Predictions, anyone?

The Podcar City 4 conference is underway in San Jose, California, ending tomorrow, October 29.

Or suggest your own!

gPRT

PRT Arrives at Heathrow

Despite Predictions To The Contrary

Kernac The Magboobicent

"...there is no PRT project at London's Heathrow airport..."

—Ken Avidor
Oct. 18, 2005

"PRT is so not happening at Heathrow."

—Ken Avidor
Oct. 5, 2010

Oct. 19, 2010: ULTra PRT begins passenger service for Heathrow Terminal 5 staff

Another Accidental Dump

Following on his accidental post of a non-PRT blog item to the PRT Moondoggie on August 5, Ken Avidor did it again on August 23.

This time the Google News Alert calls attention to a PRT Moondoggie post titled "Mac Hammond's Church Goes..."

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Once again, the link goes nowhere. And once again the post, "Mac Hammond's Church Goes Broke", finally shows up over at the Dump Bachmann Blog ("Dumping Bachmann Since 2005"). And, also once again, it has absolutely nothing to do with Personal Rapid Transit -- although Hammond's style of financial management does qualify as a boondoggle.

Transit innovation continues to have nothing to do with right wing wackos -- despite Avidor's lamest efforts to the contrary.



gPRT

Short & Stout!

Ken Avidor may be joining the Tea Party! It's true! If you read Ken Avidor's blogs, you live in Winona, MN, and you hate PRT as much as he wants you to, then Ken wants you to vote FOR the Tea Party's Joshua Chasco in the race for city council!

It is the only conclusion a reasonable person can draw. Avidor's been writing for the Dump Bachmann blog*, and he wants voters to Dump Bachmann. Avidor has also written the Dump Mark Olson blog, which was devoted to the goal of dumping Olson.

Therefore, the three recent PRT Moondoggie posts and a Tweet promoting Chasco's candidacy, Tea Party bona fides, and anti-PRT stance, MUST mean that Avidor wants you to vote against PRT by voting FOR the Tea Party candidate.

Ken Avidor: he's a little Tea Potty, short and stout (and a little bit rock & roll)!

Fellow progressive Democrats: feel free to oppose Personal Rapid Transit, but please base your position on all the facts, not Ken Avidor's slanted, cherrypicked propaganda. Consider the source: Avidor likes the Tea Party just fine -- if it is against PRT.

Update: What Avidor has already said about Ollie Mikosza's "MISTER" PRT design:

"Polish PRT?"

Ken Avidor (@Daily Kos)
read the PRTJJ coverage

*Motto: "Dumping Bachmann since 2005"

gPRT

Apparently it's not long enough

Mock Journalist, Part X

Ken Avidor has made a really amusing addition at the PRT Moondoggie to his anti-personal rapid transit Luddite Catechism -- that's the list of so-called "PRT flops and fiascos" he posts again and again and again and again and...

So anyway, after spinning a quote by Councillor Chris Over of Daventry District (Avidor says it shows Over isn't 'excited' about PRT. The reality: as holder of the Council's Economic, Regeneration & Employment portfolio, Over has been a supporter of pod transport) he re-posts the Catechism.

But I'm guessing he's insecure about the length, because he's extended it, with the additions of:

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The Columbia article is by a Peter Tocco, a former employee at Rouse, the eponymous firm of the late urban planning visionary James Rouse who founded Columbia. It was a "planned new city," envisioned by Rouse to be non-autocentric and rely on bikes, walking and transit. Construction began in the Sixties, the first constituent village opening in 1967. Mr. Tocco's first sentence reads:

[Rouse's] early plans for Columbia called for innovative forms of transit that looked beyond automobile usage. But he couldn't fight the rising tide of automobiles, and his plans were abandoned, one by one.

"Early plans."

One of my sources actually visited Columbia during the period when it was interested in PRT. It was way back in the 1970s. And what was the Nixon (BOOOO!) Administration's involvement in PRT? Answer: the UMTA project, which grew out of the HUD transit reports, which in turn led to Sen. Robert Byrd's Morgantown PRT project. That is, every grant request was being turned down if it wasn't Morgantown.

Update: Tocco himself (because I ask questions like a real journalist!) confirms: Columbia's grant application was made in 1968)

So much for Ken Avidor's idea of "recent," he keeps it at his house in Alameda, CA. It's yet another example of his poor research, and his willingness to publicize anything he can spin into a negative about PRT technology.

Update: Avidor claims Columbia item is 'new to him' (http://bit.ly/aLEP87) -- so why remove it (shrinkage!) from the Luddite Catechism on Aug. 9? (http://bit.ly/czH2QA) hey Ken - coverup much?

His Accidental DumpIn other Avidor nooz, the following Google News alert recently landed in my inbox:

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But the link leads, almost literally, nowhere: Page not found. What gives?

A post that just-so-happens to be titled "Bachmann Promotes Her Next Tele-Townhall Stunt on Breitbart's Website" went up at the Dump Bachmann blog* later on August 5. Significantly, PRT is mentioned nowhere in the story. Meaning that smearing PRT by guilt-by-associating it with Bachmann (and this time the scumbag Breitbart too) is so automatic for Avidor that his first instinct -- with even 100% irrelevant material -- is to post at PRT Moondoggie.

* Motto: "Dumping Bachmann since 2005"



gPRT

People of India, your attention, please!

This is Ken Avidor:


Ken Avidor is a cartoonist. He is a cartoonist who hates Personal Rapid Transit and has been waging all-out propaganda war against it for years. And because you will be getting a Personal Rapid Transit system in Amritsar in the next few years, you will be hearing from Ken Avidor very soon.

Keep in mind Ken Avidor probably knows absolutely nothing about you or the Indian culture. So don't be puzzled if he says that 'weird stuff happens in India,' as he once said about Dubai. Or he might write 'Indian PRT?' as if being Indian is funny -- just as he once wrote about the Poles.

There is also a very real possibility that he thinks you are American Indians, and is busy searching the bia.gov website for Amritsar. So don’t be surprised if you see a post at The PRT Moondoggie that says something like 'there is no Amritsar tribe recognized by the U.S. government.' I mean, this is the guy who wrote to Houston trying to reach the Kuwait Arab Times.

Since Ken Avidor believes PRT is a scam perpetrated by right-wing politicians, he will also be accusing Indian politicians and urban planning officials of being 'gadgetbahners just like Michele Bachmann.' So don’t say 'tea party' if you really mean 'chai party' (although Avidor seems to be supporting the Bachmann-loving Tea Party. Go figure). So, India, you might as well prepare yourself for lots of these from Avidor:


But be not downcast India, for forewarned is forearmed. And good luck with your PRT project!

Also today:
One more time (with the Luddite catechism)!

gPRT
Amritsar is an anagram for Air Trams. COINCIDENCE??? Or part of the scam?

New! Timesaving! Blogging! Technique!

Anti-PRT propagandist Ken Avidor has come up with another way to be repetitive.

It used to be that Ken would have to string his talking points together with linking phrases and, occasionally, punctuation. This takes time and effort.

But now Avidor's come up with a new timesaving blogging technique -- instead of repeating talking points, now he's just reposting whole sections.

For the past few months, a major part of every post on his "The PRT Moondoggie" blog has been the same thing: a cherry-picked list of negatively-spun PRT nooz; calling it 'news' would be a disservice to actual news (for non-propaganda PRT news, see the NewsCenter).

The nooz items are:

• "No $25 million earmark for PRT pork project in Winona, Minnesota"

• "The Swedish/Korean PRT prototype malfunctioned recently in front of the media."

• "The Masdar PRT (more computer-guided golf carts that follow magnets imbedded in the roadway) has been scaled way back, This setback got a mention in the NY Times and confirmed in this Bloomberg article."

• "The much-hyped PRT project in Daventry ended in fiasco."

• "The so-called Morgantown PRT (it's a mundane people-mover) was the subject of a student newspaper editorial after a malfunction created a "fireball" and filled a vehicle with smoke. The cost of fixing the Morgantown boondoggle is $93 million."

And lately

• "Mall of America Says No to Jpods."

This Luddite catechism has appeared in The PRT Douchenozzle on March 25, May 25, June 10, and June 15, as well as Dump Bachmann on June 10 and 30 (note that in the title of the June 30 post, ULTra PRT has become "Bachmann's fantasy transport system" [italics added] -- which should annoy Dr. Martin Lowson, ULTra's inventor).

I think Avidor might be onto something here -- a system that automatically blogs, RSS's, Tweets or e-mails the same thing, over and over and over again. It could save people millions of person-hours and billions of dollars worth of time.

Such a system could be called-- oh I don't know -- a Kenbot. Or Avispam. Doucheapp? It seems familiar, somehow.


Update (7/8): Need! I! Say! More?

gPRT Is Spam kosher? It's not really meat.

Reader poll time!