Personal Rapid Transit

The idea of personal rapid transit (PRT), in which there would be podcars or the like that would be able to transport people to and from work, as well as to and from shops, was first raised with the expansion of a number of European and North American cities in the 1890s. However, it was not until 1953 that Donn Fichter, a U.S. city transportation planner, came up with a viable means of implementing it, writing a book, Individualized Automatic Transit and the City, which was published in 1964. Two years later, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development started collecting information to see whether a system of PRT could be developed that would be different from public transport. Essentially, its aim was to replace cars with people having the ability to travel in a form of public transport, but alone or in family groups, and so avoid some of the perceived problems with public transportation. This would combine the privacy of a car with the environmental benefits of public transport. In many ways it would resemble a taxi service.

The Aerospace Corporation in the United States, established by Congress, tried to come up with a system of PRT, and in 1969 their findings were published in Scientific American. Nine years later, members of their group—Jack Irving, Harry Bernstein, C. L. Olson, [Page 356]and Jon Buyan—wrote Fundamentals of Personal Rapid Transit, which was published by D. C. Heath and Company. It was in the same year, 1978, that the term PRT was formally coined by J. Edward Anderson from the University of Minnesota, who tried to develop PRT technology for defense contractor Raytheon.

Obviously, the benefits from the use of PRT would be large, mainly as they would remove the need for many people to drive, thereby reducing toxic gas emissions. However. they would also massively reduce the demand for parking spaces in cities and encourage more people to use public transport, albeit different from existing buses and trains.

The only viable method of delivering PRT has been using the system of light rail or tram lines, whereby people using the podcars could designate the places where they wanted to stop. The problem is essentially the high cost of the infrastructure involved. As most major cities have varying levels of public transport, the sheer cost of introducing a new one has meant that most places have decided not to use it because it would be economically unviable. Certainly interest in PRT increased with the rise in the price of oil in 1973, and again in 1979. However, most cities have used this as an opportunity to improve public transport, rather than to work on PRT, which was largely seen only in science fiction books and films. This, however, did not stop work on the computer-controlled vehicle system in Japan throughout the 1970s. However, the cost of running this system led to the idea being scrapped on safety grounds. In 1987, the French Aramis project was also shelved after 20 years of work on a “virtual train.” There was also a German scheme designed by Mannesmann Demag that was essentially based on the PRT replacing the taxi service in Hamburg.

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