Who is going to pay for the "pod cars?"

I hope it is not the taxpayers. Over the last several elections, voters in Santa Clara County have passed multiple tax and fee increases including VTA’s 2000 Measure A ½-cent and 2008 measure B ¼-cent sales taxes, Santa Clara County’s Measure A 1/8 cent sales tax, the state prop 30 ¼ cent sales tax and the 2010 Measure B Vehicle Registration Fee of $10. Additionally, we’re on the hook to pay back numerous state bond issues including high speed rail, last year’s Proposition 1 water bond and the infrastructure bonds of 2006. Let the grossly-misnamed "Silicon Valley Leadership Group" get its fat cat members to pony up.

And of course "pod cars" only seem to get built in niche areas, such as airports or planned communities with car restrictions.

This topic has been discussed at length. I recommend a couple of articles on the Light Rail Now website.

First, there's "Let's Get Real About Personal Rapid Transit" by Ken Avidor. He points out that, "PRT has a solid 30-year record of failure. Its main purpose in recent years seems to have been to provide a cover enabling its proponents to spread disinformation about real, workable transit systems. Except for the occasional laboratory-scale prototype, PRT actually "exists" largely in computerized drawings, in promotional brochures, and in cute, ever-successful animated simulations on the internet."

"The unsubstantiated claims of PRT proponents are always presented in the present tense as if the system is a proven success ... which, of course, it certainly is not. Promoters never seem to fail to bash real transit, such as light rail (LRT), as "old fashioned technology". Sadly, the media rarely check the veracity of PRT publicity and propaganda."

A longer, more technical article is "Personal Rapid Transit – Cyberspace Dream Keeps Colliding With Reality." The authors write "Despite the persistent and fervent claims of its promoters, repeated attempts to implement a working PRT system, even in very small-scale scenarios, have invariably failed. Not a single PRT plan, during these promotional efforts over the past 40 years or more, has seen successful implementation even in a small test application, much less a major, heavy-duty, citywide rapid transit application. Early would-be PRT installations, such as the AirTrans system at Dallas-Ft. Worth Regional Airport, and the PRT at West Virginia University at Morgantown, eschewed any attempt to provide true PRT-style, small-vehicle, customized origin-destination service, and were implemented in effect as line-haul automated guideway transit (AGT) peoplemover systems with some innovative features (such as offline stations)."

And finally, the good folks at Light Rail Now have put up a helpful list of links to various Monorail, PRT, AGT, and "Gadget Transit" Analyses at Web Link
Links to the articles cited above are here.

A good article by Setty and Demery points out that "In our view, it is a big waste of time advocating such "gee-whiz" options, given the severe limits of monorails and similar technologies such as PRT, when U.S. transportation problems are almost always sociopolitical and economic–not technical–in nature." See Web Link

Mountain View should beware this solution looking for a problem.

"Pod cars," otherwise known as "Personal Rapid Transit," is a bad idea that just won't die.

"What is PRT? A forty year old concept for a system of autonomous vehicles that can go to multiple destinations on demand, on a track or guideway. Techo-cultists are fascinated by it, a Jetsonesque technology that has its own german joke word "gadgetbahn". Like most cults it has a core of true believers and the more sinister quacks and scammers that prey upon them. Right wing nutcases back the PRT technology movement, they know it will never be built and PRT proposals can block or dismantle real public transit infrastructure and systems. Occasionally you will see left wing fantasy loonies who want to transform the world into a Futurama cartoon back PRT schemes. All the PRT backers say "if only", if only there were politicians to back a real big system it would work, if only there were funding, if only.... "
Web Link

The folks in Minnesota had to deal with this as you can see in the PRT Boondoggle Blog: Web Link

PRT is a bad idea that distracts from solutions to the problem of moving people.

What's your alternative proposal to get people quickly and easily from Caltrain station to north bayshore?

Don't say self-driving cars, because that will just add MORE traffic to the road.
Don't say buses, because they'll also be stuck in traffic unless we add a dedicated bus lane. Good luck with THAT.
Don't say light rail extension, because that's even MORE expensive and apparently we as a community are unwilling to spend any money on infrastructure improvements.
Don't say bikes, because bike lanes will eat up precious road real estate just like dedicated bus lanes.

What's your solution to magically solve our traffic problems without spending any money? At least the council is looking into a new idea, instead of complaining constantly about any minor change to the city or its roadways.

Whatever the system ends up being, I strongly believe we need much better transit between downtown and North Bayshore, to serve both our community and the thousands of commuters who are already using Caltrain and VTA. I'm happy to see this study moving forward.

Keep in mind this is a study, and no one has signed off on implementing PRT. I appreciate Mr. Siegel's asks: "focus on a transit system that runs on electricity and doesn't share the roadway with traffic and only stops at stations". Other systems that fit that mold include light rail or subway; a mass-transit or autonomous vehicle lane (Web Link or an urban gondola (which has seen considerable more success than PRT- Web Link The nice thing about these studies is they will compare and contrast the alternatives so we can make a well-informed decision.

The city council should study the gondola transport systems used by ski area, including several Lake Tahoe. The cars typically carry 6 people, but probably could be adapted to hold a few more. They hang from cables supported by widely spaced stanchions. So there would a minimal impact on the streets below. They travel at a reasonable speed for local transit and follow a route of fixed stations. They don't stop at the stations, but slow down to a veritable crawl. This might be an issue for elderly or handicapped people. Hopefully, some studies will show how those issues could be managed.

Kudos for seeking public transit alternatives that will not themselves get tied up in traffic. Still, I've gotta wonder whether the Council would have been pushing for a blimp shuttle, if that dirigible startup were still at Moffett Field.

Absolutely great idea. Please go North to Palo Alto too as well as Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. We have terrible traffic here and since so many people work in North Bayshore and commute from here as well as far North as to Facebook, this problem is going to increase. A network of these Pods linking up these large campuses makes sense. The bigger the vision the better the end result will be.

As for cost, yes it will be tremendous. However, I think local residents would be much more inclined to vote for a tax increase that improves traffic in this area rather than South Santa Clara County which is where most dollars go. Also, if Google and others can make buses to San Francisco and other places a viable option, then surely they can be persuaded to chip into something like this.

@bjd

I also hope that this transit link will not serve only commuters but also Mountain View residents who will want to go take a walk or enjoy a concert at Shoreline, play or watch a game at Shoreline Athletics, patronize retail, eateries and entertainment both in North Bayshore and Downtown.....

@OK then... How about just saying no to new development, that will put a huge stop on more traffic, but that is way to easy and it won't bring in more money for the over bloated pay the unions provided for the city workers.

What should be done is to make the highways into double deckers. Yes, we have earthquakes, but for 2 stories, we can make them pretty safe.

I'm still trying to get those new fangled internally combustable engines off thew road. Why these roads were made for horses and buggies. Buggies I say!

Why do all these fancy men with their big fancy brains always want to try to "Improoove" things. Why can we stay just the way we are? My cows stopped giving milk once they decided to let these "cars" on the road.

Join me won't you?
Back-to-buggies!
Back-to-buggies!
Back-to-buggies!
Back-to-buggies!
Back-to-buggies!

Light Rail to Caltrain and BART.

Light Rail should be extended to the Shoreline area from the existing tracks on Moffett Field property at Ellis Street and Hwy 101. Riders could elect to travel to either the MV Caltrain station or BART in Milpitas (at the Great Mall).

Mountain View initially spent 20 million dollars to bring Light Rail to the Castro Street station. Let's enhance that investment by extending it to the North Shoreline commuters.

Just another idea, maybe companies should expand to the areas were people live. So we can keep our suburban live, we so much like. And housing prices won't go through the roof here.
By the way so called pod cars were presented in San Francisco in the seventies, and they went nowhere. By now half of all employees should be working from home. Those were the ideas in the eighties.
And those gondolas at ski areas don't run when it's to windy and are not wheelchair accessible.

Maybe we can buy a tunnel boring machine from the Europeans, who seem to build a lot of them, and start slowly digging subways. The bay area is getting dense, and the whole area is slowly turning into a giant megalopolis.

@OK then...
The city has sketched plans for a single-lane, peak direction bus lane that would operate in the median area of Shoreline Blvd in its most congested section between Middlefield Rd and the N Bayshore area. It would be used by shuttle buses and VTA buses.

As for bikes, the same plan would convert the existing bike lanes on Shoreline to be curb-protected starting at Wright Dr and accessing the N Bayshore area via a new bicycling and walking only bridge over Hwy 101.

Getting more people into and out of N Bayshore can be achieved with measures like this, which don't cost $60 million to $130 million.

@Janet Well, it still costs $40m+... Web Link

It is a great plan but there are no cheap solutions here, unfortunately.

PRT combines worst aspects of fixed guideway transit, high capital and maintenance costs with the worst attributes of cars which is low passenger capacity. It's better to go with the low tech bus and bike solutions that Janet Lafleur talks about. If you have to, build another bike/ped bridge over 101 like the Permanente Creek Trail bridge they built a few years back.

Have Google, Linked-In, Intuit, Microsoft, Shoreline Amphitheatre, etc. all contribute to extend light rail into North Shoreline area. No cost to public.

I hope these pod cars become reality. We need a different kind of transportation system to move people over to the north side of Shoreline Boulevard bypassing the many numbers of cars slowly moving in that direction.

Pod cars in Mountain View, along with the HSR station at Castro @ Central expressway. We'll be a happenin' town for sure.

@bjd $40 million is a great deal when you compare it to freeway projects to improve vehicle flow. The 3.2 mile addition of the new lane on Highway 101 between Hwy 85 and Embarcadero was $72 million, and it's only considered an "auxiliary lane" for safety, not increasing vehicle throughput (even though it does). The reconfigured Hwy 101-85 interchange cost a whopping $123.5 million a decade ago. I shudder to think what it would cost today.

Web Link
Web Link

Downsides of this kind of solution (in my opinion):
- Costs $1B+ to build (25-70M per mile).
- Eye sore if running above ground level
- requires yet another transfer for people (from light rail, bus, or caltrain), which will lower ridership
- as with all other mass transit, still doesn't take you end-point to end-point.

On the plus side,
- avoids traffic on streets
- electric
- frequent service

So how do we get the best solution here? In my view autonomous driving solves all the problems. It will:
- low cost - no need to build rail lines
- goes from your home to work (or wherever you need to go), door to door, no transfers
- reduces traffic on streets because it can route optimize, ride share efficiently, and be better at not getting into accidents. Plus it helps immensely with parking problems! Imagine Castro St opened up as a promenade for pedestrians!
- on-demand service, which is better than frequent service
- gives you every convenience and flexibility of a car - which is the primary reason people drive.

We just need to wait until 2021 when autonomous driving technology should be worked out. Instead of investing $100M to $1B in this thing, invest in a fleet of autonomous driving cars along with local industry for a fraction of the cost.

Until then, invest in running electric shuttles every 5 minutes from caltrain along whatever route you would have this AGT system built (build a private road along the same route just for the shuttle), yes it uses the road but your money is better spent.