ATRA President: "For 30 Years, PRT Advocates Have Done the Opposite of Play Nice."

Jeral Poskey, the President of the Advanced Transit Association had this to say on the Transport-Innovators Google Group in response to CETA member and would-be militant PRT fanatic Mike Weidler:

For 30 years, almost all the PRT advocates have done 
the opposite of play nice.  We have been proud of the fact that we're 
"proving the status quo wrong," "showing the ridiculousness of their 
arguments" and showing up at meetings talking about how great PRT is and 
what a waste technology X would be.  We haven't educated ourselves on the 
funding process they go through.  Very few advocates understand and can 
emphasize with the conflicting political environment most agencies operate 
in.  All in all, we haven't been very nice.  Oh, and I'd say that we've been guilty of our own level of ignorance, arrogance and sometimes even misrepresentation, albeit with the best goals in mind.

I have witnessed first-hand how PRT fanatics disrupted meetings about transit:

I have encountered more of these fanatics who insist that PRT was “faster, cheaper, better” than trolleys and buses. In one memorable encounter, a deranged man interrupted a workshop my wife and I were giving at Macalester College, shouting that PRT is the “only transportation solution", threw a dozen Taxi 2000 Corporation brochures at us and stormed out.

PRT has not only been a big waste of time for public officials and citizens, it's apparently been a waste of Poskey's time as well... Poskey is working for Google now.


Ken Avidor will blog about Personal Rapid Transit and other gadgetbahn scams.