Personal Rapid Transit in New Zealand - Future Transit Now

Dr J E Anderson comments below on the long anticipated Booz Allen report on PRT to the New Jersey State Legislature.

You can read the actual report here

The report is an excellent summary. Paul Hoffman has done a great job of fairly representing PRT in its potential place in urban transportation. The NJDOT shows PRT in a very positive light. There is of course material left out that I would like to have seen, but it will take a Historian of Technology some day to write a book on the whole history of PRT.

I have, however, some comments on three types of cost figures given:

1. Cost of a PRT test program needed before a first application should be built.

2. PRT Capital cost

3. PRT O&M cost

On the first, I don't know where the figure of $50 to $100 million came from. Of the experts listed, since Jack Irving and Claus Becker are not included, I am the only one included who has actually done all of the engineering needed to estimate such a cost, and I have designed and supervised the construction of an automated, LIM-propelled vehicle running on a 60-ft section of guideway all for a total budget of less than $800,000, but based on extensive background engineering.

Based on that experience I have written a series of Requests for Proposal for the guideway, chassis, cabin, control system, station, maintenance facility, and test program in enough detail that I have been able to use that information as a basis to interest companies in doing the details. If I direct that work, which I am fully able to do, I estimate that I can supervise the design, construction, and testing of a PRT system of three vehicles operating on a loop test track capable of at least 35 mph for under $10 million and completed in 30 months.

But this is based on the caveat that I get the money no strings attached and can direct the work. If this program is done in New Jersey under the supervision of NJDOT a great deal of educating will need to be done before final design and construction. Depending on how the program is run, this could take at least six months and maybe a year and cost the salaries and overhead of the engineers involved. Moreover if the NJDOT puts the best systems engineer in the world in charge who has had little or no experience with PRT the outcome will be as uncertain as was the outcome of the Chicago-Raytheon project.

On cost items 2 and 3 I only comment now that nothing is said in the report about the dates when various estimates were made, which can't possibly all be current, and the price indices used to bring them up to date. I will comment further after I have researched price indices and have thus had a chance to make fair comparisons. There are consumer price indices, and various kinds of construction and material-cost price indices. Engineering News Record occasionally gives such indices but even then there are uncertainties, for example, dependent on in what part of the world the various subsystems are manufactured.

Detailed Comments

• The four-to -one inflation of the costs of the Morgantown are mentioned twice without pointing out why. Here is why:

• • The project started and the first cost estimate was made assuming Alden StaRRcar's six passenger design with a guideway of appropriate size and design for it.
  • The deadline was set in December 1970 to get the system running in 20 months with a team that had never done anything similar.
  • UMTA arbitrarily increased the vehicle size to 20 passengers.
  • The project was done in such a hurry that the guideway designer, F. R. Harris didn't know the weight of the vehicles and was told to assume that they were as heavy as standard rapid rail cars. That was the basis for the over-designed guideway.
  • The vehicle designer, Boeing, began the vehicle design and only well into the program learned that the curve radii were too small for their vehicle to negotiate, so they had to redesign the vehicle with both back-wheel and front-wheel steering.
  • F. R. Harris insisted that there be borings at every post hole but to save money UMTA insisted that was not necessary. A struggle followed which was finally settled by UMTA giving F. R. Harris a letter accepting responsibility. The foundations, posts, and guideways were built. Some of the foundations sank enough so that they had to be removed at great expense, following which the guideway had to be rebuilt
  • These are only some of the problems, which showed the results of the lack of systems engineering. What was not mentioned in the NJPRT report was that at the start of the contract JPL was selected as the system contractor. The program was initiated in December 1970 and in August 1971 I visited JPL and was told that they had just resigned from the program because they found that UMTA was using them only as a money "pass-through" and that they were given no budget for systems engineering. A JPL official told me that they resigned from the program because they could not remain involved and maintain their reputation for excellence in systems engineering. So 9 months into a 20-month program Boeing took over as so-called systems engineer with no time to do any systems engineering.
  • Bottom line is that the ratio of the finish to start costs of the Morgantown program should never be mentioned without stating why the difference. In one part of the NJPRT report there is thankfully some mention of these problems.

• Option #1: How can New Jersey monitor PRT programs if there is no budget at all? There would need to be a minimum of assigning at least one person in the NJDOT to monitor the progress of PRT. Perhaps that is considered a negligible budget, not worth mentioning.

• Page 23. The Scientific American article mentioned was published in July 1969. This is the date needed to find the article. It is an historic article and one I have often used as a first introduction to PRT, thus the exact date is important.
  

• Page 23. The Apollo program stared with a speech by Pres. Kennedy in 1960.

• Page 25. Cabtrack had a one-fifth scale test track, not a full-scale track. Also Aerospace Corporation built a very useful one-tenth scale test track.
  

• Page 25. The PRT conference dates were as follows:

   

• • November 1971. National Conference on PRT, Minneapolis

  • May 1973. International Conference on PRT, Minneapolis

  • Sept. 1975. International Conference on PRT, Denver

  • April 1978. ATRA Conference, Indianapolis

  • Nov. 1996. Conference on PRT and Other Emerging Transport Systems, Minneapolis

  
  

• Page 26. Due to heavy pressure from conventional rail interests, UMTA cancelled a planned High-Capacity PRT program in Sept. 1974. See my paper "HCPRT" on www.prtnz.com
  

• Page 30. The target cost that came out of the Phase I Chicago RTA PRT design study for the Rosemont, IL, 3-mile, 8 station PRT system was $13.4 million per mile.

• Page 47. The Cabintaxi program was stopped in Dec. 1980. I have the telegram.

• Page 55. PRT need not have lower line speed. Line speed is an economic factor, not technical.

• Page 93. In the Chicago RTA project, visual impact was never mentioned as a problem. This issue is brought up to my knowledge only by people promoting surface level rail, always neglecting to show the overhead wires.

• Page 70. I like the conclusion that the technology of PRT should be open, taught in schools, and practiced by competent firms.

• Figure A-18. This illustration is attributed to Vectus, whereas it is a picture from a movie of the Taxi 2000 system serving the Microsoft campus. See http://gettherefast.org/bettercampus.html.