Have the Citizens for Personal Rapid Transit Thrown in the Towel?

UPDATE: Shortly after this post appeared, the CPRT.org website reappeared - however, the dead-enders at CPRT have yet to administer similar life support to their moribund movement in the social media - as of today (9/14/12), the CPRT Facebook page has exactly 17 likes. The last entry is from 2011. Compare that with the Transit for Livable Communities Facebook page with 1,282 likes. I also looked for the CPRT Twitter handle, but that seems to have disappeared. Like everything about PRT, the CPRT as a grassroots movement is a sham.

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For many weeks, the website of the Minnesota-based Citizens for Personal Rapid Transit (CPRT.org) has been unavailable. A year ago, the ATRA publication Transit Pulse (PDF) said the following:

It’s a new ballgame for PRT visionaries. There has long been a network of PRT-friendly residents in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. Citizens for PRT was established around 1990. It was chartered in 1998 as a non-profit corporation. CPRT activity has waxed and waned, and today is clearly in growth mode. Several Board members tended CPRT’s booth at the annual Living Green Expo this past spring. CPRT was also at the Midwest Energy Fair last month. 

“It’s a whole new ballgame,” reports long-time ATRAmember Dick Gronning. The public ecology Expo was three times larger than last year. It is held at the Minnesota Fair Grounds as a major event in the civic life of the Twin Cities. This year interest in new-generation urban mobility was intense. For the first time ever, staff from Metro Transit visited CPRT’s table. They even stayed a while and talked. Gronning was surprised at how open and helpful Metro Transit was.

The author goes on to admonish "luddites":

Will uninformed union members and leftist bloggers counter CPRT advances in Minnesota? That remains to be seen.

"Leftist bloggers"?

If the CPRT is truly kaput, I doubt the pesky "PRT visionaries" will be missed. Here are old videos showing them pitching the pods at the Living Green Expo and defending convicted felon Dean Zimmermann (2008):



Personal Note:  I began blogging about the PRTistas back in 2004 when they managed to get a pod project included in the MN House bonding bill. I think it's safe to say, with the CPRT's exit from the public stage, state and local government in Minnesota will no longer consider wasting taxpayers' money on PRT. The pod boondoggle and allied "gadgetbahn" flim flams will surface from time to time elsewhere, but here in the Twin Cities, the public has lost interest in pie-in-the-sky transport schemes as our modern transit system takes shape. Unless the pod people make a comeback here, I doubt I will continue to add posts to this blog. I will keep this blog in mothballs for research purposes.

The future of reality-based transit in Minnesota is looking good. Here is a video showing what Minnesotans can expect in 2014:

VIDEO: Heathrow T5 Personal Rapid Transit Pod Customer Service: " Truly Shameless"

Pod promoters always downplay the possibility of failures for PRT. The fact is failure can happen with any mechanical system. What is especially terrifying for a passenger is to experience a failure without any human available to explain what is going on.

This happened recently to a passenger on the over-hyped ULTra pod and recounted in a blog post titled "BAA Heathrow T5 Parking Pod failure - No face for BAA Customer Services here":

This is a failure of the Heathrow T5 Business Parking Pod system where you pay premium parking rates. 

Its not bad that it failed, because these things do fail, what was worse was that they refused to send anybody down for the 20 minutes it was out of order.  

We had to listen to a voice hiding behind the screen, who after a while stopped picking up the help phone also.  

This is Customer Services which is truly shameless. It was 9.30pm, totally dark but BAA Heathrow refused to send any person down to assist or help calm passengers - they even stopped responding to the support telephone also.

Read the whole thing.

Here's the video:



Meanwhile in West Virginia, that other uber-hyped, so-called PRT system continues to cause headaches for its passengers: