I'd really like to see VTA and the City of MV partner on a study that weighs the feasibility of a light rail extension up Central Expressway and due north along Stierlin/Shoreline Boulevard all the way to the gatehouse of Shoreline Park. A transit line that directly connects Caltrain/Downtown MV to Shoreline/North Bayshore could be one of the most-used stretches of light rail in the system. Unlike the convulted path the current Whisman route takes, a Shoreline Boulevard light rail route would be as straight-as-an-arrow and could have stations right in front of places people want to be; Downtown Mountain View, Bailey Park/Safeway, Century 16/Computer History Museum, Google, Shoreline Amphitheatre/Shoreline Park.

As for this proposal...well hrmm.

First question that comes to mind as a frequent rider of more traditional forms of transit: who the heck is going to pay for the maintenance of all these individual little pod cars and how will they be cleaned throughout the day? It's hard enough to keep a train or bus clean and comfortable, but without the watching eyes of other riders and a train conductor, certain people are likely to subject these personal cars to even more abuse than typical transit vehicles. Vandalism. Grit and grime. Awful smells. "Accidents." They're tough to manage on a bus and would be magnified in a pod. The only thing I can think of is that these pods would self-clean like those fancy automated public toilets some cities have...

On a larger scale, the initial set-up might be free, but the long term costs of maintaining such a form of transit could be unsustainable. If Mountain View were to become an early tester of this system and one of the few companies that makes these pods goes out of business, getting replacement parts could become very costly further down the road. Let college campuses and airports test this out and let the industry prove and establish itself before we make it the primary transit solution for the entire Northern half of Mountain View.

I want this! I want to use it to commute to Lockheed. Quickly!

Personal Rapid Transit and SkyTran in Mountain View (passenger capacity of a three-lane freeway) – is it another pie in the sky scheme?

Remember when Disney Land in LA opened – monorail, the system of the future!

BART before it was approved by an election, claimed it would provide 90-second headways (a train coming in a station) service!

When the Santa Clara County Transportation District was to be voted on, a Personal Rapid Transit grid over Silicon Valley was proposed – was consider ridiculous and went nowhere.

In the 1970s, SRI had a government-funded study of Maglev – it was stopped. (Google -SRI Maglev study – too many problems)

Council members Mike Kasperzak (a Mediator & Arbitrator) and Margaret Abe-Koga (a Harvard grad in Government Studies) are really the best to people to evaluate fantastic engineering claims and problems (to many to discus here) with old failed ideas that never were widely accepted and put into use in the last 50 years?

Here we go again: Somebody is offering something free, and some dummy wants to "Study" it.

Who do you get to study something that is so new that they have never even seen it. THINK.

I'm jealous of Mountain View's opportunity. I've been trying to interest Fresno in a PRT system, but your location is much more suitable. Then again Fresno has raised a lot more money to get the job done than you have. Ya really want to get beat by Fresno?

If so here's the method: Spend all your time deciding if it's a good idea instead of figuring out how to get it done.

Let's do it!

Think big!

I can see it in my minds eye: Google Fiber, High Speed Rail and PRT (Skytran or ULTra).

Now that's a vision for the future that's exciting.

Just about anything would do better than more VTA light rail. According to the DoE, VTA light rail uses more energy per person than the average light truck/SUV. And as the article says, it's slow to boot. Of course the buses are no better.

VTA light rail was all the rage a few years ago. It was going to save the environment, reduce traffic, and make all our lives happier. Now it's too slow, not energy efficient, and nobody rides it. More money down the rathole.

Mountain View is the perfect place to start the seed of a new approach to public transportation. There is so much innovation here, and talent, and potential users. This is a golden opportunity that should be carefully but heartily embraced, in a timely way. Let's get started! The advances in technology that created whole new industries started HERE, in this valley and there is no way to know where this application could go. Who would have thought everyone would want an Ipod even 10 years ago? People then may have thought it was an idea that would peter out. And now we have the Iphone, and the IPad, with thousands of applications that add value to daily life. This could spawn something just as big, or bigger.

Jack Slade: "free" things often turn out not to be free. It would be irresponsible of the Mountain View City Council to approve something without at least attempting to validate the cost estimates.

"...where young employees from Google and Microsoft are expected to embrace its cutting-edge means of moving people around."

Is anyone else troubled/annoyed by this weird obsession on the part of pod-travel advocates with appealing to the "young"? Steve Raney's reply to my posting last September about pod-travel (click on the ULTra link above to see it) seemed to consist entirely of:

1. Pod-travel is futuristic
2. Futuristic things appeal to "young people"
3. Young people are innovative
4. Therefore, if we want innovation in Mountain View, we need to build a pod-travel system.

As a Mountain View voter over the age of 30, I'll say that I don't find the above argument convincing. On the contrary, I find it borderline offensive.

I swear it's Springfield's only choice...
Throw up your hands and raise your voice!
Monorail!
What's it called?
Monorail!
Once again...
Monorail!
But Main Street's still all cracked and broken...
Sorry, Mom, the mob has spoken!
Monorail!
Monorail!
Monorail!

Dave, just check out the Gone Green photo and post. Young people will do anything to go green and hip, even endanger themselves or have the taxpayers foot the bill.

And BTW, only Google and Microsoft employees are capable or embracing anything new and cutting edge.

Well.....I'm old (67)and I like innovation. I've been following the PRT idea for years and have yet to be shown why it won't work. Huge sums are being poured into the same old technologies while PRT - which has myriad advantages - can't get a dime.

Lets do it! I like the 'futuristic shape'. Instead of making it look like a San Francisco cable car to appease someone (jokingly) how about we make all automobiles look like Fred Flintstone's car.

Just say no to gas-combustion clown cars.

Straight from the Jetson's. Looks and sounds great!

Ski lifts in Mountain View, my dream comes true.

The concept sounds very interesting.

It appears to me that it did not take up too much Real Estate, and it seems produce little noise. Cost is low -- a plus.

Think bigger, make it "D" system to serve people tranveling around. Make it solar and wind powered. Make it with recycle material. Make it a WiFi network or fiber network. Make it cost less than driving a car.....

I don't see the advantage of this over using existing roads. We already have a point-to-point network of transportation corridors. If you're worried about traffic, encourage bicycles (even better: shared bicycles at bike stands around the city) and smaller cars with carpooling. Even if free for the city, the environmental and quality of life degradation from this sound like a rotten deal.

Anyone read the front page? Caltrain making drastic cuts in service; Mountain View hiking fees on recreation programs. We can't afford the stuff we have now. I agree with Dave. "Free" things always do fall back on local government one way or another (access, security, ..).

PRT vs Light Rail vs Buses.

What do we know? We know that Light Rail & Buses are dismal failures.

Light Rail is obscenely expensive to build when it cannot be routed on existing track (and terribly expensive where there is existing track), expensive to run & hardly anyone rides it.

Busses are cheap to build, because they can run on existing roads (ie, their "track cost" is paid for by others) but expensive to run because you have to pay for drivers. So they run as infrequently as possible & hardly anyone rides them.

PRT has never been built - yet - but could actually be profitable, rather than eternally subsisized, and get people out of their cars. Worst argument against it? People might go poopie in the cars.

I'll take my chances.

I've been following SkyTran for years. It looks great, and beats cars, buses, light rail, CalTrain, and high speed rail (HSR). We should use SkyTran instead of HSR. It would save billions to build, be much cheaper to run, and probably be about as fast when point-to-point time is considered. Think of the right-of-way and other headaches that would vanish.

Then we have it phase out CalTrain, light rail, and many bus routes.

Here are some SkyTran advantages over HSR that I can think of:
• It’s much cheaper to install and operate.
• ** Its capital cost is estimated to be $10 million/mile for both directions (vs. $40 - $60 million/mile for HSR, and $100 million/mile for light rail).
• ** Its costs will decrease as volume goes up, while HSR’s costs will likely increase.
• ** Skytran expects to be able to make a profit, while HSR will likely continue to be an expense.
• ** Its total cost per passenger mile is estimated to be less than $0.03.
• ** Its ticket price would thus be much less than HSR.
• ** Its low ticket price would attract more riders than HSR would.
• ** It’s much more energy efficient and environmentally friendly.
• It’s much quieter (almost noiseless).
• It doesn’t require widely separated large stations that riders have to travel to.
• It allows many small stations that would often be easy to walk or bike to.
• It eliminates the need for large parking lots.
• It doesn’t require heavy and expensive infrastructure, and could likely use most current bridges.
• Its lighter infrastructure would be less vulnerable to earthquakes.
• It doesn’t require the complicated and divisive right of way that HSR does.
• Its environmental impact is much smaller than HSR's.
• Its environmental impact report would thus be approved more easily than HSR's.
• It can be built more quickly than HSR.
• Its approval would likely be easier and faster, because it’s much cheaper.
• It doesn’t disrupt or divide communities on its routes.
• It eliminates accidents between cars and trains.
• It eliminates the potential for “train suicides” or similar accidents (15-20/year on SF-SJ Caltrain).
• It’s much less vulnerable to terrorism, because riders are not concentrated in large trains or stations.
• It doesn’t interfere with current traffic, roads and rail systems.
• It’s immune to trash and litter on rails, and resistant to inclement weather.
• Its riders don’t have to wait for scheduled trains.
• It can run 24/7.
• Its proposed speed is 100 MPH in cities, and 150 MPH (or more) between cities.
• Its passengers don’t stop at intermediate stations.
• Its travel time is comparable to HSR and airplanes, when door-to-door time is used.
• Its estimate of 8640 riders/hour means one track could easily handle HSR’s expected 32,000 - 38,000 riders/day in 2035.
• It’s easily expandable to include many branch and parallel lines.
• It can be redundant and robust -- with a web of tracks, allowing travel around sections that might have problems.
• It could take over the peninsula traffic from Caltrain, eliminating Caltrain’s expected $471 million electrification cost.
• It would provide improved (faster, cheaper, and quieter) service along the Caltrain route.
• It might be expanded to take over many of the other rail and bus routes around the SF Bay and LA areas.
• It might be expanded with extensions to Sacramento and other metropolitan and recreation areas (such as Tahoe).
• It would provide the functionality that voters intended when they voted for HSR.
• It’s modern, with a 21st Century design, instead of the 19th Century train concept.
• It would make California the worldwide leader in public transportation.

Because of these many positive attributes (and some I probably haven’t thought of), Californians would quickly appreciate SkyTran. Also, people from the other transportation systems will likely oppose SkyTran because it will take business from them.

My understanding is that federal money requires that the system already have an installed base, which SkyTran does not have. It is likely enough cheaper than HSR that even with a possible loss of federal money, it would still be cheaper for California. Also, the federal limitation could be changed or modified.

The challenge that would face Mountain View is that Skytran is only one of several comparable advanced transit technologies. Until sonstuction starts, these other companies will be offering similar deals with their own technology, making it difficult to choose.

How Mountain View and other cities can get the wheels rolling now to make a commitment to modern transportation: Start planning/approving the route and legalities now with a commitment to eventually choose between the competitors.

Several other cities will follow the same process, (approving routes, EIRs, etc. first, so that it can be installed quickly when the new technology for that city is chosen. Only this will reduce the construction time enough to inspire investors enough to be ready.

If you have to choose between competing technologies first, there is too much risk that a competitor will be more successful and hijack the project before construction starts, which is why investors still are not putting in enough money up for any of them to promise a national system someday.

If the MV Voice does a series about alternative advanced transit companies that would also like to install a free system here, we will see that automated rail transit is inevitable and that Mountain View should move quickly to start this process to be 1st with the best technology that is necessary worldwide to jelp stop global warming, oil shortages, wars for oil etc.
Other technologies are listed by the University of Washington at http://uw.4trams.org such as Oakland's Cybertran
-Berkeley

There has never been a PRT system that was not a massive failure.

In fact there has not been a "pod" system that even worked as public transit. Just google PRT airport or PRT boondoggle or PRT bogus.

Toss your tax money away to flim flammers with "faith based transit",
PRT is more like the Hindenburg than a working system.

I find it amusing that HSR and LTR supporters are always knocking PRT. I understand they want to protect their investment and financial interest but the claims that PRT will not work are simply unfounded. If this country would have dumped the billions of dollars in PRT over the past decade as we have in High Speed and Light Rail, we would have had an excellent PRT system that could have saturated entire metro regions. Those knocking PRt have no evidence it won't work other than they hope it doesn't. It is time to tell the rail and oil lobby that we are done funding their underutilized systems in favor of one that more precisely meets American culture. Americans want on demand, private rapid transit. I don't want to be crowded in with hundreds of others climbing on top of me in germ infested cars stopping every five minutes. I want to walk out of my house, get into a private vehicle - in this case a pod - enter my destination and go directly there as quickly as possible.

The revenue stream for PRT would be excellent. Inside each car could be pay for view tv/movies and wifi. People could actually get work done in privacy. Could conduct conference/sales calls without interruption or disturbing others.

Rail and oil proponents are scared to death by PRT. They know once a system is up and running in one city in the US, the days of rail as mass transit are over.

I think these comments are amusing:
Posted by Johnny Paycheck, a resident of the Castro City neighborhood, on Apr 15, 2010 at 12:28 pm

There has never been a PRT system that was not a massive failure.
In fact there has not been a "pod" system that worked as public transit. Just google PRT airport or PRT boondoggle or PRT bogus.
Toss your tax money away to flim flammers with "faith based transit",
PRT is more like the Hindenburg than a working system.
===============================
So Mr. Paycheck--
Name one rail system that does not require massive taxpayer subsidy?
Name one rail system that has utilization over 5%?
How many billions have we wasted on rail systems that folks do not use. Even in Chicago and New York ridership share is extremely low.
Do you not understand that those anti PRT websites are operated by those wanting to protect their financial interests in existing technology?
What solution do you propose? If you are not part of the solution, you must be part of the problem.
What are you scared of? Must be worried PRT will work and will actually have ridership levels that produce a self supported transit system instead of all the government subsidy that is required to keep rail systems in service.

I love the concept but am concerned about the infrastructure. I have read that the system would be attached to the existing system of light pole. Only problem is the number of trees that live between them. Does their suggestion of using these require the removal of so many of our trees.