The traders feared that the high track of magnetic pods would adversely affect their business. The traders sat on a dharna and raised slogans against the government’s decision. Traders resented that the administration was bent on dislocating the businessmen of the century-old Hall Bazaar and appealed to at least change its route so that the market business would not suffer.
The historians alleged that it would mar the historic structure of the city. The century-old residential buildings, especially those located on the left hand side of the route, was also an obstacle. In view of their weak foundation, there was threat to these structures when six-ft-deep gorges would be dug up to erect pillars for supporting the elevated track.
Amid all these hiccups, the necessary amendments were made in the original model of the project. The root was also changed. But changed root also faced the wrath of traders.
With reports of the state government mulling alternative route for the PRTS project, the members of Rambagh Bazaar Traders Association shut their shops and staged a protest. They warned the government not to take the PRTS route through their market. They even blocked traffic at Gol Hatti Chowk and later at Ram Bagh Chowk few days ago.
In this way the project is still lying in limbo amidst all these hurdles. Authority sat silent and passing the buck to each other. The shut their mouths saying, that the study of project is in process.
MORE than 100 Daventry townspeople voiced their opposition to proposals for a pod transport network in the town at a public meeting on Monday night.
Daventry Town Council held its annual town meeting at the Phoenix Centre, off Ashby Road, which gave any resident of the town the chance to ask questions, voice their concerns, or let their opinion be heard.
More than 100 people took the chance, with most of those present angry and upset with Daventry District Council's (DDC's) proposals for a personal rapid transport (PRT) scheme in Daventry (the pod network).
And so the pod scam continues to cause trouble around the globe....
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:
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 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.
With the technical data currently available, PRT (as a lower capacity, on-demand version of APM) has limited applicability for connecting the regional transit system and LAX, the primary market under study for the Airport Metro Connector.
This is in addition to the memo from a San Jose city official that stated the conclusion of a $1.8 million study that Automated Transit Network (AKA podcars, PRT) was infeasible. In another post I reported that the Minnesota Department of Transportation was not going to go ahead on a $1.4 million PRT study recommended by the University of Minnesota's Center For Transportation Studies.
Although the PRT concept has been around for half a century, the PRT vendors are still not ready for prime time.
No doubt the pod people will cry foul and claim the process was rigged. But, as I have noted before, would-be PRT vendors sabotage their own chances of selling their systems by not providing necessary info:
The amount of data available to support rigorous transit planning efforts, as is required for developing a regional transit connection to LAX,is still very limited. Key factors for evaluation are capital and operating costs, vehicle and guideway specifications, operating characteristics, maintenance facility requirements, and capacity and operating speeds. In June 2011, we met with ULTra, the company that developed the Heathrow PRT system, to gather information and to discuss what data were available to support evaluation during the AA. We were able to obtain some information from the Heathrow project given that it began operation later that year in September, but much of the data on modern systems are still preliminary with some information proprietary.
For many years, Personal Rapid Transit promoters have claimed that PRT was faster, better, cheaper than conventional transit. They also claimed the PRT "technology" was available now for implementation in urban areas. They were lying - what they really had to offer was small-scale demonstration projects that could hardly scale up to a city-wide system. Their much-hyped PRT "success" story, the battery-powered podcars at Heathrow and Masdar have failed to be considered for far more simple applications as airport connectors.
How many more studies do we need to restate the obvious? - PRT is an infeasible boondoggle.
Here's an ancient, hilarious PRT promotional video with pod hucksters attacking conventional transit modes as "old fashioned":
As is always the case with PRT projects - they begin with a lot of hype and hoopla and end with a whimper.
A memo from Hans Larsen, the Director of Transportation for the City of San Jose about a proposed Automated Transit Network (AKA podcars, PRT) at the San Jose Mineta International Airport titled ATN FEASIBILITY STUDY STATUS REPORT (PDF) has the following conclusions:
• The complexity and service requirements ofthe Airport ATN project exceed the technical capacity of the ATN systems currently available.
• There is no established regulatory process to support the construction of an ATN in the United States. This complicates efforts to accurately estimate the cost of building and operating an ATN system.
• The estimated cost of building the Airport ATN is less than building the APM preferred alignment, plus the ATN offers a higher level o f service and greater coverage.
• The estimated cost of operating the Airport ATN is comparable to the existing expenses of the Airport and VTA to operate shuttle buses on the Airport and between the Airport and the transit stations
The main reason for such absence of any progress in implementing PRT is simple: the basic concept of PRT is inherently unsound. It combines small vehicles, ideal for low density travel, with complicated, electronically controlled guideways that are feasible only for heavily traveled routes. Consequently, in suburban areas where carrying two to six persons would be optimal, construction of guideways is economically infeasible; on major arterials, where large passenger volumes might justify the construction of guideways, small vehicles are highly inefficient and cannot provide the required capacity. Consequently, the combination of the two features–small vehicle and complicated guideway– is paradoxical and makes the PRT mode impractical under all conditions.
How is it possible that this concept should attract so much interest and even government support for development in several countries? The explanation lies in the fact that the positive features of PRT are often exaggerated while the negative ones are overlooked. Thus, although it is true that PRT resembles the positive characteristics of the automobile more than any other transit mode, it is also true that due to this similarity PRT has the severe limitations of auto use in urban areas: low capacity, very high cost and energy consumption per space-km, and extremely large space requirements for stations, guideway interchanges, and vehicle storage areas. Aerial guideways and stations, in urban streets would be highly objectionable, not even considering the legal requirement for accessibility by the disabled.
These basic problems with the PRT concept were also part of the verdict of the $625,000 2001 OKI Central Loop study.
And now after San Jose wasted an additional $1.8 million to study the PRT, they've concluded the PRT concept is too complex and expensive even for an airport (the Heathrow pod shuttle, a loop with only two stations neither of them stand-alone and elevated is not a true PRT).
Already, the PRTistas at the Transport Innovators forum are howling with indignation. A quote from Would-be PRT inventor Jack Slade:
"What a lot of bullshit!! You have to build a "Regulatory System" before you can build anything? Are you really talking about the Land of the Free? People who think like this should be deported before they contaminate the rest of the population. I could pick other holes in their "Conclusions"....most of them are wrong....but it isn't worth it.
What else should we have expected from a broke and broken Democrat city government /steeped/ in liberal bureaucracy and dedicated to the green technology that Obama thinks is going to save our economy? *Green *was one of their original goals for this project and I'll bet was unmentioned in this memo because, like Solyndra, they couldn't force it to succeed. Needing to have a "Regulatory System" says, in two *perfectly *chosen words, what these people are all about -- that is, regulation, allegiance to AlGore and his climate chicanery, and more government. They couldn't decide (and couldn't afford it anyway since the public employee unions have taken all their money) after spending millions on consultants who couldn't spell PRT before bidding on this project, so they defer it to the Feds. The public and the market seemed to have been completely cut out of this process...
The PRTists begin waxing nostalgic over the halcyon Richard Nixon era and the Morgantown boondoggle. The Citizens for Personal Rapid Transit's Dick Gronning has this observation:
While this shows some of the good side of Republican thinking (there's
more), the bad side of the picture was that the Nixon administration threw scads of money at the project without any supervision. Nixon did the same thing with Affirmative Action. His administration REMOVED all of the constraints and supervision for Affirmative Action and threw even MORE $$$ into it. The policy seems to convey the message that human-kind is basically good. It doesn't work for me. Worse yet, there's the assumption that only a certain group have ethics.
David Gow has several websites promoting Personal Rapid Transit. The Seattle "Get There Fast" PRT website - gettherefast.org seems to be slow in reporting on the new proposal for PRT in David Gow's backyard. The news page at Gow's "kinetic" PRT website is also silent about the CTA PRT Seattle project.
I have been aware for a few months that this organization -- 'CenTran' -- has been in the works. However I had been under the impression what it's about is Son Of Green Line.
Instead, it looks like they're intending a 16-mile monorail+PRT (pod transit) system in the West Seattle to Ballard corridors.
Gow goes on to address the pod aspect of the plan:
However, there are a number of practical issues here. By the time we are ready to do a technology screening (let alone select a design for installation), will these vendors be ready to deliver and operate what could be the largest pod system to date? Will their systems be sufficiently proven in regular operation?
Most of all, I personally object to this local effort being mounted by a small group, out of the public eye, creating yet another transit bureaucracy.
If PRT is going to be done here, it needs to be part of the existing decisionmaking structure. It needs to be done by Seattle or King County, or even Sound Transit. The latter had planned to do a PRT project as part of the Link program ( http://bit.ly/GN66Yg ), but the expected Raytheon PRT program was cancelled.
I have misgivings that High Capacity corridor service might be too much too soon for a flavor of PRT (HCPRT) that hasn't yet been implemented, anywhere.
Gow concludes that the problem with the CTA pod/monorail plan is really institutional:
It's OK to hypothesize something that ambitious. But set up a whole new bureaucracy? Really?
Furthermore, local planning for circulation PRT and collector-distributor PRT have been done in SeaTac and Issaquah. We should look first at those service niches.
Will David Gow report his opposition to the Seattle monorail/PRT project at Examiner.com or his PRT promoting websites?
