Here are some basic questions and answers about Open PRT that were written while preparing for a TEDx Talk.
The automobile revolutionized the transportation industry. However, it is not a sustainable solution. Personal Rapid Transit, or PRT, has been an under-recognized alternative for decades but has been curtailed due to investors’ trepidation and fundamentally flawed planning. Open PRT is a new initiative for next generation transportation. Open PRT is the “Internet of Transportation” — the idea of creating a decentralized, modular transportation system that will be automated and scalable to meet demands for the next century. Transportation is, in essence, taking one thing and moving it from point A to B: for the Internet its data packets, for Open PRT its people and goods. I propose taking a critical look at our current transportation systems and apply the lessons we learned from the Internet to develop a solution that meets our needs. Someday, with this solution, we should be able to get in a pod at our house in Charleston and get out of that same pod in New York, or perhaps Hong Kong.
Millions of cars navigating an infinite number of routes converging on highways and busy city streets, is nothing short of chaos. The complexity of the problem is not going to change. However, the approach to the solution must. Instead of creating a perfect, omniscient PRT system that plans out exact routes for every pod, we embrace the fact that the chaos of millions of people commuting to work is only solvable by breaking the problem down into thousands of individual decisions made by a decentralized body. This is the same approach that led to the scalability of the Internet. The existing system would continually expand to include new locations. Two cities could develop the infrastructure independently and then connect to allow travel between them. Multiply this by a factor of 100 to include all the major cities of the world and you get an idea of the amount of chaos that would be handled by a unified global transportation system.
Many attempts have been made to implement PRT systems. None, to my knowledge, have taken the idea of decentralization, modularization, and openness to a level that would support a viable, long lasting, and scalable transportation solution.
We need to reconsider many of the fundamental ideas we have about transportation and economics such as ownership, competition, and regulation. The technology to create Open PRT is available, but we have to be willing to accept and share it.