Not synonymous

From reading the Laffable Luddite's tweet about Princeton's Alexander Street/University Place transit task force dropping PRT from consideration, you'd think the bulldozers were already idling at the construction site:

Yes, Ken says they killed a PRT project.  Cue visions of hard hat-wearing engineers throwing down blueprints and stalking off in high dudgeon.

Except if you actually click on his link, what you find is that what Princeton has dropped is not a project:

Princeton Council heard testimony at their September 9 meeting from Kevin Wilkes, the Chair of the Alexander Street / University Place Transit Task Force. He reported that the possibility of a heavy rail extension of the Dinky Line to take it up to Palmer Square is no longer being considered. Use of Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) technology has also been excluded from further discussion. However, several other transport modes remain under discussion.

Did we get that? "Considered." "Discussion." They are talking about the transit modes they could implement, and dropping some of those. What has been stopped about PRT is scoping --which, at this early stage, is basically just an on-paper technology assessment.

Such discussion does not a project make.

Why was PRT dropped? The article itself says the reason is unknown, and speculates it's because PRT is "relatively unproven" (not noting the existence of Heathrow and Masdar). But an educated guess can be made, based on this statement about the proposal to extend the existing 'Dinky' heavy rail [italics in original]:

We don’t have the turning radius; we don’t have the ability to run the catenary lines up any street in town. We eliminated that as a possibility.

If they're restricted as to where elevated wires can go, that probably also applies to elevated modes.  The cliche putdowns "pie in the sky," "The Jetsons," and "anti-transit scam" do not make an appearance. Not even "more of a Shelbyville idea."

The verdict:

Update 1
So Ken has tried to learn from the above, posting this today (10/2/2013):

Hedging his bets, he calls the Amritsar PRT thingamajig a "Proposal."

Except the Amritsar PRT thingamabob has reached the stage of laying a foundation stone, selecting a vendor, and drawing up detailed plans. I'm afraid that takes the Amritsar PRT thingy past the rank of proposal, all the way to being a real project.*

The verdict:

Too bad, Ken.


* Although, the headline on the linked article is "Much-hyped Pod transit system for Amritsar may get scrapped" (emphasis added), so as of now it can't be said to have actually bitten the dust yet.

gPRT

Terrifying Misrepresentation!!!

Today Ken Avidor the Laffable Luddite is back, and he's in fine Jell-O-like form.

"VIDEO: Heathrow T5 Personal Rapid Transit Pod Customer Service: " Truly Shameless"
Pod promoters always downplay the possibility of failures for PRT. The fact is failure can happen with any mechanical system. What is especially terrifying for a passenger is to experience a failure without any human available to explain what is going on. …
Source

"Video"! "Shameless"! "Failure can happen"! "Especially terrifying"!

Ken then shows you the video. Of a man terrifyingly* stuck at the Terminal 5 pod STATION, trying to speak with Customer Service but not getting satisfaction, which "PRT is a Joke IS A JOKE" is certain must never happen in any other everyday situation in the whole wide world already.

OH THE HUMANITY! Frame from the terrifying video of the terrifying Heathrow Terminal 5 pod station. At any time they might have walked next door for a snack (although I hear Gordon Ramsay kitchens can be nightmares) while the problem was being resolved.

"Pod promoters" don't really "downplay" failures, either. In fact, they speak and write extensively on how they try to design their system with backup components to reduce the odds of failure. Maybe that makes them sound overconfident, but they certainly don't "downplay."

In addition, it's hard to make sense of the source blogger's complaint:

We had to listen to a voice hiding behind the screen, who after a while stopped picking up the help phone also. 

As though he expected an airport representative to be crouched behind the little kiosk. We don't even know why the pods appeared to be not in operation.

But the blogger does make it clear that:

Its [sic] not bad that it failed, because these things do fail, what was worse was that they refused to send anybody down for the 20 minutes it was out of order. 

The complaint was about Customer Service (the human factor), NOT the Ultra PRT technology. And at 20 minutes in duration, a decidedly minor complaint.

Verdict:
 

Update 1: Robert Llewellyn's Fully Charged -- "About 90%" of Heathrow Pod users have pushed the :) button.

^ *So terrified he had the presence of mind to record the video 



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

Fire Bad

Like OMG there was a big gigantic malfunction today involving the Morgantown PRT! Let's go to the coverage:

Investigators were working on Saturday to determine the cause of a transformer fire that caused a power outage at an El Cajon mall, fire officials said-

--oh hold on. That's not the story about Morgantown. That's one of the other 3,690 hits for 'electrical fire' currently being returned by Google News.

Courtesy of Laffable Luddite Ken Avidor, the Morgantown story is:

Another WVU Personal Rapid Transit Electrical Fire

...

This is what I wrote back in 2010 about the so-called WVU PRT:

The PRT hucksters will often cite the so-called West Virginia University's Personal Rapid Transit in Morgantown as a successful example of PRT "technology":

A heavy weight PRT network opened in Morgantown, WV in 1975 and has delivered 110 million injury-free passenger miles.

But the WVU PRT is neither PRT (it's really an ordinary, automated people-mover similar to what you see in airports) or successful.

While the crackpot-free version goes something like this:

WBOY-12 Morgantown Jan. 11, 2012

Electrical Fire Interrupts PRT Service at WVU

West Virginia University officials responded to an electrical fire at the PRT, Personal Rapid Transit, substation on the Evansdale WVU campus Wednesday afternoon.

A mechanical malfunction which resulted in an electrical fire has interrupted service to passengers.

WVU officials said passengers were in no immediate danger and no injuries have been reported.

The system is expected to be operational by around 5 p.m. Wednesday.

Etc. etc.

The point, of course, is that electrical fires are common throughout the world and not inherent to Personal Rapid Transit. Today's fire was in the substation, the vehicles and track were not involved.

Ken Avidor is basically criticizing PRT for relying on electricity.

Update 1:

Avidor's panic-bashing of the Morgantown PRT is sort of like the time a car crashed into a power pole in a snowstorm, causing a power outage affecting the PRT, and Ken blogged "a snowstorm shut down the PRT."

Update 2:

Avidor's blog headline promises description of "chaos" caused by electrical fire -- then he quotes the Daily Athenaeum article that shows the emergency was handled in a calm, orderly and professional manner.

Students were evacuated, and no one was harmed, according to University officials.

The PRT service was restored by Wednesday evening.

Students, faculty and staff were able to use the Mountain Line bus service and WVU shuttles while the PRT was out of service.

"Normally, when the PRT shuts down for an extended period of time, shuttles are used to transport between stations," Mazzella said.

Max Carozza, a senior finance student, said he was stuck on the PRT for 30 minutes on the track along Beechurst Avenue.

"The lights flickered, and it shut off," he said. "It slowly died. The PRT voice told us to hang tight."

PRT workers then located the car and led the seven people on the PRT tracks to the Beechurst PRT station.

Devin Novak, a sophomore nursing student, said she waited on the PRT for an hour before she was rescued.

"They said it took so long because a girl was claustrophobic and they needed an ambulance for her," Novak said.

Novak asid [sic] that before being rescued, another student on the PRT tried to pry the door open herself, but was quickly told over the car's intercom not to proceed.

"You could tell something bad was happening," she said.

At the opening of his post, Ken re-treats us to part of his conspiracy theory about the Morgantown PRT, that evil transit "concept" that relies on electricity:

...the WVU PRT was created to monkey-wrench conventional modes of transit and will be expected to function as a paragon of "gadgetbahn" for as long as they can keep it going.

The FTA and Recovery Act are supporting the PRT's modernization program, so by "they" Avidor must mean the Federal Government. Can we quote you, Ken, that you believe the Obama Administration and USDOT Sec. Ray LaHood are anti-transit?

Google News: Trains get stuck all the time.

But Ken never attacks them as 'infeasible' or 'dangerous'; #ModeBigot.

Update 3:

(3/14/12) - 21,000 in Boston lose power due to transformer fire. Hey Avidor, maybe this is connected to the Raytheon PRT test center that used to be in Marlborough!

gPRT

Another Luddite Veto

Today's Ken Avidor/Dump Bachmann coverage of Personal Rapid Transit in Amritsar, Punjab is pretty good -- if you like omission of balancing quotes, lack of cultural context, and no content about Krazy Eyes herself. It's a bait-and-switch.

That's right, the Laffable Luddite blogger who recently mocked an Indian newspaper's use of "operationalized" as though it were not a real word is now Extremely Concerned about shopkeepers in Amritsar who

apprehend that the system would adversely hit their business.

The foundation stone was laid outside the Hall Gate where shopkeepers raised anti-government slogans and staged dharnas. [emphasis not in original] 

Ken is Extremely Concerned because -- oh, did I mention the screaming headline on his post?

Shopkeepers in India Are Fasting in Protest Against the Personal Rapid Transit Boondoggle

...
A dharna is "a fast held at the door of an offender in India as an appeal for justice."

Not the first time, pRT [sic] has provoked a mass protest, read; "Pod Off! Residents oppose Daventry PRT scheme".

Here's the cultural context: dharnas actually are a prevalent form of protest in India, found in situations major and minor, in both the public and private spheres. Dharnas are not extreme last resorts like hunger strikes in the West because, Ken, India is a different culture. To see what I mean, just look up "dharna" in Google News.

And, true to form, Avidor also fails to look for articles explaining the Government's response to the merchant's concerns. Avidor doesn't do it, so I will:

[Dep. Chief Min.] Badal said that this new technology transport system not only facilitate [sic] the pilgrims coming to Golden Temple but also proved to be beneficial for the local business, as it would attract more tourists to the city. He said that as the main station of this PRT system would be in Hall Gate bazaar of the city, thus, it would multiply the business opportunities for local vendors. "Moreover, the POD would run at height more [sic] than the nearby shops, the system would provide traffic and hindrance free access to these shops", he added. Source

Avidor also pretends to weep over how advertising on PRT structures "Would be a hideous visual scar on the historic city"...

...as though Amritsar is not already a massive urban area that has -- yes -- buildings as tall or taller than PRT, and advertising:

How are each day's thousands of pilgrims supposed to get through congestion like this? Avidor doesn't want to let the local authorities decide. Flickr Photo: rwoan

And NO RELEVANCE TO BACHMANN, other than the usual 'she got her cooties on it when she was a state senator.'

Bottom line: the Laffable Luddite is once again trying to interfere in local decisionmaking, just as he has in England, Alameda and Richmond, California.  He claims PRT is a right wing conspiracy, yet the only reason he knows about any pod transit project in any country is because planning for them is occurring in public view. Whether they proceed is up to each locality. Ask Ken Avidor why he cares so much, and make him be factual and consistent.

IMPORTANT ARCHIVES:

• The year Bachmann sponsored PRT in the Minnesota Senate, she was one of 5 Republicans and 13 Democrats to do so. Ken Avidor never mentions the Democrats.
• Old Laffable Luddite blog "Now Bogus On Two Continents" (Daventry, England)
• Avidor claims to live in Alameda, accidentally sides with anti-Smart Growth NIMBYs
• "Luddite Fires His Loose Cannon" (Richmond, CA)
• Avidor claims PRT is right wing scam, but he promoted candidacy of anti-PRT Teabagger.

Ken, what did you mean by:

"Polish PRT?"

Ken Avidor (@Daily Kos)
read the PRTJJ coverage

UPDATE 1: The Amritsar pod public transit system would be used by the more than a million religious pilgrims a year who visit the Golden Temple. An Avidor fan equates them with rich people crossing cities in helicopters in order to avoid seeing slums:

UPDATE 2: (12/15/2011) Today a Ken tweet leads to one inescapable conclusion -- he believes transit competes for fares against taxis and rickshaws* ONLY IN INDIA:

Also that the planning/decisionmaking roles of the local Amritsar government and Punjab state government are not worth mentioning -- on Planet Avidorpia the "British Automated Pod Corporation" is doing it all!

"#occupy," Ken? Really?

UPDATE 3: (12/16/2011) Desperate to blunt today's NY Times coverage of Amritsar, Ken is now blogging and tweeting about comments by a grumpypants Heathrow traveler who thought 25 mph "felt" too slow, didn't like that the pods were busy, didn't like emergency exit hatches, and didn't like that the pod's windows didn't let him look directly forward or behind. Ken also issues a call for  an:

I don't know what experts would ever satisfy Avidor, since he doesn't want a state department of transportation involved.

Irony of The Year: Ken Avidor is putting stock in the opinion of someone who didn't like riding on his pod with strangers:

Ken has always tried to claim people who don't like riding with strangers love PRT.

UPDATE 4: By the way, this photo which Ken thought showed "a hideous visual scar" on historic Amritsar? 



It's not even Amritsar. It's Gurgaon.


Leave Laffy Alone!

gPRT

* Taxis and autorickshaws burn petrol, Ken! 

It's a two-fer

He couldn't get a quote right to save his life

It's hard to pick which category to file this one under -- Fact Check or Worst Expert In The World.

Remember when context-challenged Ken Avidor claimed snow shut down the Morgantown PRT, but it was really a power failure caused by an automobile crash? This is like that. But it's also like the time he claimed I thought my Twitter feed is 'private.'

A screengrab is worth a thousand words:

It's a two-fer! Not only is Ken Avidor caught in the act of taking someone out of context, it also reveals he doesn't know 'new Twitter' shows you the thread right there!

UPDATE 1: He removes the context AGAIN! (12/14/2011) Link

I tweeted:

...and Avidor quotes it as:

Is Avidor content to leave it here, and limit the damage to himself (@GottaLaff has over 18,000 Followers, versus Avidor's 501)? Of course not, he continues the kerfuffle -- finishing it off with an arrogant flourish:

(Firedoglake? Why doesn't Ken ever promote the time he got his clock cleaned at Democratic Underground?)
 
Thanks for this Christmas present Ken , it's exactly what I wanted!


Update 2: No Comprende Subset (3/22/2013) Link

Ken went after another humorist on Twitter last weekend, this time it was the actual Lizz Winstead (72,726 followers). Let the record show Avidor has trouble distinguishing between "ALL" Minnesotans and a subset thereof:

Oh, but it didn't end there.

By the way, "goo.gl/G65rl" links to Dump Bachmann blog ('Dumping Bachmann since 2005 or possibly 2004'), where Ken duplicates his error and amplifies it with a huffy 'buy my book' (as in "just follow the money"!) post.
  

He thinks he was being polite!

First Laffy, now Lizz. Ken, what's your problem with funny women?



Leave Laffy Alone!
gPRT

Luddite fires his loose cannon

We can't think of any other reason Ken Avidor would need to smear Richmond City Council progressives such as Dr. Jeff Ritterman, so the only reason, the Single Issue, is Personal Rapid Transit.

Apparently realizing his attack on Richmond, California's support for CyberTran conflicts with his Only Right Wingers Support PRT talking point, Avidor has doubled down on the smear.

Now he's blogging that the liberals on the Richmond city council aren't real liberals. No, apparently they're:

Self-described "progressive" members of the Richmond, California City Council

Source

And to deepen the smear, Ken uses the tried and true Sarah Palin tactic, Questionin' The Associations.  In Ken Avidor's universe, progressive Jeff Ritterman is a "progressive" (in airheadquotes) because of the involvement of one Allen Payton.

It's Ken's same old Cooties talking point -- he says if you're for PRT you're Just Like Bachmann, you're for Bachmann's Boondoggle, because she got her cooties on it in 2004. Never mind the DFL (Democratic)-dominated bipartisan agreement on PRT.

What Avidor means is: Councilman Ritterman's support for new transit technology means nothing because I say it has GOP cooties -- in fact it means Ritterman isn't a real progressive.

Yet inconsistent Ken (and his Twitter proxies who pretend to miss the point) remains in favor of light rail despite it being infested by Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich's cooties. It's Ken's standard, not mine.

Not only does Ken Avidor want veto power over your local transit policies, he's also annointed himself the go-to litmus tester to vet your elected officials for you.

What a dick-tator.

Update 1 - Ken claims 2011 GOP-Green connection:

But the blog post "http://t.co/eb5eAKiU" contains no mention of Greens (23:09 PDT).
I don't care for U.S. Greens -- not enough experience in governance -- but that doesn't mean they deserve to be lied about. 

Update 2 (10/7) - He continues to push the Conservative Cooties angle in attempt to shame California Democratic elected officials. Basically, whether you call it a hotel project, economic development, or whatever, Ken Avidor is opposing transit-oriented development in Richmond.

• Archive: Against it before he was for it -- Avidor sides with opponents of Smart Growth in Alameda

He continues to try to suck up to Current TV (after attacking it) in the Comments:

• Only Avidor would call realism "dampening expectations." The reality is that ULTra's India partner is proceeding with a system in dense Amritsar, in the state of Punjab.
• Also, there is no nasty political battle in Richmond over Cybertran. The city is pursuing a lobbying effort, any controversy will be due to Avidor (or other out-of-town proxies) creating one. 

gPRT

Great Mileage

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." - George W. Bush

Tell me, what does "No need to ride with strangers" mean to you?

In the context of Personal Rapid Transit, it is describing a fact of the service concept -- when transit service is on demand, a trip starts when you enter the station and select a destination, board a pod and go. People ahead of you are in their pods and don't have to wait for you, and your pod doesn't have to wait for others. Whether you know them or not is immaterial. If you're at your neighborhood station you might know the travelers in the other pods, but otherwise the odds are good that you won't. This is what it means.

To Ken Avidor it means something else: People don't like to ride with strangers.

Let's just tell it like it is. What Ken is doing here is trying to smear PRT with another Ick Factor (like PRT is dirty and PRT=Bachmann). He's implying PRT fans are people who don't care for other people, are trying to scare people away from transit, or trying to appeal to classists, ageists, racists, etc.

Ken 's little paraphrase would be fine if it just stopped there, but it wouldn't be our Ken if he stopped there. Ken takes People don't like to ride with strangers and attributes it to others.

It's gone from a paraphrase to a quote, those are quotation marks. The group Minnesota 350 is holding a sustainability event this Saturday, part of the worldwide Moving Planet day, and Citizens For PRT is participating. Ken wants to try and shame MN 350 into disassociating itself from CPRT. Lookit what the bad PRT people say! says Ken. He even provides a photo, the Twitpic link. Only, that photo only proves he is the Great Misquoter:

What, he's hoping no one actually looks at it?

This would be a minor amusement, except for that Ken has been pulling this same trick for 8 years.

Apr. 23, 2003 in Pulse Of The Twin Cities:

[gives no reference.]

Jul. 13, 2004, at Car Free Cities: The biggest myth the PRT proponents spread around is that people don't like to ride with "strangers". [gives no reference. At this point he's just quoting one word though.]

Jan. 2005 at Light Rail Now: PRT proponents can say things that the highway boosters could never say, such as "people don't like to ride with strangers". [gives no reference. Now the quote is a whole phrase.]

Apr. 17, 2005 at Mobjectivist: When Councilman Dean Zimmermann testified for Mark Olson's PRT bill (HF1174) in the Minnesota House Local Government Committee March 9th 2005, he said "With PRT you don't have to ride with strangers." This is the audio link:

http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/audio/ls84/locpol03092005.asx [This should be definitive, right? I mean, it's audio! Except Ken gets wrong both the quote and the context. At 3:15:20, what Zimmerman really says is:

"You have the same relationship with this sky cab that you would to an ordinary taxi cab, in that you get in it, you ride it with yourself or your family, you're not riding with strangers. And when you get to your destination you don't look back and say 'now what am I going to do with that big hunk of steel?' You just leave it there, and it's available, sitting in the station, ready for the next person to jump in and go."

He's only describing how PRT is like a taxi.]

Jun. 2, 2005 at Transportation Geek: What they will "market" will be more websites with flashy computer graphics and more brochures with anti-transit propaganda saying stuff like "People don''t [sic] like to ride with strangers". [link to image of flyer with quote that doesn't match]

Jun. 6, 2005 at MAP-NP Community Forum: Dean Zimmermann has testified at the Minnesota State Legislature in favor of Rep. Mark Olson''s anti-transit PRT bills saying that "people don''t [sic] like to ride with strangers". [gives no reference, note same typo as Jun. 2, 2005]

Jun. 14, 2005 at PRT Skeptic: Dean has even teamed up with right-wing Republican Mark Olson at the Capitol and Minneapolis City Hall to say wonderful things about the Taxi 2000 Corporation and spread nasty disinformation about buses and trains such as "People don't like to ride with strangers". [gives no reference]

Jul. 25, 2005 at PRT Skeptic: What do you expect from people who are fond of saying "People don't like to ride with strangers."? [gives no reference]

Aug. 22, 2005 at Seattle P-I (and republished elsewhere): PRT proponents can say things that the highway boosters could never say, such as "People don't like to ride with strangers." [gives no reference]

Jan. 25, 2006 at Detroit Metro Times: PRT proponents can say things that the highway boosters could never say, such as "People don't like to ride with strangers." [gives no reference]

Feb. 7, 2006 at Wikipedia: PRT proponents can say things that the highway boosters could never say, such as "People don't like to ride with strangers." [he was unable to document it, tried to use the Jun. 2, 2005 link]

Apr. 11, 2006 at PRT Skeptic: What do you expect from people who are fond of saying "People don't like to ride with strangers."? [gives no reference]

Jan. 12, 2010 at Democratic Underground: The pod people are always saying PRT is better that reality-based transit because "you don't have to ride with strangers". [includes image with non-matching quote]

And now it's back!

May 20, 2011 at PRT Moondoggie: the PRT hucksters aint [sic] going to give up the fear-mongering about "strangers" on buses and trains

Ken Avidor: the Great Catapulter. How many more miles can he get out of this sleight of hand?

Also: The reality is that PRT ride-sharing is happening

UPDATE: This Avidor  post shows how if someone thinks PRT is about not riding with strangers, it's because Ken gave them the idea.

Archives: Ken's opinions about teenagers and Poland

Catapult:

Super mileage:

gPRT