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Mass transit is ripe for a revolution, but a new wave of speedy and specialized systems to move people still faces high hurdles in the quest for government grants and private investment. Figuring out how to break that stalemate was the big question at this year’s Podcar City, an international expo held last week at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.
Now in its ninth year, Podcar City is devoted primarily to the concept of personal-rapid transit (PRT), a fixed-rail system that moves individual “pods” carrying up to six passengers in what looks like something straight out of “The Jetsons” cartoons. Advocates describe the idea as a more user-friendly and affordable alternative to standard mass transit — it is automated and allows riders to pick their own destination, bypassing other stops along the line. At its best, advocates say a podcar system could cherry-pick the advantages of mass transit and personal autos while jettisoning the drawbacks.
The setting for the expo could hardly be more apt for the South Bay and its overwhelmed labyrinth of roads, highways and transit routes. Mountain View and its neighboring cities already have mass transportation options — including trains, light rail, buses and community shuttles — yet those systems are generally considered inadequate and inconvenient. Roughly three-quarters of workers in Silicon Valley still drive solo to their jobs every day, according to U.S. Census data.
The PRT concept has been around since the 1950s, but it has evolved along with technology. At last week’s event, entrepreneurs from across the globe showcased a variety of different takes on podcars, such as magnetic suspended railways, solar-powered systems and ground-based autonomous cars.
Since it first started in 2007, the Podcar City expo has been spearheaded by Ron Swenson, a Santa Cruz-based solar-power consultant. He easily stood out at this year’s Podcar event, sporting a wide-brimmed cowboy hat and an infectious smile as he mingled with the 100-or-so convention-goers.
There had never before been a better time for the PRT concept, Swenson said, since technological developments were bringing down the cost of a full system. Once the PRT concept gains a stronger foothold in the United States, he said he believes more communities would be racing to implement it.
“One of the reasons (PRT) hasn’t taken off yet is the designs have been too expensive. It’s been like buying a computer in 1975,” he said. “We hope to review the opportunities for communities to do something tangible.”
Could such a system take off in Mountain View? Swenson pointed out that he was scheduled to meet with council members from Mountain View and nearby cities on Monday to discuss ideas. Just days before the Podcar expo, City Council members signaled renewed interest in some kind of transit system that wouldn’t burden the already crowded roadways.
In fact, Mountain View had previously investigated creating a pilot project for SkyTran, a NASA Ames Research Park-based private company that builds high-speed podcar systems along an overhead electromagnetic rail. The company had created a basic proposal for a transit network through town that would connect various sites north of Highway 101 to the downtown area. Creating an 8.5-mile system would have cost between $60 million and $130 million, city staff estimated in 2010. When the idea came back for consideration last year, council members had largely soured on pursuing it any further.
Speaking at the expo on Friday, SkyTran chief scientist Robert Baertsch didn’t seem brokenhearted about losing Mountain View’s business. Since parting ways with the city, his firm received a major boost in seed funding from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, which opened many other doors for his company, he said. His 25-engineer team is now partnering with an Israeli firm to build a pilot track, which should be running by early January, he said. By the end of 2016, he hopes to complete a larger SkyTran loop through the city of Tel Aviv.
There is still ample opportunity for a similar pilot program in Mountain View, Baertsch said. Since last year’s election, he has met with three council members who were receptive to the concept, he said.
“It’d be good to build an equivalent (pilot program) here — it’s a very appropriate area,” he said. “We’d like an opportunity to sit down with the city’s planners.”
Several other speakers at the podcar event seemed to think that trying to cultivate government interest could be a waste of time. Since it is unfamiliar and new, PRT is a risky proposition for political leaders. Plus, the idea had little buy-in from private investors since the return-on-investment would be relatively meager over the short term.
“It’s a case of the inventor’s dilemma, because PRT and ultra-lightweight mass transit are disruptive technologies,” said Neil Sinclair, chairman of CyberTran International. “Human nature here is we’re all married to our cars in some unnatural way.”
That experience rang true for Fernando de Aragon, director of the Ithaca Tompkins County Transportation Commission in upstate New York. Around 2009, his region was investigating a $350 million PRT system, but those plans were ultimately scuttled because the full project couldn’t maintain a partnership of local, state and federal support. For PRT to be a viable transit option, the concept would need to be explicitly included in future federal transportation legislation, he said.
“(PRT) still doesn’t come up — it’s not recognized, it’s not known,” de Aragon said. “I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s a public-relations component to everything that goes on with this technology.”
But the U.S. has had one big success story when it comes to PRT and podcars. Since the 1970s, the West Virginia city of Morgantown, a city less than half the size of Mountain View, has operated an automated PRT circuit as its main transit option. The 8-mile system fully replaced the region’s bus system and cost $130 million to build — or about $426 million in today’s dollars when adjusted for inflation. Nevertheless, the Morgantown system has generally been hailed as an overall success for its high reliability and low cost. It still costs just 50 cents to ride, and fares cover most of the operating costs.
Many of the attendees at Podcar City said that society is at a crossroads for transportation, particularly with the advent of self-driving cars. Exactly what this technology would mean for PRT — and mass transit as a whole — became an open question at the event. Some believed autonomous cars would provide a better means to deliver riders to PRT stations while others felt it only make Americans more reliant on overcrowded roads.
Baertsch, the SkyTran researcher, put himself squarely in the optimist camp. He expected his prototypes to get to market around the same time as self-driving cars.
“I don’t see any threat,” he said.
Email Mark Noack at mnoack@mv-voice.com
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As part of the inaugural ArtWorlds event, the Community School of Music and Art will display mixed media works by artist Bryan Keith Thomas. Photo courtesy of the Community School of Music and Arts. -
In the French comedy-drama, “Haute Cuisine,” a chef is put to the test when she is appointed as the personal cook for the president of France. Photo courtesy of Wild Bunch. -
Dancers interact with computers in “Mainframe,” choreographed by Katharine Hawthorne and performed at the Computer History Museum Nov. 13. Photo by Benjamin Hersh. -
Children’s music duo Play Date brings their Ninja Pajama Party to regional libraries on Tuesday, Nov. 17. Photo courtesy of Play Date.
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*SIGH* Not again. “Podcars or “Personal Rapid Transit” is an idea that’s been around for decades yet never seems to actually get built or solve any real-world urban transportation problems. It basically combines the worst of both worlds: low vehicle capacity of the private automobile with the expensive infrastructure of a fixed guideway transit system. For certain niche markets, such as airports, PRT-type systems can work but scaling the concept into an urban setting is tricky.
This topic has been discussed at length. I recommend a couple of articles on the Light Rail Now website.
First, there’s “Let’s Get Real About Personal Rapid Transit” by Ken Avidor at http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_prt_2005-01.htm
Avidor points out that, “PRT has a solid 30-year record of failure. Its main purpose in recent years seems to have been to provide a cover enabling its proponents to spread disinformation about real, workable transit systems. Except for the occasional laboratory-scale prototype, PRT actually “exists” largely in computerized drawings, in promotional brochures, and in cute, ever-successful animated simulations on the internet.”
“The unsubstantiated claims of PRT proponents are always presented in the present tense as if the system is a proven success … which, of course, it certainly is not. Promoters never seem to fail to bash real transit, such as light rail (LRT), as “old fashioned technology”. Sadly, the media rarely check the veracity of PRT publicity and propaganda.”
A longer, more technical article is “Personal Rapid Transit – Cyberspace Dream Keeps Colliding With Reality” and can be found here: http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_prt001.htm
“Despite the persistent and fervent claims of its promoters, repeated attempts to implement a working PRT system, even in very small-scale scenarios, have invariably failed. Not a single PRT plan, during these promotional efforts over the past 40 years or more, has seen successful implementation even in a small test application, much less a major, heavy-duty, citywide rapid transit application. Early would-be PRT installations, such as the AirTrans system at Dallas-Ft. Worth Regional Airport, and the PRT at West Virginia University at Morgantown, eschewed any attempt to provide true PRT-style, small-vehicle, customized origin-destination service, and were implemented in effect as line-haul automated guideway transit (AGT) peoplemover systems with some innovative features (such as offline stations).”
And finally, the good folks at Light Rail Now have put up a helpful list of links to various Monorail, PRT, AGT, and “Gadget Transit” Analyses at http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_monorail.htm
The Mountain View City Council needs to realize that “podcars” are the latest manifestation of the PRT fad. With self-driving cars on the horizon who build a system that combines the worst aspects of public and private transportation. As Setty and Demery write, “In our view, it is a big waste of time advocating such “gee-whiz” options, given the severe limits of monorails and similar technologies such as PRT, when U.S. transportation problems are almost always sociopolitical and economic–not technical–in nature.” See http://www.planetizen.com/node/70
Does not seem feasible – but still a MUCH better idea than closing 2 lanes of El Camino to cars as proposed by VTA and recently approved by some city council members (who conveniently changed their opinions after the election).
Check out this article: http://www.citylab.com/tech/2014/09/personal-rapid-transit-is-probably-never-going-to-happen/380467/
Author Eric Jaffe points out that “Though the concept has been around for half a century, only five completed systems in the world can be reasonably defined as personal rapid transit: those in Morgantown, West Virginia, which opened in 1975; Rotterdam in The Netherlands (1999); Masdar City in Abu Dhabi (2010); Heathrow Airport in London (2011); and Suncheon Bay in South Korea (2014). While there’s been a noticeable uptick in the past 15 years, four projects in that span is still, in the report’s own words, ‘not enough to claim that there is an active market sufficient to support an industry.'”
“Upon closer inspection, it’s this attempt to be everything to everyone that creates some problems for personal rapid transit. As more people use the system, it becomes less able to accommodate individual demand for destinations, which renders it more of a traditional rail transit system—but without enough capacity to handle rush-hour crowds. Meanwhile, the direct-to-destination element still can’t beat the door-to-door service offered by taxi networks. In other words, personal rapid transit reproduces modes that already exist in the city, only less effectively.”
Hey, maybe they should just buy some used ski resort gondola systems.
Probably better than a T-bar.
😉
To all the skyTran naysayers: If you like your commute now, just stay with it, make no changes. Not only will you remain stuck in traffic but you will be there along with your good friends: electric car, computerized car, shared car, and hydrogen car…All surface vehicles are stuck in traffic and there are more cars and traffic coming.
If you like studies and reports as much as you do consider that by most accounts we will have 40,000 car fatalities in 2015 and that LSE and Duke have definitively established that the more roads you build the more traffic you get.
skyTran offers a system that moves you above traffic, never stuck in traffic, at 1/10th the cost of light rail, at speeds of up to 150MPH, no stopping at any one else’s station, no waiting on anyone else’s schedules, can be built in a matter of weeks (as all it requires are the replacement of existing lamp poles with skyTran lamp poles that also serve as skyTran infrastructure and e-bike charging stations.
But, hey, if you like the same ol’ same ol’ who are we to argue…
That propositions like PRT have supporters is only human nature. One need only look at the photographic documentation of the history of railroad locomotives and airplanes to find numerous ridiculous failure, each of which had its own champion. It is sad when these charlatan’s do manage to get substantial public resources misappropriated to these misguided ventures, yet that is their goal, with a profit in it for them of course. Often, as is the case with PRT, there are mediocre college professors trumpeting false information in an attempt to boost their own careers. One need only do a little research and exercise valid reasoning to see through the guise of PRT.
And what happens when these wonderful pods break down? Indifferent customer service, if this example from Heathrow is typical. http://rishidshah.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/baa-heathrow-t5-parking-pod-failure-no.html
Steve Ly, If you have to go back 3 years to find an unhappy customer, many of us would call that a pretty good track record!
There are many more YouTube videos of people praising the Heathrow pods with new ones being posted every few weeks. Have you considered their opinions too?
The Heathrow pods allow for zero waits or maybe a short wait of 1 minute or so with a quick ride to Terminal 5. This compares extremely well to the old system of waiting for a bus for 10 minutes or so, getting you and your luggage onboard, waiting while others do the same, then hoping traffic to the terminal isn’t too onerous.
The Heathrow Airport Authority plans to expand this system to the T2 and T3 terminals and other parking lots in the near future after they get major terminal construction completed. That says a lot about their confidence in the system right now.
Usage of this business parking lot is up and that suggests people are finding it more useful and friendly than before. Many PRT supports consider that a big validation for PRT.
Wow! Negativity from the peanut gallery, much? I can’t believe the naysayers. First it was, “this thing will never, can never work.” Then someone makes it work. Then it is “well, that’s the only one, there will never be another.” And someone builds another, and even a couple more for good measure. Then it’s “well, it doesn’t serve a whole community yet,” or “there aren’t enough systems to establish a ‘market.'” They just keep moving the goalposts. At some point, I am hoping that the naysayers will have lost enough credibility that they will slink back into the woodwork. On the other hand, a good point is raised by this crowd, that we should beware of charlatans and fly-by-night cons. By all means, let’s look carefully into what’s on offer and what is realistic and feasible to build. I have been watching SkyTran for many years, for instance, and am very excited to hear that they expect to get their demonstration track up and running in Israel by January. Adding a fudge factor, I will be satisfied if it is real by June of 2016. Best wishes, SkyTran! As well, other projects around the world continue to move forward. Eventually, there will be enough convincing “demonstrations” available for test-rides and inspection, that some US college campus, business park, or community will give PRT a try here. I wonder what new gripes the naysayers will put forth in the meantime.
“Society is at a crossroads for transportation, particularly with the advent of self-driving cars. Exactly what this technology would mean for PRT — and mass transit as a whole — became an open question at the event.” The solution for the future is a grade separated roadway for Self-Driving cars. For a lot less cost than High Speed Rail, an automated, solar powered, elevated roadway just for electric self-driving vehicles can be built along high traffic corridors. In the near future people could use their cell phone to call for a self-driving car to pick them up at home then drive to a station where they enter a high-speed nationwide mass transit network and are driven non-stop across town or across country and delivered to their destination. The cost for the trip could be no more than cost of travel in their own car and they do not have to drive. Please see: http://freedomtransit.com/
Ya, you are right, the more and more offices and new housings being built, and the roads not changing, the only outcome will be way more traffic.
Solution stop building all the new offices and Housing.
SkyTran
Better than taxis, busses, trains, subways.
Soon you will be seeing
whole city centers around the world without any cars whatsoever!
the only transportation allowed: elevated electric maglev pods [SkyTran] and electric trams,
all other cars [including electrics] will be forced to park outside city centers
thus traffic congestion in city centers will be eliminated.
Soon after that all cities around the world will ban cars!
and the only transportation allowed will be SkyTran or similar.
Also, all transportation between cities around the world
will be with the unbelievably fast Hyperloop, conceived by Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk,
completely eliminating highly polluting, inconvenient and expensive air travel.
The end of the oil age has come.
Welcome to the new 100% electron world.
http://www.skytran.us/benefits/
ff
Others far more informed than I on this subject have proven here that this is a failed concept that has been around for a long time that never has amounted to anything other then grief for its proponents. Let fools mess with podcars. There are far better proven investments.
Getting to specifics, if MV wants to provide improved transportation capacity to N Bayshore, its best option is to get poor, incompetent VTA to run a light rail spur from a huge parking lot on leased NASA land from the Bayshore/NASA VTA Light Rail Station directly to the heart of GoogleLand. The VTA light rail system presently is a total failure. Maybe it can find some redemption by helping solve the growing N Bayshore park-and-ride crisis — from Ellis St & NASA and NOT from downtown MV.
” that by most accounts we will have 40,000 car fatalities in 2015″
Please provide *one* legitimate source. For the last 150 years, conventional mass transit has done a wonderful job of moving people in high-density areas.
“skyTran offers a system that moves you above traffic, never stuck in traffic, at 1/10th the cost of light rail, at speeds of up to 150MPH, no stopping at any one else’s station, no waiting on anyone else’s schedules, can be built in a matter of weeks”
Is there a working installation that can demonstrate this, or is this just from the marketing brochures?
Has anyone ever wondered why there is no video of a working Skytran pod on youtube?