Is personal rapid transit for real?

USC associate planning professor Catherine Burke had an interesting opinion piece in The Times on Monday: She advocated for more research of personal rapid transit systems, saying the time is now for a new transportation alternative.

What are these things? Basically small, automated cars that are attached to fixed guideways. What makes them different from a train is that the guideways go all over the place, the idea being that the pod on the personal transit system takes you directly to your destination. There's no going to umpteen other stations first.

Now, a confession: I have to say that I'm skeptical. Readers e-mail me ideas for these type of systems all the time. I think they're novel and kind of neat, but I also tend to think that it's a little too advanced for the Southland.

To put it another way, I'd be more ready to accept podcars zooming about if there were more bike racks at train stations, synchronized traffic signals or ticket machines that dispensed monthly passes. You know, the kind of simple, no-brainer things that should have been done decades ago but still seem beyond the grasp of local transit officials and the politicians who are supposed to be watching them.

So that's my issue. Others have, well, other issues. The group Light Rail Now, for example, has a long dissection of personal rapid transit on their website and they conclude it doesn't work too well -- that crowds will swamp such systems and result in long amusement park-like lines.

On the other hand, the above video is from London Heathrow's Airport, which is building a personal rapid transit system to connect one of its terminals to parking, rental car facilities and other buildings. If nothing else, it's slick.

And, if it works, maybe there is a real-world application out there somewhere.

-- Steve Hymon

Comments

[Kymberleigh Richards]

PRT is an application that would work well as a "people mover" at LAX, just as it does at Heathrow.

As a public transit application, there would have to be so much infrastructure -- all of it required to undergo environmental impact reports, where a handful of people who would see the elevated structure as objectionable, and kill it, by the way -- that we could build subways to every corner of the county for the same money.

This is another case of dreamers who want to expand a technology beyond its reasonable limitations.

[Dana Gabbard]

PRT has very limited applications as a circulator collector at airports, convention centers, theme parks, etc. The same essentially can be said for monorail and people movers. The problem is when boosters of these technologies try to tout them as urban transit systems for large scale use when it is clear that their limitations make them utterly inadequate for these purposes.

Siemens some years ago went for PRT in a big way, going so far as to build an extensive test track outside of Chicago. Eventually they folded the effort. And if a big company like them didn’t see it penciling out, I think that pretty well can be seen as definitive as to what PRT is and what it isn’t.

Some technologies suffer from the zeal of their boosters who tend to overemphasize advantages, soft-pedal shortcomings and make straw men arguments against perceived competing technologies (monorail buffs can go ad nauseam about why light rail is inadequate). They’ll cite per mile cost which can be mis-leading; for PRT to have any value it would have to be an extensive system covering a wide area with massive connectivity—probably more elaborate and extensive than our freeway system. How many Billions (or Trillions) would that cost just in our region? Where would the storage and maintenance facilities be located? How would accident liability be handled? Supposedly the great vision is so glowing we are supposed to dive straight in w/no worries about all these concerns. Does that sound practical? Not to me.

[Guy Transit]

"it's called the automobile?"

That exact criticism i(and others) answered at http://kinetic.seattle.wa.us/~prt-q.html#duplicate

[BOB2]

We already have PRT. I have two PRT's sitting in my driveway right now. We had zero emission PRT's until the automaker you showcased in the previous blog piece crushed them back in the early 2000's. PRT is operated by the most sophisticated biometric computer yet found. PRT requires no new guideways or infrastructure. All humor aside, the PRT already exists, it's called the automobile?

[Guy Transit]

That Light Rail Now dissection was itself dissected shortly after it was released. Seems it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what PRT could be and how it would work, as well as obvious logical errors. See
http://gettherefast.org/lightrailnow.html

I can't find any evidence Light Rail Now has ever acknowledged the errors in its paper or corrected them. Their sponsor page is filled with light rail consultants and advocacy groups. Gee, bias much?

[Roy Reynolds]

For more on PRT and specific recommendations for it in southern Calfiornia, you might visit www.prtstrategies.com. PRT is being implemented at Heathrow Airport now, and has passed safety certfications for Swedish Rail at a test track in Sweden (video links on our site for both these vendors).

We also discuss Public/Private Partnershps on our site (in the PowerPoints) and their viability for attracting investment in these elevated systems which are readily implemented in our public right-of-ways for at least one sixth the cost of light rail.

PRT could also operate in the most underutilized of our surface infratstructure assets -- flood control channels -- over 630 miles of channels exist in southern California. As well, the 24-mile Pacific Electric Right-of-Way is an excellent candidate for a PRT backbone.

PRT is also an answer to the underutilization of LA/Ontario Airport as recommendations have been made to connect it with the Anaheim Resort area to reduce pressure on the overutilized John Wayne Airport.

[Aaron]

It's hard to call Heathrow's system PRT, when you can put the potential list of destinations into a single sentence without violating any grammatical rules. Doing it in any setting where you can't immediately identify all of the potential destinations is a joke. Forget LA - I wouldn't want to try this outside of anything bigger than Avalon.

PRT is best left to the people who talk at Metro board meetings because they forgot to take their lithium.

[Morgan Wick]

Well, I certainly don't see how it could do a lick for congestion except make it worse. Even if it took cars off the roads, it would be little more than a specialized freeway.

[Marcotico]

I too am skeptical about PRT, however there is one aspect to it that I'm surprised its advocates don't highlight more often. As a system it has great potential for public private partnerships. Imagine a public agency is in charge of building trunks lines, but private groups can build, maintain, and service additional loops and vehicles. For example, a PRT loop could be privately built that would hook up with the trunk line, and service a movie studio, a hospital, a business park, or a hotel/resort area, with multiple stops. Public cars could access the site, but the business could have its own cars that would only be available to employees.

However, there is a lot of work to be done, and I completely agree that the required public oversight of those connections is, unfortunately, well out of the grasp of our local agencies.