Non-video video

It's 2013!

The Laffable Luddite is so desperate to find bad PRT news, he's posted audio of a Minnesota legislative meeting with new transportation commissioner Charles Zelle. The remarks are actually neutral and do not result in any policy statements about PRT in Minnesota (i.e., pod transit is still going nowhere in the state). But it's not negative toward PRT either, so Ken has to call it "PRT rears it's [sic] ugly head", complete with obligatory Ken typo.  

LINK

Also: Ken's blog post on the topic, slamming both of the transportation commissioners (Zelle is second) appointed by Democratic Governor Mark Dayton. PRT continues to exist for Avidor only in a conservative Republican bubble he has constructed, ignoring nonideological PRT activity around the world.




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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

Berther

Laffable Luddite again displays ignorance of basic PRT concepts


I think we've pretty well established how Ken Avidor is the Worst Expert In The World when it comes to anything to do with PRT. So his new blog post "Suncheon Bay Vectus "PRT" Revealed to NOT be Personal Rapid Transit" can best be described as maintaining his pattern.

Avidor writes as follows (pay attention to what he has put in bold, they are not in the original):

The Vectus October update (PDF) has a preview of their much-ballyhooed Suncheon Bay project in Korea.

Station Two is currently under construction and due to be completed by the end of December 2012. Both stations will feature in-line berths, platform screen doors and touch screen passenger information/destination selection facilities.

According to the Wikipedia PRT article which is mostly written by fans of PRT,  offline stations are  a defining characteristic of PRT:

In PRT designs, vehicles are sized for individual or small group travel, typically carrying no more than 3 to 6 passengers per vehicle.[1] Guide ways are arranged in a network topology, with all stations located on sidings, and with frequent merge/diverge points. This approach allows for nonstop, point-to-point travel, bypassing all intermediate stations

So Vectus is just another monorail/people-mover that exist in airports, amusement parks etc. all over the world. Not the revolution in transportation we were promised, not "faster,  cheaper,  better" than conventional transit modes.

He really thinks he has something here, and sinks his teeth in. Except he's comparing apples and oranges: the fact is a PRT station is offline, but its berths can be either inline or not inline.

Nomenclature review:

1. A station is where multiple pods can park to load and unload passengers; it is offline on a siding so vehicles going to other stations can bypass it.
2. The positions where pods park are berths; they can be sawtoothed where pods park at an angle so they can pass each other in the station, or inline (!!!) where pods park nose to tail.

Here is a PRT station at Masdar City:

Sawtoothed: Berths angled, not inline. Station is offline.

Next, a PRT station at West Virginia University:

Berths nose-to-tail, or inline. Station is still offline.

You choose: Ken Avidor doesn't understand what an inline berth is, or knows what it is but has decided to deliberately confuse it* with inline stations.

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Update 1 (11/16): Martin Pemberton, Vectus director of Sales & Marketing, has confirmed to NewsCenter that the Suncheon stations are indeed offline --

Maybe some confusion in terminology. By 'in-line' we mean one behind the other. The stations are 'off-line' from the main track, ie. in siding as you call them.

The clock to see how long it takes Ken to retract his post starts... now.

JavaScript Kit

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By the way, while the official definition of PRT calls for offline stations, a demonstration system with only two stations (like Vectus at Suncheon) wouldn't need stations to be on sidings. A trip from Station One that bypassed Station Two would end up -- where? I invite Ken   to try to fill in the blank.

Basically, there is no need at Suncheon to bypass a station. Doubt could be cast on Vectus should they ever offer inline stations in a larger, multi-station system. But we know they are capable of offline stations. An offline station was a feature of the Vectus test facility in Sweden, which received government safety clearance.

Uppsala, Sweden. Vectus pod enters offline guideway.

Also: We cover this Vectus Update at the NewsCenter.

^ * i.e., lie

P.S. Ken  also has a second post today, in which he declares:

"elections have consequences... the [Nov. 6, 2012] election slams the door on any chance of public funding for PRT projects"

For proof he cites a quote from 2011 by one Minnesota legislator who is skeptical of PRT, who is the new chair of the senate transportation committee. And the quote contains no vow about door-slamming, it's all an Avidor prediction; we know how accurate he is about predictions.

In short, elections would have consequences for PRT in Minnesota -- had PRT been an issue in any Minnesota election contest, which it was not (sorry Ken, you mentioning it doesn't count).

At any rate, no future public funding for PRT projects in Minnesota represents no change from the past. Ken is celebrating no change.


gPRT
PRTher, rhymes with Birther

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

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

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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