After the Antiplanner started writing about driverless cars, I received a lot of emails congratulating me for jumping on the PRT bandwagon. I just had to roll my eyes, as I’ve argued since 2003 that driverless cars are the reason why PRT, short for personal rapid transit, will never happen.
First proposed in the 1970s (see these 1976 studies done for Minneapolis-St. Paul and Denver), PRT has attracted a fanatical following. Even though no PRT system has ever been built, they are convinced it is cheap, fast, convenient, energy efficient, and everything else that ordinary transit is not. If you believe everything you read on the web, you would think there are at least a dozen gigantic companies producing PRT lines, including Taxi 2000, ULTra, and many more.
ULTra actually built a 2.4-mile line connecting a parking lot with the terminal at Heathrow Airport. Including 18 vehicles capable of going 25 mph (a bit short of the 180 mph promised in the video), this line cost $41 million, or $17 million per mile. While it may save Heathrow the cost of bus drivers, this is hardly cheap considering freeways cost as little as $2.5 million per lane mile plus right of way (which probably isn’t included in the $41 million Heathrow cost).
