Newsflash

Heathrow PRT Project Delayed Another Year into 2010

It seems that the opening of the Ultra PRT system constructed at Heathrow Airport outside London, England, has been delayed again, by issues that remain unidentified.

During some intense debate earlier this year involving this website and the engineering team behind the Ultra PRT at Heathrow, it was stated that the system would open for revenue service in the "4th quarter" of 2009, e.g., sometime between October 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009.

In recent British press reports (for example, http://www.ultraprt.com/cms/index.php?page=the-london-science-museum-aug-09 ), the system now reportedly will open "sometime next year." To wit:

The bubble-shaped, driverless cars with black, bug-eyed windows are his solution to the problems of urban travel. He began working on the system in 1995 and NEXT YEAR [2010]  they are due to start operating at Heathrow, carrying passengers from car parks to Terminal 5 [emphasis added].

So what gives? Did the concerns raised here a few months ago sink in, and perhaps produce more "due diligence." Of course, I'm not going to hold my breath for any explanation from Mr. Lowenson et al regarding up to another year of delay.

Also, displaying the Ultra PRT vehicles alongside Stephenson's Rocket is highly presumptuous until PRT is actually proven for several years in revenue service, which it still has to show.

 
PRT Activism Paper Offers Some Insights, But Still Fundamentally Flawed
Perusing Jerry Schneider's vast website documenting Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) and other "innovative" transit technologies, I came across an interesting paper by Nathan Koren, a PRT advocate and Advanced Transit Systems (ATS) employee, PRT Activism: Strategies and Attitudes Towards Conventional Transit. I hadn't seen this year-old (May 2008) paper before, but it deserves a brief review. The Machiavelli and Sun Tzu quotes are an interesting touch.
 
The Real Question About Sprawl & Transportation PDF Print E-mail
Written by Administrator   
Thursday, 30 October 2008

Ironically, the most fundamental question to ask about urban sprawl and transportation was in a comment thread at the Reason magazine website about a "Hit and Run" blog post regarding a Wendell Cox article:

The better question is: How many people would have chosen a suburban lifestyle if suburb dwellers had to bear the entire cost of extending transportation systems to the suburbs, and if the credit they used to finance their moves had been properly priced? How expensive would it have been to create the suburbs using private means alone? What would a price change of this magnitude have done to consumer preferences, and to the relative attractiveness of different modes of life?  Item posted by "Fluffy"  October 29, 2008, timestamped 12:21 p.m. http://reason.com/blog/show/129725.html#1125627

II suggest reading the "Hit and Run" post and the comment thread, the whole thing. It seems a lot of libertarians--or at least those reading the Reason magazine blog--strongly disagree with Randal O'Toole and Wendell Cox about their claims that land use regulations, specifically "Smart Growth", was the primary reason for the recent housing price bubble.

Hat tip to http://rationalitate.blogspot.com/ who originally spotted this quite interesting thread.

Last Updated ( Thursday, 30 October 2008 )
 
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