Raytheon cans PRT 2000

In another innovatory failure Raytheon’s personal rapid transit (PRT) prototype track and vehicles are quietly being dismantled. The company thought it had a customer in the Chicago RTA (Regional Transit Authority). But enthusiasm ebbed as costs rose to double the projected level and the Pentagon-oriented giant was unwilling to give guarantees on maintenance and parts costs.

The established car/road system badly needs real competition, not the ridiculous fantasy that modern Americans will abandon their cars for mass transit in the form of city-center oriented trains, trolleys and buses.

PRT conceptually meets the challenge of the car/road system by providing, like the car, a personal auto-sized vehicle from within walking distance of origin to within walking distance of destination on a dense grid without stops or vehicle changes along the way. And it meets the enviro challenge of using electric propulsion by drawing power from a gudieway and the potentially beats roads on the big safety concern by extending grade separation and automated control throughout the system.

Unlike mass transit’s corridor line-laul orientation it is a network concept, oriented, like roads and cars to the dispersed origins and destinations of real year-2000 persons. So it met the intellectual challenges.

Raytheon let the cars get too heavy - 2.5t vs PRT-expert Ed Anderson’s Taxi2000 recommended weight of 1.0t. The heavier cars made the Raytheon guideway cumbersome and obtrusive, and everything too expensive. No customers then. (www.taxi2000.com) Larry Fabian in a perceptive post-mortem on the Raytheon project says the company went astray because it failed to identify a realworld customer first up. Get his excellent paper lfabian@compuserve.com