My Pod

Never mind light rail. Imagine your Volkswagen-sized vehicle is traveling fifty miles an hour on a three-foot-wide guideway. Twenty feet below are people on a sidewalk. There is a vehicle a few feet in front of you. You can see the woman in the car behind you reading the newspaper and sipping her coffee. Then the car in front exits the guideway. A half-mile later, your car exits, eases into your station, and slows to a stop. The hatch opens and you walk the two blocks to your office. You just rode a personal rapid transit, or PRT, vehicle. If Minneapolis City Council member Dean Zimmerman has his way, he’ll be in the pod right behind you.

PRT is a concept that’s been around for thirty years. President Richard Nixon endorsed it, with a jowly waggle, in his 1972 State of the Union address. Ed Anderson, former space vehicle designer for Honeywell and current CEO of a Fridley company called Taxi 2000, jawboned with Nixon’s aides about PRT, back in the day. “He didn’t know anything about it,” Anderson says of Nixon, “but we spent quite a bit of time talking to his staff.”

Anderson has been certain since the late 1960s that more buses, trains, and roads will not heal the daily transit aneurysm that American cities suffer. He is convinced that our transit needs more than a tweaking. Taking the “mass” out of transit and inserting the “personal” will allow transit to live up to its frequent billing in the “rapid” department.

Anderson’s thirty-five-year-old vision of a networked system of four-passenger vehicles on a small, dedicated guideway with non-stop service—and the capacity of a freeway—seemed impractical, somehow, to hard-headed urban transit managers. But today, with advances in plastics, software, and hardware, PRT is merely off-the-shelf rocket science.

A PRT system has been tested in Cardiff, Wales, and several European cities are lining up to install it. In the U.S., Taxi 2000’s SkyWeb product is leading the way; Minneapolis and Duluth are waiting on the passage of bonding bills to build test tracks.

Zimmerman says PRT would work with light rail and buses to reduce inner-city traffic, pollution—and haggling about where to build the next parking ramp. “If you catch a bus on Bloomington Avenue by Minnehaha Creek to head downtown, you’ll transfer twice. Chances are, each transfer will involve a wait. With PRT you’ll catch your bus to a PRT station in the core area and have a five-minute ride downtown. Transfers are virtually eliminated.”

Zimmerman is a confessed apostle of PRT. If you let him, he’ll read you fourteen reasons to agree with him. But since you’re busy, here are just a few: It produces zero emissions. It does not require a yearly subsidy from taxpayers. It makes it easier for more people to use existing forms of transit. There is no waiting; it runs twenty-four/seven.

Everybody is happy about PRT except Betsy Barnum, Zimmerman’s Green Party colleague. She would like to see adequate funding for the bus system before $60 million is spent testing PRT. She wonders if people will tolerate the overhead guideways, and what happens when the system shuts down and suspends a few thousand people twenty feet above Marquette? Perhaps they could simply enjoy the view. The Metro Transit picket lines could surely be seen a few blocks west on Seventh Street.—Tim King