I'll respond to Olson's letter first;
OLSON: Mr. Avidor called PRT an “imaginary transportation concept”. This is puzzling because PRT has been developed entirely from existing technologies.
AVIDOR: Horns, wings and hoofs exist on different animals yet nobody has seen a flying unicorn... or a working PRT system.
OLSON: There is also one being built at the Heathrow Airport in the United Kingdom...
AVIDOR: Sorry, last I heard, ULTra has a few development hurdles to jump before construction begins. Anyways, what relevance does a battery-powered buggy that cannot operate in snow or ice have for Minnesota? The other would-be PRT company he mentions, Vectus is yet another sham PRT "testing facility" project. For forty years, PRT was always on the verge of some breakthrough that never happened. Here's a long list of PRT projects that never happened and never will.
OLSON: ...but none as advanced as ours: www.skywebexpress.com.
AVIDOR: Skyweb Express/Taxi 2000 never advanced beyond the shiny red pod prototype. Taxi 2000 has failed to update its news page on its website since 2004... when Olson's bills failed in the legislature. A dead website usually means a dead company.
OLSON: The travesty is that we are falling behind the world technologically.
AVIDOR: There is no technology. When Taxi 2000 sued J. Edward Anderson in 2005, Anderson claimed there were no PRT patents.
OLSON: Our U of M technology is by far the most advanced in the world
AVIDOR: The U of M is no longer interested in PRT.
OLSON: ...and it may soon be taken overseas for us to watch its development there, after we spent $30 plus million to develop it.
AVIDOR: Where have we heard that pitch before? "...and if you don't buy that used car right now, I can't guarantee that it will be on the lot tomorrow."
OLSON: Mr. Avidor also raised some good concerns with our Local Government Committee hearings on my PRT bill.
AVIDOR: No I didn't. Mark Olson scratched the bill the two occasions I showed up to speak against his bills at his committee.
OLSON: I have checked the record and am aware of Mr. Avidor being scheduled to testify once on my PRT bill. As the chair, I have however taken steps to avoid my position from being used to push my bills inappropriately. My bill was put on the agenda as a time permitting item a couple times. It is very likely that this was not communicated to Mr. Avidor. I would like to apologize for my failure to make sure proper communications occurred when setting tentative agenda items.
AVIDOR: What a lot of jargon! Mark Olson was not the chairman of the House Transportation Finance Committee on April 12th when I was scheduled to testify.The meeting began at 12:30. My name was on the agenda posted outside and copies of my statement were sitting on a table. Mark Olson walked in at 2:00 and whispered in the ear of the Chairperson Liz Holberg, then he walked out. At 3:00, the meeting adjourned. When I asked Liz Holberg why I didn't get a chance to testify, she told me "Sometimes things get ugly up here at the Capitol".
I should add that Gary Dean Zimmermann, now a convicted felon had no trouble testifying for Olson's PRT bills... you can hear Zimmermann testifying at Olson's committee HERE.
On to Mark Swanson's letter;
SWANSON I am writing to agree with Mr. Avidor. It is not about right vs. left, it is about what makes sense for the taxpayers of Minnesota.
That’s where our agreement ends. According to his letter last week, we should not be using our imagination to come up with innovational ways to solve our transportation issues. That old train will get us there...using that kind of thinking, maybe we should just go back to the horse and buggy.
AVIDOR: Mr. Swanson obviously hasn't ridden the Hiawatha LRT... LRT is a completely modern, state-of-art technology. PRT on the other hand has not advanced further than the concept stage which is hardly different than the 1960's concept of PRT.
SWANSON The technology to run the PRT is hardly imaginary, just bringing the pieces together and the programming a system to run it is yet to be developed.
AVIDOR: Which hasn't been done for three reasons because nobody can figure out how to do it, nobody wants to pay the cost o developing it and nobody wants a transportation system that requires communities to cut down half the trees on their streets for a monorail with a clear view into their bedroom windows.
SWANSON That is why we should be supporting it with a test track at the fair grounds.
AVIDOR: And which would-be PRT vendor is proposing that "test track"? Some PRT scam artists tried to hoodwink the Saint Paul City Council into approving a PRT test track in Falcon Heights last year... read about that here.
SWANSON In fact, the University of Minnesota holds several of the patents on the technology and stands to make millions in royalties when it is implemented
AVIDOR: Wrong. J. Edward Anderson said no PRT patents exist at Taxi 2000.
SWANSON: The other great part about PRT is that it would be put together by private industry, no tax dollars for continued operation and maintenance like the train will have.
AVIDOR: This is one of the big lies of the PRT disinformation campaign. No transit system can be built and operated without subsidy. PRTistas like Swanson claim that PRT is so cool that people would pay any price to ride it. The ridership figures for monorails, the closest thing to PRT falls far short of rail transit. The Morgantown "PRT" (which isn't a true PRT system) went way over budget during construction and is loathed by its passengers.
SWANSON: A final point is that a bill to give tax breaks for the private development of PRT passed in both legislative bodies (i.e. was actually approved) but removed by legislative leadership, e.g. senate majority leader Dean Johnson (DFL)
AVIDOR: It wasn't just Johnson. PRT had little support anywhere in the legislature. In 2005, Mark Olson's PRT amendment was voted down 26 to 107.
Here's a blog sums up what most transporation professionals think of PRT:
Putting the PRT myth to rest for good
"Like gold standard crazies, intelligent design ideologues and cold-fusion enthusiasts, Personal Rapid Transit nuts see something the rest of the world doesn't see and think they are visionaries as a result. Since there is no "true" PRT system anywhere in the world for these people to spend all day riding around in, they spend their time comment-spamming blogs like ours. A similar blog, publictransit.us, had enough of it and decided to fact-check the PRT claims. They found claims of systems that don't exist and studies that were never conducted.
I think that pretty much ends the discussion."
Learn more about PRT at the PRT is a Joke web site.
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