, technological reason why your pod system can’t work: backups of vehicles waiting to unload at popular stations will stall the through track.
Next question?”
So don’t use PRT at heavy-traffic stations, or use one of the larger-car systems, like Ultra-Light Rail.
The best system is probably a hybrid of PRT and ULR/GRT. During rushhours or other busy times, the larger cars run, providing no- or few-stop service along the various lines emanating from the station–sort of like commuter rail but faster. At less busy times, the smaller cars run and pick up smaller groups of passengers for direct-to-destination travel–just like a private taxi service, except that your driver is a robot, and so your trip is a lot less expensive.
Incidentally, PRT and GRT have much in common with driverless taxis. The only difference is that one is a lot safer and faster, at least with current technology. It’s also more expensive, but most people probably don’t mind more expense in exchange for safety and speed.
Next critique?
Vladimir is right that there is a compromise between door-to-door service and passenger throughput. But like I said, the solution to that is to compromise–to run both larger and smaller vehicles, with the larger vehicles acting more like share taxis or even express commuter rail. These would add a few intermediate stops into most people’s trips in exchange for passenger density and efficiency, but in the end their trips would still be faster than with conventional rail.
Electric PRT is much quieter than cars. Combustion engine cars, anyway.
“What happens when a person in a wheelchair or a mom with three kids or someone with eight bags of groceries takes an extra few minutes to load into their pod? Every other person will have to wait behind them.”
Each pod or car loads passengers on a separate track. There’s no “waiting in line”.
The other people sharing the car of course have to wait, but that’s also true for light rail.
I have to repeat once again, I’m not claiming that PRT is the solution to all the world’s transit woes. I’m just saying it’s a concept that should at least be considered with the others, and not dismissed a priori.
Marty Barfowitz? Is that your real name?
“A Transportation Enthusiast” is well known in PRT circles for making well-reasoned, cogent arguments.
He is not as entertaining as that other well-known fraud Mark Twain but he is no less identifiable & his arguments are no less valid for not using his “real” name.
BTW, crusading internet types have uncovered that the fraud known as Mark Twain is really some guy named Sam Clemens. Help us debunk his anti-transit fraud & lies.
/snark
Anonymous 12:15 – many PRT designs do use an “in-line” loading method, where up to 3 cars are in line waiting for the first car to pull out.
ULTRA uses a “loading bay”/Parking stall concept at Heathrow which eliminates this potential problem & which is one of their contributions to overall PRT design.
A well-designed PRT system would incorporate both types of loading schemes, depending on the anticipated volumes/uses of the station.
rufustfyrfly #28: there is already a word for that, and the word is “paultards”.
“Mark Walker: you don’t know what you are talking about. PRT is more cost and energy efficient than buses or rail, by a factor of at least two….”
True, I’ve never tried PRT, but I’ve never tried electric roller skates either, yet I’m pretty certain that would be less suitable for public investment than proven rail. And given that PRT has gotten about as far as electric roller skates, you’re in no position to make predictions about cost and efficiency.
Vladimir writes: “As for PRT, I see that it is fast (less time) but don’t see any serious advantages over cars in space-saving and capacity. It more looks like an environment-friendly rethinking of elevated freeways. So it hardly seems reliable to me.”
If you can’t “see” it, then look deeper. Specifically regarding space usage, if each PRT vehicle makes 5 trips in the morning, and PRT vehicles can be stored in half the space of automobiles (both conservative), that’s a 10-times space savings, i.e. PRT vehicles would require 1/10th the parking area per passenger. In reality it’s probably more than that, since the numbers are probably more like 7-10 trips and 1/3 storage requirement per vehicle.
Marty Barfowitz: how do you know “A Transportation Enthusiast” is NOT my real name? Seriously, my name or my identity is irrelevant to my arguments. I have revealed myself on occasion to prove that I am nobody. Just someone interested in improving transit.
Marty Barfowitz also writes: “What happens when a person in a wheelchair or a mom with three kids or someone with eight bags of groceries takes an extra few minutes to load into their pod? Every other person will have to wait behind them.”
Marty: look at the ULTra design. Vehicles pull into parallel bays to load. There is no risk of a single slow-loading passenger holding up others.
rufustfyrfly writes: “On topic–show me a public mass transit expansion that’s planned and funded, or has a decent chance of getting there, and I’ll show you one that I support.”
rufustfyrfly, if human history were filled with people like you, we’d still be living in caves. We’ve been installing the same transit systems for 100 years, and in that time cars have gone from zero to 98% of market share. Don’t you think it’s time we try something new to enhance and augment transit?
Broad thinker: Agreed 100%. PRT is one piece of the puzzle, not the be-all-end-all.
Sidewinder: “A Transportation Enthusiast” is well known in PRT circles for making well-reasoned, cogent arguments.”
Avidor: A.T.E. was more fun when he used to rant and rave in caps and use lots of expletives like this…. for more of A.T.E. go to check out A TRANSPORTATION ENTHUSIAST’s blog.
A.T.E is typical of the PRTistas who used to show up and disrupt meetings in Minnnesota where transit was being discussed. In 2005. I used to see these militant PRTistas disrupt meetings before the Hiawatha LRT was built. I’ve seen it first hand, so have other transit advocates in Minnesota. In one memorable encounter, a deranged man interrupted a workshop my wife and I were giving at Macalester College, shouting that PRT is the “only transportation solution”, threw a dozen Taxi 2000 Corporation brochures at us and stormed out.
Mark Walker writes: “you’re in no position to make predictions about cost and efficiency.”
So I assume you’ve read about ULTra PRT’s test track, which has been running a full PRT system for several years now and has *measured* energy usage and cost? This is not rocket science: cost and efficiency is quite easy to estimate for an on-demand system like PRT once the vehicle characteristics are known.
They’re not predictions, they’re measurements. Do some research, as I did, and you’ll discover these *facts* for yourself. Don’t rely on anti-transit activists like Ken Avidor to supply your position.
“less suitable for public investment than proven rail…”
You’re right – rail IS proven.
Proven to underperform ridership estimates.
Proven to to exceed projected construction costs.
Proven to require massive operating subsidies.
Proven to disrupt & divide communities.
With all this proof on the table, it’s a wonder anyone continues to support it.
Avidor said: “… PRTistas …”
Funny you should use that label – it’s derived from “Sandinista”, defined as
“The party named after Augusto César Sandino who led the Nicaraguan resistance against the United States occupation of Nicaragua in the 1930s.”
So, in other words, you mock PRT advocates by labeling them after people who fought against corrupt corporate interests.
I guess you want to insure that American transit users remain a poor, oppressed “Banana Republic” too.
Further, I guess that would make you a Transit Contra, funded by the Ollie Norths & Ronald Reagans of the transit industry – are you practicing “trickle down transit” Avidor?
Me, I will wear the badge of PRTista proudly.
what happens if someone lays a steamy log on the floor or seat of one of the cars?
its not their own vehicle so the ‘shatter’ doesnt care and theyre not amongst a crowd which is a big deterent to this behavior. this is a big problem in gondolas at ski resorts so you can imagine what it would be like in a city.
with prt, its not like you have a big choice of seats or can sit at the other end of the car away from it.
“…Rail IS proven… Proven to to exceed projected construction costs.”
Dudes, contractors are contractors. You build anything, there are cost overruns. I doubt PRT would be immune to this unfortunate effect.
“what happens if someone lays a steamy log on the floor or seat of one of the cars?”
The next passenger notices the log and pushes a button which sends the vehicle to maintenance, and another vehicle arrives within a minute or so. If it becomes a consistent problem, video surveillance and fare records can be used to identify the offender, who then gets a fine or loses the privilege to ride.
Morgantown has an automated small-vehicle transit system that’s been in use for 30 years, and somehow they’ve been able to avoid the “log” problem. 🙂 Really, do you think the designers haven’t thought of these issues?
As for the rest of your points, rail is….
“Proven to underperform ridership estimates.” Please feel free to ride the Broadway Local in New York City at a variety of times throughout the day and then tell me if you still believe our subway system is underutilized.
“Proven to require massive operating subsidies.” Like every other form of transporation ever invented.
“Proven to disrupt & divide communities.” This is demonstrably false. Rail creates communities. Google the term “railroad suburb” or just look at the concentration of population around major passenger rail routes in the NYC area. My neighborhood, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was farmland before the subway came through.
With the next chapter of the peak oil crisis about to hit our civilization in the solar plexus, this is no time to waste public money on unproven technologies. On the other hand, if the advocates of PRT would like to build with their own dollars, I’d enjoy seeing the result. I suspect you’d have to structure an entire community around it, so building PRT would mean building a whole city. Good luck with that.
“Dudes, contractors are contractors. You build anything, there are cost overruns. I doubt PRT would be immune to this unfortunate effect.”
The amount of actual construction is minimal compared to other infrastructure projects. Heathrow’s construction of its pilot system was completed in less than a week, and completed on budget. I believe most of it is prefabricated and the onsite construction is mainly putting in footers every 50 feet or so.
It’s unfortunate there’s such vitriol in discussing these things.
Aside from the usual back and forth between Mr. Avidor and his nemeses, it appears that most PRT objections are coming in the form of tangential design issues as opposed to the core design principle at work. Objections in the forms of guilt-by-association and belief in some dark conspiracy are simply silly.
As to the design objections, think about what the core design principles are as opposed to the manifestation choices. For example, nothing is written in stone about track elevation. It could be elevated, surface, or subsurface. Tracks could meet or they could interlace. The waiting for others at the station objection assumes that there’s a thruway track and a single offshoot track for loading and unloading. It could just as easily be an offshoot, then bays.
There is a reason that automobiles are the highly dominant modal choice in the United States and many other countries. Top on the list would be flexibility. Sharing the top would probably be time. Safety – or the feeling of safety – is also important to people.
Mass transit isn’t bad per se, it’s just limited in its ability to do certain things. Point-to-point travel is only time efficient if the two points are along the same express route. Once one starts getting into making transfers and/or dealing with frequent stops, then the average speed of the trip can become ridiculously long.
I trust most people here have extensive experience with many modes of transportation, and in particular different transit systems in a variety of places in the US and the world. I also trust that most people here also have lots of experience and knowledge of driving cars, riding bikes, walking, intercity bus and train travel, commercial aviation, and so on. No mode as it stands is strictly positive or negative. Everything has its pluses and minuses.
However, the reality is that transit has about a 3% modal share, and that’s an average, not the median, so excluding the New York area in particular, and perhaps some of the second-tier transit metros like DC, Boston, Seattle, etc, the modal share of transit experienced by most of this country is probably more on the order of 1%.
I would just suggest that people remain a bit more open-minded about new ideas to old problems. For example, carsharing had a load of detractors before it actually hit the ground (which took a few decades in the US) and now look how its widely lauded as being a brilliant concept.
All these silly ad hominem attacks about Ron Paul, crazy people, poop on seats – these are not intelligent nor reasonable comments. Focus on core design principles and let go of the emotional trip buttons, and perhaps a more fruitful discussion can take place.
Mark Walker: “‘Proven to require massive operating subsidies.’ Like every other form of transporation ever invented.”
You may not know this, but PRT *can* operate with little or no subsidy, because operational costs are in direct proportion to ridership. PRT vehicles have no drivers and do not need to consume energy moving up and down the line. If nobody rides, there is very little cost. Pessimistic PRT projections have fares covering 100% of operating costs. Optimistic projections have fares covering BOTH operating AND capital costs. Maybe the subsidy-free transit system HAS been invented.
Even NYC’s rail system, with it’s dense ridership, requires significant operational subsidy and will never pay down a dime of capital costs, because it’s *expensive* to operate those trains all night with few riders. This is what PRT avoids, and why it is the perfect *complement* to trains.
“On the other hand, if the advocates of PRT would like to build with their own dollars, I’d enjoy seeing the result. I suspect you’d have to structure an entire community around it, so building PRT would mean building a whole city. Good luck with that.”
OK, fine, we’ll build a whole city around PRT. We should have phase one ready by the end of this year. 🙂 I’m guessing by your tone you didn’t even know about Masdar, right? You know, the city in the desert that will be pure PRT with no cars? Apparently, there’s a lot you don’t know about PRT. I’d be happy to continue enlightening you.
Disney was a PRT fan too:
http://www.streetsblog.org/2007/12/20/disneys-highway-to-hell/