Bill James, founder and CEO of the would-be Personal Rapid Transit vendor Jpods, dropped in on the Hennepin County Regional Railroad Authority meeting yesterday to urge the county to adopt a resolution to give Jpods the right-of-way to build PRT in Hennepin County.
James says there there are three companies in Minnesota that can build PRT and create "several hundred jobs in Minnesota in the next 12 months" - that's total nonsense.
Bill James then asked for "a favor" - a resolution that would give companies that claim they could build transit systems that are privately-funded, getting all their revenue from the fair-box "non-exclusive access to rights-of-way". Bill James also claims he has agreements to build Jpods in China.
Bill James said he wants to build Jpod "feeder lines" to connect to the Hiawatha LRT.
PRT promoters will tell you there is grassroots support for PRT. Whatever public support PRT had in the past, it has all but vanished. Internet PRT forums are quiet - the last post on the Minnesota PRT forum is June, 2010 and the last post on the Seattle PRT forum is February, 2010. A handful of PRT promoters and would-be inventors opine on the Transport Innovators Google forum, but few of the participants fit the definition of grassroots.
Looking around the internet, there's the moribund Sky Loop Committee in Covington, Kentucky. The Skyloop website used to have a news page which apparently has been removed. An archived Skyloop web page has this news item about what happened to PRT in Cincinnati:
September 25, 2001 The Central Area Loop Study Committee (CALSC) of OKI voted to not recommend Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) for adoption as the transit technology for linking the downtowns of Cincinnati, Covington and Newport. For more on the outcome of the Central Area Loop Study (CALS) go to Central Area Loop Study Ending, including the paper "Why the Central Area Loop Study Committee Failed to Adopt PRT" and the CALS Draft Final Report (DFR) Rebuttal Documents..
The "Loop Study", which began early in 2001, studied monorail, personal rapid transit, light rail, streetcars and buses. The Central Area Loop Study, as it was known, concluded in October 2001 that any further study of monorail and PRT in the urban cores of Cincinnati, Covington and Newport should be eliminated. Any additional study of surface alternatives should be conducted and incorporated as an integral part of the proposed Regional Rail Plan. This left the use of light rail, streetcars and buses as alternative systems.
PRT websites litter the internet. Years ago, there was something called Saint Paul Personal Rapid Transit with the unfortunate acronym SPPRT. There is another website for a SPURTS.org. There's a website for PRT promoters in Santa Cruz... there's likely more if you bother to look.
The so-called Morgantown PRT (it's a mundane people-mover) was the subject of a student newspaper editorial after a malfunction created a "fireball" and filled a vehicle with smoke. The cost of fixing the Morgantown boondoggle is $93 million.
Forman said three-prong brushes on PRT vehicles can be become misaligned, scraping the ramps that guide the vehicles due to carbon buildup from the machinery.
The scraping brushes, carbon buildup and speed of the vehicle can cause a "fireball effect," he said.
"It would take a substantial fire for the vehicle to be engulfed or for the passengers to be in any danger," Forman said. "The outside (of the vehicle) and the carpet inside are completely fire resistant."
Because the Feb. 25 incident happened in a low-speed area, more passengers were subject to seeing more of the fire than if the PRT was traveling fast along the track, he said. Usually, impending flashes or fireballs happen very quickly, Forman said.
PRT employees, who call the occurrences an "HV1," locate the short circuits on the track to fix areas where the buses could be scraping because of carbon buildup.
Students should insist on an independent investigation to determine whether the "fireball effect" is dangerous.
The forum includes experts on a variety of technologies, including: Mark Fuhrmann of Minneapolis Light Rail; Hugh Kierig of the University of West Virginia at Morgantown's personal rapid transit system; Chris Perkins of Unimodal Personal Rapid Transit; Jim Spalaiskas of Bombardier; Michael York of Cleveland Euclid Corridor; Randy Woolwine of Doppelmayr.
It’s pretty safe to say anyone who has ridden West Virginia University’s PRT system has some kind of horror story.
Typically, it’s the same complaint – it breaks down or it’s is late getting to one station over another. However, recent incidents have proven to be more serious.
We’ve had multiple reports from riders about seeing a PRT car filled with smoke and a fire erupting in one of the cars Thursday.
Students in the car were then forced to walk the tracks as the system came to a complete stop – a safeguard for such incidents.
However, these incidents have been downplayed by the University.
The issues were attributed to "minor problems" and "arching electrical phases on track" that "caused a flash and cloud of smoke," according to Director of Transportation and Parking Hugh Kierig, by way of Becky Lofstead, assistant vice president for University Communications.
As reported in Monday’s edition of The Daily Athenaeum, University spokesman John Bolt said there had been several electrical problems but none were major.
The PRT is synonymous with its problems, despite continual reassurances from University-provided statistics of high reliability and constant uptime.
The system is a flawed behemoth. There isn’t enough money to completely overhaul the system, despite constant funding being poured into it for upgrades.
Most recently, the University closed the system for an entire summer, spending $2.5 million on track and system issues. These upgrades weren’t designed to fix all issues, and they haven’t.
Two fires on PRT last week causes trouble for students
A passenger’s photo shows the damage as a result of recent problems.
Several West Virginia University students have reported an explosion on the tracks of the PRT Friday and a fire in a PRT car Thursday, but University officials are denying the incidents occurred.
University officials attributed the disruption in PRT service to minor problems.
"There are some rumors going around on Twitter and some misinformation," said Becky Lofstead, assistant vice president for University Communications. "But there was no explosion or fire or anything."
John Bolt, WVU spokesperson, said though there were several electrical problems with the PRT Friday, none were major.
"My last word was that it was taken care of," he said.
Calls to WVU’s Transportation and Parking Department were not returned by press time.
Sounds like a cover-up. The article continues:
Krista Whites, a freshman theater major, was on PRT car 50 Friday afternoon around 1:40 p.m. heading to the Student Recreation Center when the car stopped between the Beechurst and Engineering stations. There was an "explosion right behind the car that was like five feet in the air," she said.
After an operator’s voice came over the loud speaker, and the car attempted to move again, but "there was another explosion – a bigger one – it left a pretty big hole in the track," Whites said.
The students in the car were then fetched by a PRT employee and walked to the station.
Paige Carver, a sophomore television journalism major, entered the Beechurst PRT station around 1 p.m. Thursday. When she entered the station, she said, a PRT car was waiting at one gate with smoke pouring out of its door.
Carver saw flames inside the car, she said, but could not determine where they originated from because the smoke blocked her view.
She waited for several moments before calling PRT assistance on her cell phone and explaining the situation to the operator. He took down the information, she said "but there was no shutting it down, no maintenance guy came, for the whole 15 minutes."
The car then left the station and another one came in its place.
For the past several years, the PRT guys have been praising the WVI PRT to the heavens.
Recently, on the City Pages Blotter, Peter "PRT Guru" Muller showed up in the comments to say this about the WVU PRT:
For those who follow the link to Minnesota 20/20 I offer a correction here because Mr. Avidor is careful not to allow comments to his postings directly.The assertion that "The Morgantown PRT has been plagued by glitches and breakdowns ever since" is simply wrong. Morgantown has now completed over 140 million injury-free passenger miles (regular transit would have injured over a hundred). It has done this at transit level of service A - as good as it gets. Yes, it had teething problems but the New York Times recently called it a "white elephant turned into a transit workhorse".
WVU students have made not one, but TWO You Tube Hitler-parodies of the WVU PRT.
"ULTra has a passenger-carrying capacity as great as LRT at 4800 seats per hour one-way at a 3 second headway.”
From a presentation at a January 12, 2008 ATRA conference:
Note: Slide #10 of the presentation mentions a shuttle application with a "5 second minimum headway". This only refers to the headway along the guideway. The small end-of-line stations shown in the shuttle graphic on slide #11 could not operate with headways below about 15 seconds. This is because all vehicles have to reverse direction at a single point within the station, and furthermore the limited number of berths would not give time to deboard and board passengers A larger station with more berths and multiple turn-around locations would be needed to process a vehicle every five seconds.
I have re-checked by email with the candidate and I can affirm again that Marcy Winograd does not support PRT.
Dear Ken,
I removed all references or recommendations for the PRT from my blog posts after learning more about the PRT as a boondoggle that wasted taxpayer money. Initially, I was excited about it as evidence that aerospace can move beyond weapons manufacturing into rapid transit, but after realizing that the PRT was an inefficient investment and waste of taxpayer money, I deleted all references to it from my postings.
Thank you,
Marcy Winograd
PRT promoters are misrepresenting the facts in support of a project that would cost taxpayers many millions of dollars... and that is a very serious matter.
In the recent past, the 6th ward has dealt with a Council Member that ineffectively pursued another Quixotic transit fantasy (Pod cars on elevated guideways) and I think that folks would do well to remember how that experience ended up while they evaluate their ballot.
As I stated in my previous post, our incumbents in wards 6, 8, and 9 have not been perfect (and they should not be expected to be perfect). I appreciate and value the roles of their challengers to put themselves out there in hopes of doing better and/or pushing our incumbents to do better. I just see things a little differently than they do: in wards 6, 8, and 9 we have excellent CMs that are doing an excellent job whereas the challengers would likely have us pursuing Pod Cars on elevated guideways.
Well, I can't really speak for him as a candidate, but Dave has followed PRT for some time and he knows quite a few of the people involved in CPRT. Dean Zimmerman, who is a Green City Council member in Minneapolis (neighboring ward) has been a strong proponent of PRT during his time in office (and like all the councilmembers, he's also up for reelection).
I get the impression there's conflict in the Green Party over this, as some see PRT as a dig on traditional mass transit like Light Rail. I'm personally very excited about PRT, as mass transit just doesn't work well.
There's been a lot of hype about the Morgantown PRT, like this segment from the bizarre Discovery Channel show (see yesterday's post):
A relic of misguided 1960's futuristic thinking, the so-called Personal Rapid Tranist (PRT) at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia now is in bad need of an overhaul and taxpayers may be asked to spend upwards of $90 million to fix it.
Here are two videos that lampoon the over-hyped people mover:
The futuristic Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) in Morgantown, West Virginia was designed to be an innovative "personal" mode of transportation... but it was jinxed from the start:
The Nixon administration rushed to have this trophy running before the '72 election, even as it was still being designed, driving up a budget that had (in the way of first efforts) been ludicrously underestimated. It was a great scare, and maybe karma, when at the launch a car took off prematurely with Tricia Nixon aboard. Congressmen and Reader's Digest railed against this "boondoggle," and the stigma has taken decades to shake.
... the PRT demonstration at West Virginia University at Morgantown, viewed at the time (mid to late 1970s) as the "proof of the pudding" of Personal Rapid Transit, in the words of the Metropolitan magazine article already cited. Originally estimated at $14 million by Prof. Samy E. G. Elias, an engineering professor at WVU and a major advocate of PRT technology, in the end the WVU system, 3.6 miles end-to-end with 8.7 total miles of guideway and 5 stations, cost over $126 million (as of 1979) – about $319 million in 2004 dollars.
While that amounts to only about $89 million per route-mile in 2004 dollars (not too bad for a mostly elevated transit system), it is far more than the bargain-basement prices typically promised by PRT promoters – and it does not include costs (such as real estate acquisition, public environmental mitigation, traffic control, etc.) which would be encountered by rapid transit planners trying to install a system in an urban area rather than a university campus. Moreover, the WVU experience engendered skepticism that such a PRT system with small van-like vehicles and small stations would really provide any sizable capacity in a more demanding environment to justify the relatively heavy investment that seemed to be indicated by the demonstration project. in effect, Morgantown was an ice-water bath for federal enthusiasm for PRT.
The Morgantown PRT is hardly "green" The concrete guideways have to heated with embedded pipes filled with anti-freeze to melt snow and ice. And the WVU PRT fries squirrels... lots of them:
It runs on electric rails above ground so when it rains or if a squirrel is unlucky enough to touch the rails then it breaks down. Nothing better than to look out the PRT window and see dozens of fried squirrels.
.. and according to WVU student blogs like this one, the PRT is extremely unreliable:
At least 15,000 students rely on the PRT's little yellow cars to get them where they need to go every day. To class, to the Rec Center, to the store. It will take you just about anywhere, when its working. First of all, it closes at 5 on Saturdays and isn't open at all on Sundays. Yeah, if you live downtown and want to work out during one of the few times you don't have class, too bad. Live up on Evansdale and want to do anything but work out? Oh well. Wanna go to church on Sunday? I hope your Methodist, or like hiking, cause those are really your only options.
A recent opinion piece in the The Daily Athenaeum gives more details about the WVU PRT's decrepitude and unreliability:
Part of the problem with the image of the PRT is that it breaks down without warning and without reason.
Students bemoan the fact that they are often late for classes or miss them altogether because of it.
It’s not a rare occurrence; it seems like there are always cars stuck on the rails above Beechurst Avenue.
In 2006, the PRT was down a total of 259 times for a total down time of 65 hours and 42 minutes, according to a 2007 Daily Athenaeum story.
According to a 2007 series of stories on the PRT, Bob Hendershot, assistant director of public safety and transportation for West Virginia University, said that one of the reasons for the recurring breakdowns stems the outdated power-collector arm – the sharp prong-like object on the individual cars.
Another issue is that the on-board computer system is severely outdated, according to one article.
... the vehicles are poorly designed and badly maintained:
The windows leak, the cars bump and jolt all across the tracks and half the time the heating is still on.
It’s not that I am expecting a first-class experience of some cross-national train journey, but the PRT ride, though brief, shouldn’t be completely miserable.
One of the biggest complaints of being stuck on a PRT is the experience inside the car.
When it rains, most cars lose two seats at the front and sometimes, if it’s a really bad storm, lose all four seats due to broken window seals that fail to keep the water out.
Another big issue is the heating and cooling system on board. It’s nice that the system even has those climate control devices, but when it’s the beginning of summer and the PRT is blowing out heat, it’s not a good combination.
Nor is it when the car breaks down and you’re trapped with a huddled mass of sweaty, angry people.
An article in The Dominion Post says officials at WVU are seeking to "modernize" the "antique" system and it will cost upwards of $90 Million. The university has hired a team of consultants to come up with a an exact figure. The cost of the consulting work is $565,183 for a ten-month study.
