The Patriarch of PRT, Sheffer Lang.

 
Shef Lang (1927-2003) was the Chairman of the Board at Taxi 2000.  If anything characterized his career it was pure hatred of transit. He described buses as "no see ums" because to him, they were always empty. His style was confrontational, macho, take no prisoners. An aide to a St. Paul city councilmember said that every time she heard him talk she wanted to go home and shoot herself.
 
He relied a lot on his year or two as Assistant professor at MIT to give him academic credibility. He worked as a railroad administrator at the U.S. Department of Transportation. Those in the know regard Shef Lang as more of a "railroad mortician". He regarded Amtrak as "19th Century" and advocated it be scrapped. At the Citizen's League and at the University of Minnesota, Shef Lang railed against anything on rails.

Given Shef Lang's outspoken, virulent hatred of transit, his advocy of automobiles and highways casts doubt that PRT and the Taxi 2000 Corporation he headed was anything more than a cynical scam to derail public policy that would help Minnesota become less car dependent.

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Sheffer Lang allowed himself to be interviewed for a City Pages article about the Hiawatha LRT line. He didn't identify himself as the CEO of a corporation that was potential competition (ha ha) for LRT. He instead used his Univerity of Minnesota credentials to rabidly bash LRT like a maniac. It's fun to read the story now that LRT has proven to be such a HUGE success in Minnesota.

"Later I talked to a good friend of mine who is one of the foremost experts on transportation in Canada. 'Everybody says this is the future,' he told me. 'It is kind of a monument to an idea.' Then he said, 'Better you should build pyramids. At least they don't have any operating costs.'"

http://www.citypages.com/databank/19/918/article5511.asp

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http://www.skywebexpress.com/news/news-2003-01-16-lang.shtml

"....Our last visit was to Shef’s office at M.I.T. where he was Professor of Transportation. In several positions in the U. S. Government including a term as Federal Railroad Administration, he had followed the federally sponsored studies on new transit systems including PRT. The one specific thing I recall from the meeting is that he told us that he and his colleagues had calculated that if Boston ripped up all of their rail systems and replaced them with PRT with the same line and station locations it could handle the traffic carried by the rail system at substantially lower annual cost. This is an excellent example of Shef’s forthright, honest, statement of facts that many don’t want to hear and are unpopular in political circles."

-J.E. Anderson
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http://faculty.washington.edu/%7Ejbs/itrans/lang.htm

Shef in his own words:

""Marketization" is a simple concept with enormous power over the complex problems our fast-changing economy throws at us, an economy that changes so fast just because it is largely market-driven. Let the market sort it out. There is no longer goodreason to reserve so many of our transportation decisions to governments instead of letting the market sort them out. The time has come to "get with the program." We have already done some of what needs doing, but there is a lot more left to do. "

http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/pubs/fedgaz/02-03/rail.cfm

“The Washington-New York market has a little chunk of that [high-speed rail] market, and they can have it. And there are people who look at that and say, 'You know, if this were run by a private corporation instead of by this Mickey Mouse government-supported operation, mainly Amtrak, they might be able to hang in there as a private entity and do reasonably well,'” Lang said. “But this is 19th century technology—we should never forget that. It was great then, when the alternative was buggies on unpaved roads or stagecoaches or riverboats chugging along at 3 or 4 mph up and down the Mississippi. But this is no longer the case. The highway sets the standard. ... Behind every single one of these [rail] initiatives is a bunch of people who are convinced ... that the automobile is the curse of modern civilization.”

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