A few weeks ago, the state of New Jersey appropriated $75,000 to study the development of a personal rapid transit system for Long Branch, a shore town just south of New York City. If PRT projects elsewhere are a sign of things to come, it's the beginning of an epic boondoggle.
As described by its promoters, PRT is a computerized, driverless mass transit system. The passenger enters a sleek, four-person pod that is guaranteed to be waiting at the station, swipes a fare card, punches in a destination and goes. The pods run on a web of elevated tracks 16 feet above street level with stations every two or three blocks apart. PRT advocates promise transportation with no wait, no traffic and no smelly strangers.
In theory. In practice PRT has never worked anywhere despite 30 years of study and development. Combining the small carrying capacity of an automobile with the expensive infrastructure of mass transit, PRT offers the worst of both worlds. If you want to see what it looks like, watch The Incredibles. In the movie, the evil villain's henchmen travel about their volcanic- island lair in pods that look remarkably similar to the system SkyWeb Express is selling to New Jersey.
It's fitting that a cartoon villain should choose PRT as his ride of choice. Though it all sounds very gee-whiz innocent, PRT is a major scam. In Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Seattle, Chicago and elsewhere, PRT has burned through tens of millions of dollars of public and private investment. The only tangible result has been to clear the way for highway construction and make legitimate mass transit projects more difficult to build. In at least a few cases, after finally running PRT out of town, citizens learned that the public officials most enthusiastic about PRT had financial stakes in the companies developing it.
There are signs that all of this is now underway across the river. PRT advocates expect to wring another $1,000,000 out of the New Jersey legislatures shortly. They dream of a pod network stretching from Atlantic City to the misbegotten Xanadu sports and entertainment complex at the Meadowlands.
The PRT craze is a clear sign that an endgame is underway. Suburban Americans are waking up to the fact that their car-based lifestyle is broken and unsustainable. They are starting to look for solutions, but their vision is limited by an "autonomist" ideology that places personal convenience above all else, no matter what the cost. Rather than looking at transportation options that we know work (PRT gurus derisively refer to the train as a "19th-century technology"), Americans are looking for a high-tech miracle to save them from the rough road that is so clearly ahead. PRT ain't it.
