The PRT Experience- City by City
CINCINNATI
The $625,000 OKI Central Loop Study put the final nail in coffin of PRT in this burg. But , you wouldn't know it from the PRT publicity machine that still mentions Cincinatti as a city where PRT is being "considered".
From An Editorial on the Cincinnati Experience with PRT:
http://www.cincypost.com/2001/aug/21/edita082101.html
"The Sky Loop system seems more likely to fly in the desert enclave of
a Saudi sheik or in the inhospitable climates of northern American or European
cities than here. In the grand Cincinnati tradition, let's give them the honor
of being first. "
...and the post-mortem:
"....John Deatrick, Cincinnati's engineering director, said the city concluded after many meetings that the sky loop was not the best alternative for downtown and Over-the-Rhine. The city was concerned about drawing people away from street-level businesses and fitting the rail and its supporting pillars on narrow city streets."
http://www.cincypost.com/2001/sep/26/oki092601.html
DENVER
John Caldera of the Independence Institute in Denver: http://i2i.org/article.aspx?ID=669
".... it wouldn’t be the first time Colorado taxpayers have been sold a “bill of goods” on fantasy transportation systems.
In 1973 the gullible, but well intentioned folks in Denver voted themselves
a half cent per dollar sales tax to purchase a transportation system right out
of a “Jetsons” cartoon. It was called Personal Rapid Transit:
100 miles of track with 800 small, driverless, automatic cars that would zip
passengers to their destination with the press of one button, without any stops
in between. The tax, which was to retire in the early 1980’s, is
still in place today, but all RTD has to show for this system is some rusted
test track by Broomfield.
The promises being made by the monorail proponents are almost identical to the
claims made by the builders of Denver International Airport about its infamous,
first-of-its-kind baggage system. If you remember, once the baggage system
was developed, it would be a prototype for the world and we’d make gobs
of money from royalties. What we got was a two-year delay in opening DIA
as it went billions over budget. The system that only sliced and diced
luggage was scrapped, as Leno and Letterman had a field day with it.
Ever notice that the proponents of this monorail tax increase only show artist
conceptions of a mountain monorail and never a picture of an actual one from
anywhere in the world? That’s because the technology simply doesn’t
exist. "
SANTA CRUZ
Monorail proposal mulled in Santa Cruz -By Regine Labossiere
LOS ANGELES TIMES SANTA CRUZ
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/transportation/7630885.htm
"... No SkyWeb monorails have been built, and the company was hoping
Santa Cruz could be a model for other cities. Jeral Poskey, the firm's director
of business development, said testing the personal rapid transit system would
boost the city's economy. For each mile of track built, 128 jobs would be created,
Poskey said, and every time another city wanted to implement SkyWeb, all the
engineering, planning and manufacturing would be based in Santa Cruz, creating
more jobs. Skeptics say the cost and the risks are too great in the current
economy. Building a full SkyWeb monorail would cost the city an estimated $150
million."
The interesting thing to note about this article is the claim that PRT would create engineering and manufacturing jobs in Santa Cruz is the exact same claim made by supporters of PRT in Minneapolis. Another point of interest is the confusion over terms "monorail" and "PRT" -they are two different systems.
SEATTLE:
The PRT gadgetbahners are very active in Seattle.
In Seattle a referendum resulted in a decision
to build a monorail instead of
conventional, surface transit. Now the monorail plan is turning out to be a
huge boondoggle. Some cities have to learn the hard way:
http://www.WhatDoesItLookLike.com/
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/transportation/161039_monorail18.html
http://www.exordia.net/monorailrecall/23reasons.htm
"Concerns over how the new Seattle monorail is to be built are giving ground to a nagging new question: Will it be built?":
http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0409/040303_news_monorail.php
MINNEAPOLIS
Right wing Republicans, clueless Greens and dumbed-down DFLers have formed a wacky tri-partisan effort to build a PRT system in Minneapolis. Funding for the test track was stopped at the legislature. Now that the Hiawatha LRT Line has turned out to be a HUGE success, less people are willing to believe PRT's anti-LRT propaganda. It's highly unlikely PRT will get funding for their test track at the next legislature...but, it looks like they're still going to try.
They still have work to do spreading anti-transit propaganda. Minneapolis and Saint Paul are looking at trolleys. There's growing support for LRT and commuter rail. There's increasing opposition to highway projects. The gadgetbahners will always be out there in the neighborhoods with their brochures and PowerPoint presentations, wasting everybody's time.
"....Anderson, a former University of Minnesota engineering professor and the president and CEO of Minneapolis-based Taxi 2000 Corp., has spent more than 30 years trying to win over converts to his futuristic vision of personal rapid transit (PRT). That work found an audience in Cincinnati and suburban Chicago in recent years, although public transit officials in those cities eventually backed away from his proposals, scared off by a still unproven technology and its potential high costs."
http://www.finance-commerce.com/recent_articles/020614b.htm
".....Much remains undone. Taxi 2000 still faces doubt from investors and
the established mass-transit industry, which claims it would be unworkable or
too costly.
The Santa Cruz, Calif., City Council, for example, recently voted down a plan
to study the company's system. A city official told the Los Angeles Times that
SkyWeb was untried and ahead of its time. "
http://twincities.bizjournals.com/twincities/stories/2004/01/12/story3.html?page=1
MORGANTOWN
The PRT proponents will point to Morgantown as a success story until you find the many flaws in the system...then they say Morgantown isn't real PRT. Because it is essentially a "line haul system", Morgantown is really an AGT, Automated Group Transport like the familiar "people movers" you may have ridden in an airport. Not glamorous.
Some of the features it shares with PRT, however have a lot
of problems, which is why it was never adopted elswhere.
"Ah, PRT, the future of transportation. West Virginia University [wvu.edu]
has had it's own PRT [wvu.edu] (Personal Rapid Transit, also known by the students
as Pretty Retarded Train) system since the early 1970's. The PRT serves as the
primary mode of transportation between the two main campuses for thousands of
students every day.
In fact, this morning I was riding the PRT to my CS lab, when I experienced
first hand one of the minor glitches in the computer system that controls the
PRT.
The computer system is still the original one from the 70's, housed in a warehouse-like
building, mainframes with magnetic tape reels and all, running programs written
in Fortran by the engineering students that built the thing, with all the processing
power of the average digital watch.
Anyways, the PRT car I was in was right in the middle of the long straight stretch,
having reached it's top running speed of about 40 miles per hour, when the power
went out. The little electric cars are designed so that when the power goes
out, the wheels lock up.
So, our PRT car goes from 40 mph to a dead stop in under 1 second. I was immediately
reminded of physics class; objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted
upon by an outside force. I was standing up at the time. Fortunately, the outside
force acting upon me was the soft and squishy back of the person in front of
me. The people sitting in the front had the less pleasant experience of having
their faces acted upon at 40 mph by the front plexiglass window.
So, yeah, PRT all the way!"
".....In its early years, Morgantown gave the GRT technology a poor start.
During its 1972 inaugural run, a car with President Richard Nixon's daughter
Tricia took off prematurely, in front of national media.
"They [the politicians] undertook the Morgantown PRT project but placed
unreasonable time constraints on it to get it up and running before an election,"
says Mr. Schneider, professor emeritus of civil engineering and urban planning
at the University of Washington. "It had a number of start-up problems
and received a lot of ridicule in the press."
http://search.csmonitor.com/durable/1998/11/19/p11s1.htm
DULUTH,
Sad Puff Piece about PRT in Duluth:
http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/news/breaking_news/7975729.htm
CARDIFF, WALES
Assembly shelves grant for Ultra taxi...
FUNDING for a futurist new transport system has been frozen just a fortnight
after it began trials.
Last year the National Assembly announced grants which could exceed £15m
for the Ultra system of driverless passenger pods.
The system was to have started carrying passengers at Cardiff Bay in 2005, with
the elevated track later being extended into the city centre. Yesterday, however,
Transport Minister Sue Essex said the grant for Ultra was being withheld because
of uncertainty over its finance.
http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0750expats/expats/page.cfm?method=full&objectid=12590158
An ambitious plan to create a system of futuristic
driverless taxis round Cardiff has been dealt a blow by the Welsh Assembly.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/2714309.stm
Rosemount
According to the PRT propaganda, Rosemount, Illinois is still "considering" PRT. I have found no evidence of this.
Sometimes it's difficult to get city officials to talk about how they were snookered by the gadgetbahners. They're embarassed and they just want to forget about it. Officials need to come forward and expose the PRT flim flam so other cities can be spared the hassle.
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