Personal Rapid Transit in Indianapolis

In the sidebar on the right, you will see an incomplete list of cities that have a history that includes the Personal Rapid Transit boondoggle. Until now, I saw no reason to include Indianapolis because I did not have access to primary source material. Thanks to the wonderful librarians at the Indianapolis Public Library, I was able to access a few articles (scroll down past the video) about an attempt by PRT promoters in the Indiana State Assembly to fund the planning and building of a German version of PRT, Cabinentaxi in the late 1970's in the Circle City. The story is a bit murky after all these years, but it appears there were two prominent PRT promoters in the Indiana State Assembly who were able to leverage funding for the project.

 J. Edward Anderson:

In the late 1970's, through vigorous efforts of two Indiana legislators, Dr. Ned Lamkin and Richard Doyle, the Indiana Assembly appropriated $300,000 for a study of automated transit in Indianapolis including PRT. This study has been mentioned above in the discussion of Cabinentaxi. 

Cabinentaxi's German entity appeared to have gone kaput in the late 1970's, but continued to exist in typical pod-proselytizing-zombie-mode in Detroit, causing trouble for reality-based Michigan transit advocates. The demise of Cabinentaxi, appeared to end the chances of pods zooming around Indy as they do in this wacky video:

Taxi 2000 Corporation Kaput?

I haven't been following the PRT Boondoggle as much as I used to, but this popped up on the Transport Innovators forum last summer:

Dear Shareholders: 

This e-mail is being sent to let you know that the Taxi 2000 Corporation office at 8050 University Avenue NE, Fridley, MN 55432 is being closed and that all operations will cease June 30, 2017. Our angel investor decided last year that it was no longer in a position to continue investments into the company in view of their being no immediate prospects of a system contract. We have been unsuccessful in finding other investors, licensees or purchasers of the company assets and we are now out of funds. We thank the investor for supporting Taxi 2000 Corporation for more than a decade. We also thank all of the individuals that have supported the Company over its entire history, whether that support has been through your labor, your financial contribution or your moral support. While we still believe that it is a superior technology, in the history of inventions that has often proven to be insufficient to bring an idea to the marketplace.

Sincerely,

Morrie Anderson, 

Chairman Taxi 2000 Corporation 8050 University Avenue NE Fridley, MN 55432

I cannot confirm the demise of the Taxi 2000 Corporation (Skyweb Express), but their website is appears to be down.  Back in 2014,  in an article titled "Is Fridley Company the Future of Transit or 'Moribund'?", I asked this question:

"This is a company that's been around for a while and it's not produced a single pod system anywhere," Avidor said. "How do they produce a profit?"

This "moribund" company that injected itself noisily into nearly every public meeting about transit in Minnesota and elsewhere, that lobbied for taxpayers' dollars in city after city, now  appears to have quietly and stealthily given up the ghost. But Taxi 2000 lives... on the internet, confusing citizens about reality-based transit policy forever. Here's one of many You Tube videos featuring Taxi 2000: