Thursday, September 21, 2006

4 Black Holes in Personal Rapid Transit's Cyberspace Dream

As this excellent Light Rail Now article explains, PRT only exists in computer graphics on the many PRT websites all linked to one another. But the cyber-illusion is starting to fall apart. Dead links are starting to spread like varicose veins as the websites for dead and moribund PRT projects like E.D.I.C.T. blink off. Here's four examples:

1) The Citizens for Personal Rapid Transit website featuring convicted felon Dean Zimmermann's bizarre PRT plan for South Minneapolis has been down for a week or more:

www.cprt.org

I heard the CPRT had a little trouble with the IRS after they violated their non-profit status by electioneering for Zimmermann and other PRT-promoting candidates in the 2005 election. You can still view archived pages from the cprt.org website at the Wayback Machine.

2)Years ago, the city council of Cardiff, Wales was hoodwinked into supporting the phony PRT project called ULTra. When ULTra turned out to be a tortoise-slow, battery-powered, magnet-guided, gussied-up golf cart, they apparently pulled the plug on the web page heralding the ominous-sounding program they called E.D.I.C.T.

www.cardiff.gov.uk/edict

Here's what happened to E.D.I.C.T.:

The lead partner in EDICT was the Welsh capital Cardiff which has been planning an ULTra system for several years. The city is home to ULTra's 1 km-long test track, which opened in 2002, and the council originally hoped to have a commercial system running by 2004. Progress slowed, however, after political disagreements and the withdrawal of funding by the Welsh Assembly in 2003.


Translation: another failed PRT project flushed down the memory hole.

3) Skyweb Express (the Taxi 2000 Corporation) still rides the cyber-waves, but the would-be PRT vendor is manned by a ghostly crew and hasn't posted any news on its website's news page since 2004. Mark Olson links to Taxi 2000's website on his campaign website.

4) Skyloop has been dead as a doornail since 2001. Skyloop's website is a relic from PRT's go-go years in the late 1990's... hilarious stuff.

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