San Jose held a conference last week on podcars, the new name for personal rapid transit (PRT). Exhibitors included a variety of planning and consulting firms as well as at least three companies–2getthere, Ultra (which built the Heathrow line), and Vectus–that would like your tax dollars so they can build a podcar system for your city.
One of the members of the audience was Brad Templeton, a software engineer and advocate of robocars–which the Antiplanner calls driverless cars. Templeton notes that Sebastian Thrune, the Stanford researcher who led the Google driverless car program (as well as the Volkswagen program) made a presentation that was politely received–but none of the podcar developers admitted to knowing much about driverless cars.
