Fact-Checking the "PRT Boondoggle" Blog
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Friday, December 07, 2012

Sense of proportion

"King Kong was only three foot six inches tall."
Peter O'Toole to Steve Railsback
The Stunt Man
1980, 20th Century Fox
Scale. It's always good to put things in their proper scale. Context, if you will.

The history of this blog is replete with examples of us pointing out when Ken Avidor ignores or omits context, all the better to incorrectly portray Personal Rapid Transit technology. I bet he thought he could sneak two non-contextual photos by us in his November 15 post, Suncheon Bay Vectus "PRT" Revealed to NOT be Personal Rapid Transit (Berther, 11/15). We could probably call it a Screen Play -- a Big Lie, 'Suncheon PRT stations aren't offline', running interference for this:



Two pictures in which there is nothing familiar to impart a sense of scale. Sure, thought Ken, I'll just call them 'massive.' It's not like anyone can prove otherwise -- it's all the way over in Korea.

He thought wrong.

An examination of the photo of Station One and Depot in the official Vectus PDF does contain a good clue about scale: workers on the ground.


Let's propose those workers are 5'7."  That would make the station platform only about 28 feet above the ground. And the station roof only about 40 feet above the ground.

For even better sense of scale, behold these recently released photos showing a rather compact Suncheon Station 2:
PRT Consulting

PRT Consulting
As for the 'massive' main guideway to Station Two, it is holding 2 sets of rails, one going in each direction. Therefore that guideway is twice as wide as what's shown above at Station One. Here's a photo of 3 guys standing on single guideway at Suncheon, just imagine it twice as wide.

PRT Consulting
UPDATE 1
It's official: Vectus lists 'typical' guideway width as 1400mm (4.6 ft. Ref: page 23 here). But the vehicles are 2100mm/6.9 ft wide (p.22), so the little pods are actually wider than the "massive" guideway.



gPRT Massive Liar