Taxi 2000

Professor Emeritus Edward Anderson's system of lightweight, automated electric cars on elevated guideways is projected to be faster and cheaper than current transit alternatives. The system could revolutionize public transportation, but its advocates are having a difficult time getting the concept of the ground.

by Josh L. Dickey

Faster than a sluggish city bus, more efficient than a locomotive, able to leap rush hour traffic in a single trip: It's a taxi, it's a train, it's... Personal Rapid Transit. Despite all its obvious advantages, proponents of the innovative public transportation solution are having a difficult time convincing politicians to make it a reality.

The brainchild of University mechanical engineering professor emeritus Edward Anderson, PRT is touted as the public transportation system that will finally pry reluctant commuters from their precious cars—without sacrificing their personal freedom.

The system will work like a personalized monorail train. Small, lightweight, and entirely automated electric cars, each carrying up to three passengers, move along a system of slim, elevated guideways at 30 miles per hour or more. Inside an elevated station, commuters enter their destination into an ATM-like machine that dispenses a magnetically coded ticket.

After waiting no more than three minutes for the next available car, the commuter then inserts the ticket into the car's onboard computer, embarking upon a journey to any destination station along the grid-like system.

Because the cars merge from the guideways to the off-line stations, the trip is always smooth, safe, and nonstop; cars wait for passengers instead of vice-versa. Riders on the system need not share a car with strangers. Instead, they can choose to commute in privacy or share the fare with one or two other commuters.

The system is available 24 hours a day, in all types of weather. The narrow, inexpensive guideways can be installed almost anywhere, and the estimated fare for an unsubsidized system would compete with conventional bus and light-rail systems.

But despite a plethora of promising features, Anderson's patented PRT system remains a futuristic fantasy—for now.

In 1983 the University of Minnesota bankrolled the development of Anderson's already ten-year-old concept. The University had even set aside money to explore the possibility of installing a PRT system to move students around the expansive Twin Cities campus—money that has since evaporated under a 1997 realignment of University funds.

But the design lives on. Called Taxi 2000, Anderson's vision of personalized mass transit is far past its nascent stages. The powerful computer program needed to run the automated system is already operative in Anderson's basement.

Cars run synchronously in a virtual realm designed to carry passengers across the portion of the Ohio River that divides Cincinnati. The simulation program allows Anderson to work on making time intervals as efficient as possible; not one trip throughout the virtual city takes more than five minutes, and no passenger —even during peak times—waits more than three.

Some physical components of Taxi 2000 have been developed as well. A cost-effective truss-track prototype has been designed and built by a local steel manufacturer, and the simple design for the cars is ready for development.

The Raytheon Corporation, a Lexington, Massachusetts, defense contractor better known for its radar and sonar systems, so liked Anderson's idea that it purchased the patent. The company has spent more than $40 million developing and testing its own version, called PRT 2000, scheduled for testing in Rosemount, Illinois, just outside Chicago.

"They knew they couldn't solve the problem of transportation in Chicago with more roads and more conventional light-rail systems,” says Anderson. “So in the spring of 1989 they said, 'There's got to be a rocket scientist out there with a new idea.' We happened to meet with them a month later. They were just ripe for it. They jumped at the chance to work with our idea."

As soon as next year, Raytheon hopes to take the next step in deploying a PRT layout design to service a conference center and hotel complex at Rosemount near O'Hare Airport. The five-kilometer layout, with its eight stations and 45 cars, would carry up to 2,000 passengers per hour to and from the Chicago Regional Transportation Authority's Blue Line rail transit station.

If the Rosemount project succeeds, the city of SeaTac, Washington, says it will consider spending more than $300 million to buy up to 265 cars and build 12 to 18 miles of guideway, linking 40 hotels, parking lots, and car-rental agencies in and around the booming Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Several other transportation authorities are keeping their eyes on the Raytheon project as well.

Although Raytheon's plans are far along—it already has three cars running smoothly along its test-track in Marlborough, Massachusetts—modifications in Anderson's design have the company going in another direction.

"They made the track too big, too wide,” Anderson says. In fact, besides the basic concept of PRT itself, about the only thing left in the Raytheon project that remains of the original design is the switching mechanism on the cars. Because the tracks need no moving parts, they are simpler and less expensive to build.

But Anderson is not giving up hope that his design could work in places like the Twin Cities, Cincinnati, and Denver. And he has some outside support.

"If there was the political will and the funding right now,” says Steve Anderson, secretary of Citizens for Personal Rapid Transit (CPRT), “it would be up and running in two years. If there is an innovative solution for transit, we need to be exploring it, because transit in America is in a pitiful state."

CPRT is a local grassroots organization that aims to get PRT off the drawing board in Minneapolis before conventional light-rail plans gobble up federal funding and precious space.

"All the data shows that light-rail is a crazy idea,” says Professor Anderson. “It almost seems that when government finally gets behind something, it's absolutely the wrong thing to do. Putting something else on the streets isn't going to reduce congestion. You've got to go to a different level—overhead is the only practical thing to do."

Based on estimated costs of building and operating a PRT system, he believes his design can more efficiently replace a proposed light-rail system in Minneapolis' Hiawatha corridor at little more than half the cost.

Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin, a staunch proponent of the proposed light-rail system, says that more than 24,000 riders would use the light-rail system daily.

But Professor Anderson is unconvinced that light-rail will do the job efficiently enough to warrant its heavy price tag.

"Light-rail is about as energy-efficient as each person driving their own Mack truck,” he quips. He claims that light-rail's per-rider energy efficiency is roughly equivalent to a car getting about ten to 12 miles per gallon. Preliminary estimates gauge that same quotient for PRT systems at or above 70 to 90 miles per gallon.

"What it amounts to is,” says Anderson, “they always like to code their energy efficiency as if the light-rail vehicles were always full. But the nature of it is actually that the daily load factors barely hover between 10 and 20 percent."

The federal government has already approved half of the $440 million needed for the system; the other half will come from state and local coffers.

"It's closer to inevitable than ever,” says McLaughlin. “We're already poised and ahead of the pack. To change gears now would really set us back."

McLaughlin says he's seen the numbers on PRT but doesn't see the new technology as a viable option—at least not right now.

"The concern about it is that it would be the first time out of the chute,” McLaughlin says, “which presents an additional risk. The LRT technology is tested, and we've already approved the impact statement. Besides, people don't like elevated trains."

Professor Anderson believes it isn't public opinion that's holding PRT back, but rather the massive light-rail industry itself. “They say you can't be a 'real' big city until you have light-rail,” he says. “More than $100 million a year is spent on light-rail lobbying alone."

And it was light-rail industries, he muses, that fueled the drive to kill federal PRT funding in the 70s, when the Nixon administration decided that public transit was a local problem, not a federal one.

"The problem there is, many of the conventional light-rail people think PRT would take away their business,” says Professor Anderson. “They'd have to get into it, or their business would go to pot. And transportation is so big."

Whoever is ultimately charged with the task of improving public transportation needs to think progressively, say members of CPRT.

"People think the problems of today are so unsolvable,” says Steve Anderson, “but in many cases I've found that the solutions are very clear. You go to the politicians, and they say there's no popular support for it. You go to the people and they say, 'why aren't the politicians doing something about it?'"

At a CPRT meeting held in Minneapolis on October 6, more than 30 people— from curious teenagers to seasoned engineers and business owners—watched Professor Anderson's cars run briskly around his automated computer simulation of a PRT station.

Local printing company owner David Dillon believes in the importance of this technology.

"We have here an opportunity to sell a Minneapolis-developed project,” Dillon says. He also compares the use of technology like light rail to the wasteful practice of importing raw materials that are indigenous to the state. “We can compete with a homegrown invention to solve a worldwide problem."

Hopeful that the word on PRT gets out before light-rail is a reality, members of CPRT will not be ready to give up their cause should the streetcars finally run.

"There's no reason PRT can't work with light-rail or the bus system,” says Steve Anderson. “We'd like to take over the transit corridors ourselves instead of light-rail. But if light-rail is built, there are several areas that would benefit from high-density lines of PRT. And you can use this as a feeder for LRT."

Which is exactly what the Raytheon project hopes to accomplish in Rosemount in the very near future.

"A single small system is worthwhile in and of itself,” Steve Anderson continues. “When you build off this system, there's a multiplicative effect in how convenient it is. It enhances the value of what you build."

While proponents of PRT do their best to educate the public about the revolutionary concept, Professor Anderson continues to improve its technology, including the performance of the lightweight Taxi 2000 system. Currently, the cars can only travel just over 30 miles per hour. Asynchronous control systems—which would move the cars about the track at irregular intervals—could allow the cars to travel at speeds of up to 80 miles per hour.

Increased speed could make PRT a more viable option for such proposed sites as the new airport in Denver, where more than 150 miles separate the airport from popular destinations like Glenwood Springs.

Right now, the problem isn't whether or not PRT would work—it's whether or not enough support for the system will be generated.

"I've never heard anybody able to attack anything on the technical side,” Steve Anderson says. “Once people know this is a low-cost alternative, the rest of the battle will win itself. The sooner we do it, the more we would save, and the less congestion people would have to deal with."

Professor Anderson sees PRT as a small solution to an even larger problem than just traffic jams.

"We've got to design for a sustainable future: minimum land use, minimum energy use, and minimum material use was really at the bottom of what we were trying to design."

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