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 



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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!

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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.

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Three little words

In which I report on a City of San Jose memo about its Automated Transit Network study, and correctly predict what words Ken Avidor would focus on.

Related:

The 6 Surrenders Of Vukan R. Vuchic

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Possibly the funniest Laffable Luddite post...

...Since the last one! Ken Avidor's headline BLARES --

"Seattle Transportation Examiner.com Reporter [sic] Not Reporting His Opposition to Recent Seattle Personal Rapid Transit Proposal"

Not reporting on it, but quietly whispering his opposition on his personal blog.

The Laffable Luddite says:

"He's covering monorail!"

"He's NOT covering monorail!

He then goes on to breathlessly quote all the stuff I reported - a week ago - at PRTJJ's sister blog, "This Week In Precipitation" (TWIP, The Editor's Blog of The PRT NewsCenter™). And what does "quietly whispering" mean? How is posting something in a normal size font 'whispering'?

For some reason,  Ken  has a bug up his butt about my not reporting it at Examiner.com, as though some massive pipeline of Seattle Transportation News has been filtered to omit mention of the Great PRT Conspiracy. 

News Flash -- I don't report anything on Examiner.com anymore, not in over TWO years, which was when I decided Examiner to be pretty much a joke as a citizen journalism umbrella.

My material is still there, it's still damn good stuff, but I haven't been adding to it, and I won't be.

Examiner doesn't really vet anything anyone writes. Content-wise there is no difference reading an Examiner-branded blog as opposed to something on Blogger or Tumblr -- quality depends on the author, being part of Examiner adds no value.  And so in the last couple of years Examiner has become, in my opinion, a home for a lot of right wing nutjobs. Why would I want to be part of that brand?

I wouldn't, so I don't and I'm not.

Why has Ken Avidor decided to obsess about Examiner? I don't know and really don't care -- although I am amused.

If you want to know you could ask him -- if he allowed "PRT Moondoggie" readers to post comments.

* * *

Ken also writes

David Gow has finally acknowledged the existence of the PRT proposal for his city on his Get There Fast website's news page, with this comment:
Get There Fast takes no position on this proposal.

revealing (yet again) that he has absolutely no idea what he's talking about. I'm designer and admin for  GetThereFast.org, but it's not 'mine.'  It is run by a Seattle-area committee as an advocacy/community outreach website about PRT. Therefore MY editorial voice is not present on the page of news links.  That GTF takes no position on the CenTran monorail proposal (again, I covered it here) is simply a statement of fact, and we want to stay out of what is, essentially, a political campaign.

As for "finally" acknowledging the existence of the "PRT proposal," I want to extend my apologies to Ken. New posts of news on GTF can lag because it often takes me a while to get to it, since I give PRT NewsCenter most of my time.

Although, Ken,  my not having enough time for GTF is really your fault. All your anti-PRT idiocy creates tons of work for me here at "PRT Is a Joke IS A JOKE."

Update 1:

I suppose I should acknowledge the possibility that Avidor thinks he is Valiantly Taking The Fight To The Enemy On His Home Turf. But the way he's gone about it comes across as 'Don't cover PRT your way, cover it MYYYY way.'

Ken, I'm telling you this as a friend -- get some help for the OCD.


Allow comments, Ken! Cluck cluck bawk bawk BAWK! 
gPRT

A Certain Demeaner

Ken Avidor served himself up for us to write about today, with the following tweet. Apparently he just couldn't resist the opportunity to conflate Bachmann's 2003 PRT bill with the current St. Croix River Bridge project.

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The one thing has nothing to do with the other -- unless you equate the bipartisan support for the bridge in the MN congressional delegation with the 13 Democrats and 5 Resmuglicans who were pro-PRT in the 2003-04 state senate session.

We'll leave behind the matter of the bridge, since Ken's handlers seem to have helped him find the correct side of that issue. But what of this 'promotion' of PRT by Minnesota Public Radio?

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It was a story in MPR's News & Features section. Got that? Not Opinion or Editorial.

In Ken's eyes, if a news story doesn't agree with his propaganda it must be enemy propaganda. That's how author Dan Olson is turned from a reporter into a promoter.

You know, this reminds me of the time Ken Avidor took issue with an article about a possible PRT project in Dubai:

"Personal Rapid Transit" PRT Disinformation Part II and III (Ye Olde PRT Skeptic Blog, 11/5/05)

"Fun"? There was nothing fun about it. Ken wasn't satirical, there was no irony, he employed no pun or other wordplay. 

Nope, it was just Ken Avidor suggesting you Google sexy pictures of Zoe Naylor while thinking of an accomplished business reporter who happens to have the same name.

Far from fun, it was demeaning. Ken Avidor might as well have told journalist Naylor to hold an aspirin between her knees.

Ken makes MPR sad

gPRT

Achtung

You boys play nice, now.

Archive

Missed Again (2/14/2010)

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