Back in the 1970s, some people thought that personal rapid transit (PRT) would replace the automobile. By sometime early in the twenty-first century, we would all be traveling in small, computerized vehicles riding soundlessly on fixed tracks. The vehicles would go nearly 100 miles per hour, and each car would go exactly to where its occupants wanted to go over the least congested route.
I’ve been intrigued by this concept since 1972, when I heard a presentation about it by a consulting firm named Deleuw-Cather to the Portland city council. DeLeuw-Cather was trying to get some city to buy into the idea, and it claimed that the Germans and Japanese were experimenting with this system and had solved most of the technical problems.
Wikipedia photo by Darren Ringer.
