On the occasion of the approval of an Amritsar PRT

Today we take note of the Punjab Infrastructure Development Board's approval of an urban PRT for the city of Amritsar, India.

Let's see what Ken Avidor the Minnesota anti-PRT propagandist has said about Amritsar. Please welcome back Mr. Side By Side Comparison:

Avidor sez:	Meh:
With only "revenue service trials" at Heathrow completed, ULTra has teamed up with Fairwood India to propose building an ambitious PRT system in Amritsar, India. "The Personal Rapid Transport (PRT) – developed by our ULTra PRT, UK – is a revolutionary new transportation system, which has been operationalized in London (Heathrow airport) after 20 years of development." "Operationalized"?	Yes, Ken, "operationalized." It's a word, the past participle of operationalize, meaning to make operational. I know what this is! This is like that one time, when your only comment about the M.I.S.T.E.R. PRT was "Polish PRT?" -- isn't it, Ken? They speak English in India, Ken, English is one of India's two official languages. You might have heard of a little thing called the Raj?
The map for the Amritsar PRT is here. There is no indication that the citizens of Amritsar had any input in creating the route and the proposed destinations on the map. There has already been criticism that the PRT project "would harm historic Walled City of Amritsar and would hamper tourism in the city.	He's pulling it out of his butt. He has no idea what public input had occurred or was planned, or what Indian law requires. We can pretty much count on it being different from how we do it in America since, you know, it's a different country. Actually, the whole purpose of the PRT project is to serve some of the 100,000 religious pilgrims a week who visit (some might say tour) the city's world-famous Golden Temple. How could a low-profile transit system possibly get in the way of that?
One reason that PRT never goes anywhere is the PRT guys never engage the public in any meaningful way. Source Dec. 4, 2010	It's not the job of "the PRT guys" to engage the public, "the PRT guys" don't make the decisions. Officials of the various state and city jurisdictions are the ones who lead the process, they are answerable to their citizens. I'm going to assume whatever public input regulations they have were followed, since India is the world's most biggest democracy.

We know what kind of public engagement Ken likes. He likes it when the citizens are angry about PRT, because that's the output of his international Luddite propaganda campaign, waged in website comment forums and in the op-ed pieces he has gotten published from time to time.

Ken loves when citizens get angry about PRT, and I'm sure he's helped stir it up. When the District government of Daventry, England was planning PRT, Ken gleefully posted and reposted the public's negative, "pod off" reaction to the project (See? Governments do engage the public about PRT). When I was doing background research on the Daventry planning process, I communicated with a District official who said they had received anti-PRT cartoons. Gee, I wonder who sent those.

An angry populace is also no doubt what Ken was hoping for when he was agitating against the PRT initiative by the municipal government of Winona, Minnesota. A centerpiece of his campaign involved drawing attention to local Teabagger opposition to PRT, in the form of Teabag city council candidate Joshua Chasco. Nobody disrupts a town hall meeting like Teabaggers.

Teabaggers disrupt town hall meeting on health care reform, 2009

gPRT