Good Morning I need more coffee myself.

; it’s that taxis can’t carry as any persons at once.

Your welcome;)

Thanks, amazing the lengths these types go to to keep the public from getting any benefits of its support for our entire system.

Thanks.

Hey PW!

A good rule of thumb for me is, if it comes from Republicans, it’s almost certainly a boondoggle, if it comes from Vichycrats, it’s almost always a surrender.

I have to confess this is the first time I ever heard of such a thing. I would have thought PRT is a car, or maybe a bicycle, or just plain two feet.

morning pw, ruth, joe.

very sad to witness the full destruction of our community resources and diversion to the thieves and scammers. just heard last nite that south fl going for cheney’ private prisons — no bids will be more cost effective. ARGH!!

;o(

That’s why this originated with and is being marketed to white-flight exurbanites: They like the idea of not having to do the driving, but don’t like the idea of having to sit next to people whose skin tones are darker than theirs.

Granted, the movement has enough powerful backers that it’s managed to con a few progs who should know better. The chief example: Dean Zimmermann, who used to be a prominent Minneapolis politician and Green Party member, until he was caught taking bribes a few years ago. (Zimmermann and his followers claim he was “framed”, a tale that Zimmermann can get away with pushing so long as neither he nor the FBI authorize the public release of the FBI tapes catching him in the act, tapes shown at his trial.)

A PBS host in Dallas made it into the bigtime by being the focal point opposing DART rail. He’s the darling of the anti-immigrant and pro-taxenders there, who, incidentally, are losing their hold on city gov’t.

It’s been around in various forms since the days of Nixon. Its biggest successes, such as they are, are in airports, where the distances are shorter than those between a central city core and a typical white-flight exurb, such as, oh, the ones that make up much of Michele Bachmann’s congressional district. (Did I mention that Bachmann’s a big fan of PRT?)

Yup. There’s a reason pretty much any big city, even in Texas, is going to turn away from conservatism: They can’t afford it and it doesn’t work.

Privatized prisons? That’s another scam in itself.

Take the jackboot heels of the Koch Brothers and the Murdoch empire and those of their ilk who fund the Tea Party zombies off the throats of America’s Middle Class.

The freebooters who grab hand-over-fist the treasury of the country for their own selfish greed. The privatizers who dip their beaks like Sopranos.

Restore the revenue. Tax the rich.

In Costa Rica, ‘freebooters’ translates as ‘filibusteros’, which I always enjoy.

“Restore the Revenue: Tax the Rick!

That should be a bumper sticker and a rallying cry!

Just this morning we were given another reminder that our wealthy overlords, the “engines of job creation”, don’t give a shit about creating jobs for anyone but themselves:

The Commerce Department last week reduced its estimates of economic growth in 2010 and early 2011. At the same time, it said corporate income was much better than it had thought. Using newly available data from 2009 corporate tax returns, the department raised its estimates of corporate profits by 8.3 percent for 2009 and 10.8 percent for 2010.

The new figures indicate that corporate profits accounted for 14 percent of the total national income in 2010, the highest proportion ever recorded. The previous peak, of 13.6 percent, was set in 1942 when the need for war materials filled the order books of companies at the same time as the government imposed wage and price controls, holding down the costs companies had to pay.

In the first quarter of 2011, the latest figures available, the new estimates indicate corporate profits accounted for 14.2 percent of national income, well above the 13.1 percent that had previously been estimated.

Sorry, I meant to type “Tax the Rich!” But I also wanted to thank Phoenix Woman for this diary as I too had never heard of PRT. It adds one more thing to be wary of to an already long list.

I am a strong follower of the great Che Guevara so my revolutionary bona fides are apparent, but you can’t force Americans into mass transit. Pick an issue that will resonate with the masses. Capitalism is the cause of our current problems,this must be preached(sorry for that word)every day.Barrack is trying to tell us and we are not getting the message.

The demand is going to be served by electric Zip cars. At a much lower per person cost. All that’s needed for that is cheaper battery technology. PRT’s are a design from the ground up proposition. Even large hospitals and manufacturing plants (the few that are left) that have a lot of single-person trips use small light rail with no PRT service. And pay for mostly empty transit cars for 3/4 of the day.

OT. I am getting a whole lot of amusement from the FDL ads. The latest one essentially asks, “Did you know your criminal records were public records?” The Mitt Romney ad the other day was amusing as well.

And article on transportation apparently draws a Ford commercial truck ad. Now, that’s a better neighborhood than “Posterize your photo”.

PRT is also being promoted and studied by Sweden’s Institute for Sustainable Transportation, a group that sees PRT as a part of an integrated mass transportation system, extending the reach of traditional trains and subways into areas that are not densely populated enough to support other systems. Systems like this are being actively tested and implemented in small scale by company’s like Korea’s Vectus.

American public transportation faces huge problems because almost all of our resources are invested in parking, cars, and roads while far too little is invested in walking, cycling, and the entire range of transportation options that include high speed rail, regional rail, local rail, trams, buses, shared vehicles, et cetera.

If the pot of money were the right size, PRT would be one of the answers that would make sense in some areas. Instead, we see vicious debates between advocates for various modes, while we fail to invest adequately in any of them.

But as with many things, innovation in transit will not come from the US, because our political system is so badly corrupted.

This is obviously a scam to bilk the government of scarce resources for a really bad idea that will never actually materialize. The rich will get richer and the rest of us can go suck eggs. That is if we can afford eggs.

As far as consevative governance in Texas, we have far to many rednecks and religionist nuts who could never support those dirty, liberal, commie, pinko, terrorist-lovin’, latte drinkin’, homo marryin’ democrats.

In America, PRT is and has always been used primarily as a way to peel off transportation money from transport modes that work, and work well, by playing (subtly and otherwise) to the racist fears of white exurbanites. (See also the graphic at the top of this post, from a pro-PRT brochure.) Its proponents are addicted to sockpuppetry and ballot-box stuffing (virtual and otherwise), as shown here. They’re also not fond of transparency: They rely on closed-door meetings to push their product.

Wow! Thanks for this too. Those numbers are significant and I really do believe that we have enough evidence, combined with the suffering of the American people, to make the case for a real populist uprising. Cries of class warfare have shut down the left whenever there were calls for fair taxation, but we should be able to make the case that the corporate/elite class has been waging war against the middle class for the last 30+ years, and that is why Americans quality of life has been sucked into a deep hole. The problem we face is Obama, who masqueraded as a populist and gives our cause a bad name due to his corporatist policies that increase the pain, and the fact that the media is owned by the enemy.

I was just over at Truthout reading the Michael Moore article about how the breaking of the air traffic controllers strike August 5, 1981 was the beginning of the gutting of the American middle class. I remember that period of time well because a friend/colleague of mine was married to the head of PATCO in El Paso. I just remember how devastating it was to realize, even as a rather young person, the significance of the breaking of that union. Back then I remember thinking that we needed a revolution… hah! I had no idea then how bad things were going to get. We need a revolution NOW!

Here is the link to the Moore article:http://www.truth-out.org/30-years-ago-today-middle-class-died/1312641859

Yup. Kudos to Moore for remembering that PATCO was one of three unions that endorsed Reagan, the guy who would move to destroy them. (And that the AFL-CIO stupidly helped Reagan do it. Solidarity much?)

So about that revolution… I am a follower who is willing to work, but I am hoping there is someone who can lead us out of this nightmare.

Agreed, as long as you qualify it with “primarily”.

I just wanted to point out that the rest of the world doesn’t have political systems that are broken as badly as ours, and that transportation modes are being constantly assessed and reassessed based on energy efficiency, convenience, cost, and whether or not they work in a given setting.

If the US had a serious government, instead of a kleptocracy, we would have made very serious changes in our transportation systems plannings decades ago.

But we can’t even manage to build high speed or regional rail systems or decent bike paths or sidewalks at the local level, so it’s pointless to talk about the modes that might connect regional and human-powered systems.

Wow. Thanks for the story, sort of. Just when you’d thought you’d seen it all…

Are you the Aeolus who posts PRT diaries over at DailyKos? I tried to view this one, but I get this message: “You do not have permission to view this diary.”

You sound a lot like Gus Ayer:

My name is Gus Ayer, and I’m a City Council member in the fair city of Fountain Valley, California, currently taking my turn in the largely ceremonial position as Mayor.

Recently, I’ve been working with the Swedish Institute for Sustainable Transportation, which has been working to rescue the concept of Personal Rapid Transit from the clutches of crackpots, ideologues and anti-transit nutjobs. They recently sponsored the PodCar City conference in Uppsala, which I attended and spoke at, and their new Kompass group will help cities interested in new transit solutions to find a common direction.

As for how it works in Sweden: Not so hot.

This reminds me: Here’s a video of Gus Ayer talking about “transit-free, transit-oriented development”.

This is in essence a scheme for developers to get around local environmental regulations prohibiting big developments with no access to transit. (And that’s where you see the occasional progressive get sucked into this: the guy Dean Zimmermann was convicted of bribing happened to be a real estate developer.)

Big housing developments bring in a lot of people who need parking, wider roads, transit, etc. Expensive stuff for local governments – so some communities limit the unit size, and thus the profitability, of these projects.

A few developers have offered PRT as a cheap solution — which would be fine, except that, as folks dscovered in Alameda, it’s completely unworkable and much more costly than advertised:

Failures of computer-controlled systems are legendary. San Francisco’s MUNI Metro suffered a summer long “meltdown” after software controlling train switching went haywire in 1998. The new airport in Denver ended up scrapping a next generation multi-million dollar point-to-point luggage delivery system that lost and mangled suitcases and proved more expensive to operate than simply hiring people to do the work.

The Alameda Point project will be home to an estimated 9,000 jobs and 4,000 people, when complete. A size, critics say, that is simply too small for investing in an intensive mass transit system. “I don’t see Personal Rapid Transit as viable for that number of people,” said Stuart Cohen, executive director of the Oakland-based Transportation and Land Use Coalition. Cohen said grouping new housing and jobs around transit stops, providing free or reduced price bus passes to residents and employees and extending bus lines into Alameda Point with frequent service is a more realistic approach.

We’re talking about something that is tough and costly to implement even for airports, where the total distances involved are short. Imagine the skies of the suburbs filled with overhead pod rails shuttling people downtown and back. (Ironically, many of these same people object to the unsightliness of overhead lines that power mass-transit light rail trains, but these lines block out far less of the sky than would a similar network of pod rails.)

I read through your working links to arguments against PRTs, and the ones that work (the CUPR link is broken, and searching their site for PRT or ‘personal rapid transit’ returns 0 hits). The arguments boil down to two categories — 1) conservatives support it, so it must be bad and b) certain previous attempts (particularly the Denver Airport baggage fiasco) have failed in a messy, public, and expensive fashion.

Conservatives are people who support many bad ideas, but it does not follow that an idea must be bad because it’s popular with conservatives. PRT is not charter schools or private prisons (the first is a failed experiment and the second is just transparently awful), and there’s no obvious commonality between them other than the fact that many conservatives are fond of them. This sort of cheap tribalism ultimately serves far-right ends by making good governance impossible.

The second is a slightly better argument, but it’s ultimately lacking, for two reasons. First, every technology you depend on had a significant history of early and often disastrous market and/or technical failure. What is really important is how well other practitioners learn from those failures and improve. Second, there are examples of complex systems that are similar to PRTs (i.e. autonomous movement of cargo over a complex and densely interconnected set of routes) that perform well, such as Amazon’s automated warehouses.

The efficiency argument is a bit of a red herring — what’s really important is the ratio of cargo/passenger weight moved to the total mass moved. Cars really suck for this — almost all the gas you burn goes to moving the car from point A to point B, not moving you from point A to point B. A full bus is a bit better, and rail masks the issue due to exemplary efficiency of steel wheels rolling on steel rails. PRT proposals are all predicated on cars light enough so that the total mass moved per passenger is less than a bus or train.

That brings me to my last point, which is that distances aren’t nearly as important to the difficulty of successfully implementing a PRT-type system as is the number of interconnections in the system. A PRT system that mimicked a commuter rail line would be much simpler than one that tied together a bunch of stations in an urban core, even if the total track length was ten times longer. It’s much like a computer network that way — 5000 machines in a single room form a much more complex network than two machines on opposite sides of an ocean.

I don’t think PRT is ready for prime time, btw; it needs to build a much more substantial experience base in less challenging conditions (like airports) before it can be rolled out on a larger basis.

The real question is whether and how well it can implement the essential properties of a good public transit system. Four important ones are speed, ride cost, ubiquity, and time flexibility.

Speed — a successful public transit system must be almost as fast or faster than a car over comparable routes during rush hour. Without this, only people who can’t afford cars or can’t use them for some other reason will use it with any regularity. The thing I miss most intensely about living in NYC was taking the subway everywhere — fast and not too expensive. I’d love to take the bus to work now… but it would take me two hours each way (plus traffic), instead of an average of 40 minutes each way in my car. This is why bus systems that run on public roads are doomed. They’re always going to be much slower than driving your own car. Bus rapid transit (BRT) with dedicated roadways can work — I liked Quito’s system when I saw in in 2004. BRT without the dedicated roadways is just a set of gilded bus stops. Most of the PRT systems that have entered hardware development so far aren’t fast enough to meet this requirement under many circumstances.

Ride Cost — it should be cost comparable or cheaper than driving to work. In cities with truly excellent public transit systems, like NYC, London, Paris, or Boston, it’s often cheaper to take public transit. This is largely a matter of resource requirements and technological maturity, and PRT definitely isn’t there yet.

Ubiquity — In cities that grew up around their transit systems, like NYC, everything worth going to is within a few blocks of a real transit stop, not a bus stop or similar cruel joke. This is where PRTs have real potential to shine, due to the (presumably) lower cost per linear foot of track than light rail or subways.

Time flexibility — An excellent public transit system runs frequently and 24 hours a day. A passable one must permit significant schedule flexibility on the part of users. There is, for a bad example, a commuter rail line that runs from a mile or so from my house to a mile or so from my job. I’ve never taken it, because it consists of three trains inbound in the morning and three outbound at night. The times are inconvenient for my schedule and would stick me with a very long bus ride if I happened to be held up at work or otherwise prevented from catching the last train home at 1830. This is another property which a mature PRT system should really shine at — there’s no reason to reduce service at any time of day, because the marginal cost of maintaining service in the middle of the night is very low.

PRT is a potential future transit option, not a current one. That will change when someone successfully rolls out a system in an urban area.

1) All the links I’ve posted (both in the posts and in comments) work. Otherwise I wouldn’t have posted them.

2) Hoo boy. Nice total (and deliberate?) misreading of my post there. Sounds all too reminiscent of the way PRT boosters (especially those trying to hide their advocacy) make their arguments. Oh, and you get extra marks for hijacking progressive terminology to serve regressive ends. Attacking the racism underlying the PRT push is “tribalism”? I think not.

But of course deception and secrecy are a key reason why PRT’s been allowed to stay on life support for so long. If PRT had any legitimacy, the PRT vendors would comply with EPA requirements to have open, public meetings about their projects. Instead, the PRT guys shun the public process like vampires shun daylight:

According to a Jan. 20 article in the Winona Daily News, a meeting where the public could have asked questions was for Winona City Council members only, “While there was little discussion of PRT during the meeting, the vote came after council members examined the system during a pre-council informational session that lasted more than one hour.”

I recall a similar PRT “informational session” for Minneapolis city officials only on March 26, 2005. When a proposal for a PRT project later came up for a vote in committee, the PRT promoters failed to show up and the matter was tabled. More recently, public officials in Daventry, England, complained that PRT promoters would not show up at public forums to answer questions. The Minnesota Department of Transportation held a “PRT workshop” Aug. 18, which cost $50 to attend and was not a public meeting. Why are PRT promoters avoiding the public?

The people in Daventry, a British city of 22,000-odd souls most famous for being the site of the first successful practical radar demonstration, got fed up with the secrecy and deception of the PRT promoters. They showed up en masse at the annual town meeting of 2009 and told their public officials “pod off!”

Considering all the concern about social and environmental equity, transportation for low incom travelers, etc, it is remarkable this article fails to considr the on demand direct to destionation non’stop service PRT provides to about 30% who do not drive.

Otherwise it they are relegated to inconvenient slow mass transit. Vehicles that have hardly changed in 100 years.

And PRT saves even more energy than the new efficient autos that are appearing.