Epoch, In Your Face-level defeat for the Laffable Luddite

UK Tram -- a British industry group that promotes light rail and trams -- has issued how-to guidance on promoting Personal Rapid Transit projects.

Ken Avidor will now have to claim UK Tram are "gadgetbahners," have been "hoodwinked," and are "just like" Michele Bachmann.

Keep an eye on Ken's "PRT Moondoggie" blog for the out of context quotes he's bound to pull from UK Tram's PDFs!

gPRT

Hazy

An effort on PRT by the Indian state of Kerala has been underway this year (1, 2, 3), and today a brief article in Yentha.com gives both a status update as well as reflection of the uncertainty surrounding the project. Clip:

Trivandrum: Infrastructure Kerala Ltd (INKEL) had brought up the idea of pod-cars around the same time when monorail was being pushed as a Mass Rapid Transit System for the city. As of now, monorails do not appear likely as the government is waiting for E Sreedharan's report on the feasibility of Trivandrum to have a metro rail system. And the future of pod-cars seems hazy as well.

. . .

While INKEL came up with the idea, NATPAC was given the task of conducting a feasibility study regarding the project.

"The feasibility study has been conducted and the report has been submitted to INKEL," informed T Elangovan, Head, Traffic and Transport Department, NATPAC. "Now it is upto [sic] them to submit the project report."

He refused to comment on the conclusion of the report and only said: "The study was conducted for the 7 kilometer stretch between Vellayambalam and East Fort; it wasn't a study on how the pod-car project would be implemented but merely if the pod-car project is feasible or not."

Source

In other words, there are monorail and pod feasibility studies for one corridor in the city of Trivandrum, the latter is done and the former isn't. But the fact the infrastructure agency has yet to release the results of the PRT study gives the unnamed reporter the impression that no news is bad news. That's clearly an opinon.

And the overall impression is that, really, as yet nothing can be concluded about the report one way or another.

Unless you're Ken Avidor the Laffable Luddite. True to form, he cherrypicks one sentence to tweet about:

Yup, Ken takes it out of context again -- taking the characterization of PRT in a specific bureaucratic process in one city ("hazy as well" as monorail), and broadening it -- 'hazy as well' in all of India!

And glossing over pod projects in Amritsar (1, 2) and Gurgaon as "hype."

What a hazy guy.

gPRT