No Chance for Personal Rapid Transit Projects to be Funded by the Minnesota Legislature

Elections have consequences; in Minnesota, the last election slams the door on any chance of public funding for  PRT projects (there are a bunch, see below).

Both houses of the Minnesota Legislature are now controlled by the DFL. The MN Senate caucus just announced their choices for committee chairs and Senator Scott Dibble is Chair of the Transportation and Public Safety Division. Here's a quote by Senator Dibble from a 2011 article about PRT:

State Sen. Scott Dibble (DFL-Minneapolis), who heads the senate’s transit subcommittee, said that he thinks the proponents of PRT are sincere, but he dismissed their plans for implementation as that of “technophiles” who are not interested in examining the ramifications of a PRT line in terms of the overall multi-modal scheme, land use, economic development, mobility, urban form and the environment. 

“There’s this constant refrain, ‘Build PRT everywhere, all your problems will be solved,’ with no acknowledgement that it is a political impossibility and that we would be throwing a bunch of money at something that’s completely unproven with a lot if implications that haven’t been addressed,” Dibble said. “All I ever here from folks is personal-freedom rhetoric about going anywhere and everywhere, but what happens to the urban forest if you’re running these things all over the place.”

In short, PRT is soooo not happening in Minnesota.

Apparently, there are still pod people who hold out hope for PRT in Minnesota -  the ULtra PRT website still has a page up about "PRT Niche Options for Minnesota" and there is the  proposed $100 million pod project in Coon Rapids.

There's a list of Personal Rapid Transit projects in Minnesota on the Google Transport Innoovators forum:

* Coon Rapids for Rob Jacobs,

* Winona and Duluth for Taxi 2000,

* Bill James talked about an effort in New Jersey and a computer campus N. of Duluth,

* I think that Joe Lampe has an edge city to the N. of downtown Minneapolis

* Ed Anderson is quiet, but says that he has some irons in the fire.

List of PRT businesses is from a CPRT brochure (view on Google):

PRT Updates from Minnesota

JPods

Hull, MA passed a resolution supporting PRT. JPods expects to lease private land and build the first leg there in the next 4 months. New Jersey is considering declaring performance standards, allowing anyone access to public rights of way that can privately finance transport networks that exceed 120 mpg.

PRT International

Dr. Ed Anderson has been working for many years to acquaint planners and decision makers with the potential of an optimized version of PRT for solving urban transportation problems. He gave a presentation to the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority in December 2010. Dr. Anderson works on advising a number of people in various locations around the world on various PRT projects or pending projects. He is willing to give courses on PRT of any desired depth.

PRT Minnesota

PRT Minnesota’s current focus is on preparing a patent submission for their PRT mechanical design. PRT Minnesota is still
seeking funding to complete the technical development program and achieve manufacturing readiness.

PRT Partners

PRT Partners is based in the Minneapolis area and is headed up by Robert Jacobs. PRT Partners assembles teams, technology, and projects that solve specific urban transportation and land use challenges.

Taxi 2000 and Skyweb Express

Currently, Taxi 2000 is working with two financial institutions interested in implementing Skyweb Express projects using a private public partnership agreement. They are also working with corporations for implementing system on corporate campuses. Taxi 2000 continues to work with Winona, Minnesota to build a PRT demonstration and laboratory facility.

Not mentioned is Rob Jacobs' other company Smart Infrastructure which is pitching the pod project for Coon Rapids.

There are two PRT lobbyists - Mark D. Olson for Smart Infrastructure and Edwin Cain for Taxi 2000 Corporation. Taxi 2000 spent nearly $80K since 2004 lobbying in Minnesota.

Suncheon Bay Vectus "PRT" Revealed to NOT be Personal Rapid Transit

The Vectus October update (PDF) has a preview of their much-ballyhooed Suncheon Bay project in Korea.

Station Two is currently under construction and due to be completed by the end of December 2012. Both stations will feature in-line berths, platform screen doors and touch screen passenger information/destination selection facilities.

According to the Wikipedia PRT article which is mostly written by fans of PRT,  offline stations are  a defining characteristic of PRT:

In PRT designs, vehicles are sized for individual or small group travel, typically carrying no more than 3 to 6 passengers per vehicle.[1] Guide ways are arranged in a network topology, with all stations located on sidings, and with frequent merge/diverge points. This approach allows for nonstop, point-to-point travel, bypassing all intermediate stations

So Vectus is just another monorail/people-mover that exist in airports, amusement parks etc. all over the world. Not the revolution in transportation we were promised, not "faster,  cheaper,  better" than conventional transit modes.

And if anyone thinks Vectus can be integrated into a city, take a look at the massive guideways and stations:

Personal Rapid Transit in Amritsar, India: " faces wrath of traders as well as historians"

From Punjab News Express:

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.

This is reminiscent of the 2009 protests in Daventry:

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....

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:

Another Failing Grade for Personal Rapid Transit

A memo from Los Angeles County compared PRT to other modes (PDF). The conclusion:

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.

The reason is PRT vendors don't try harder is that PRT is more useful to promoters as an wedge issue to delay or stop funding for conventional transit.

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":

 

 Where is the Taxi 2000 Corporation today? It's still in Fridley, MN and it's "moribund".

No MnDOT Study of Personal Rapid Transit

In the previous post, I posted a link to a 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. A while back, the University of Minnesota's Center For Transportation Studies wanted MnDOT to waste $1.4 million on PRT study, but an MnDOT spokesperson has said they won't do it.

In other Minnesota pod news, the Citizens for Personal Rapid Transit (CPRT) were a no-show at the Living Green Expo.

Also, fugitive U.S. Navy Vets scamster Bobby Thompson was apprehended in Oregon.Interesting to see if he can explain why he hired pod lobbyist Ed Cain to be his lobbyist in Virginia. Here's the mugshot: