Campaign Objectives [Opinion]

the objective of this website/blog is to establish a reference system by 2010.

What is a reference system ?

Many organizations involved with transit might well consider a PRT system but they perceive the risk as too great. We are talking huge sums of money here. Every transit system in the world is a complex financial ecology between government, a number of transit providers, the passengers and the the public. It takes a lot to convince them.


Critcally from the transport engineering point of view there is no up front data on how 'attractive' ( to use a non technical term) the system is. That is it is difficult to predict how many people are likely to use the system. With out these numbers then its difficult to put a strong business plan together.

A reference system must be something which members of the public can travel on. It must be do at a small scale what the large system needs to do. A reference system must demonstrate all the key technologies operating and it must do so ideally with out a huge cost over run.

While some may produce objections to Personal Rapid Transit we must differentiate between objections to even bothering to see if it is workable (i.e the reference system) and objections to installing a network of systems in many cites.

For example if you belive PRT will never be cost effective then the you have nothing to fear from building a reference system. All the reference system will do is confirm your suspicions. Many of the oppositions to PRT are to the projections from the system designers.

In many ways the anti-prt lobby create a Catch 22 situation. "There are no current PRT systems. There fore your claims are based on your wild projections. We contend that your projections are dubious. We object to building even one PRT system based on these dubious predictions". Clearly this creates a self fore filling prophecy of objection.

A better way to do this would be - create a test system running with real people on it. If the cost over runs are extensively over that of a similar monorail/light rail system/software project then no other PRT systems should be build.

The real problem with evaluating a new system is that is like ALL new things there will be cost over runs. The cost over runs on the channel tunnel springs to mind and that wasn't using any fundamentally new technology ( just trains and holes). Even the introduction of new fleet of buses in London BBC Link had serious technical difficulties. So to imagine a wholly new PRT technology with no cost overruns is naive in the extreme. A perfect test would have two systems linked side by side so we could more fairly compare the results.

If PRT only offered a 1% or 2% improvement on the current situation then you might not argue that effort would be worth while. PRT does offer the most radical changes to transportation and the urban environment. This is the kind of change we desperately need.