Le voilà...

...tout est là: le monotone; la victimisation paranoïaque; l'illustration du niveau de personnalisation PeeChee. Et bien sûr, c'est un Anti-vaxxeur.

PRT Developer William Alden

William Alden died November 16 in Falmouth, Massacusetts. He was 92. Mr. Alden was married to Judith Alden for 67 years, was a descendant of the English colonist John Alden, served in the Navy, and graduated from Harvard. He created or served on the boards of a number of businesses and charities.

That time Denver voters approved a PRT system

Looking amazingly like 2getthere's Masdar vehicle, the TTI prototype on display at the PRT Expo '73. Denver Library

Read Katie Rudolph's article for the Denver Library, Denver's 1970s Flirtation With Personal Rapid Transit.

Taxi 2000 Exits

©MMXVIII The PRT NewsCenter
 
Long time pod transit company Taxi 2000 closed in mid-2017, exiting the business without achieving a demonstration facility or system in fare service. A shareholder letter obtained in January by the NewsCenter revealed that in 2016 Taxi 2000 lost an angel investor who held 49% of the company's shares.

Taxi 2000's demo in 2005. Ed Anderson is at left.

Following Freely

Part V of the IPERT Series

Email chatter picked up recently concerning Freely and Workman, therefore we thought it was time to check up on the Dotard Duo's internet presence.

Most of it is the same old stuff–except for this listing at MuseumsUSA, which lists "Roger Freely, Curator" at the Western Museum of Flight at 12016 Prairie Avenue in Hawthorne, CA.

It likely won't surprise you to learn that is not the address of the Western Museum of Flight.

Fast, Imaginary Ride To Courthouse - 2 Updates

Part IV of the IPERT Series

©MMXVII The PRT NewsCenter

The NewsCenter is able to confirm key parts of allegations made, first tipped by a comment on Part III , against IPERT fraudster Roger D. Freely. Not left out of the story is his partner Ivan L. Workman. The March 12, 2017 comment was—

Roger Freely tried to get a 16 year old child to move in with him. He also has a Facebook account. According to Facebook rules and regulations sex offenders cannot have accounts. However Facebook does not provide a way to report him.

Back And Forth With skyTran

One of the things we miss about the old days of covering personal rapid transit is the way everything used to be out in the open.

Perhaps an outgrowth of the federally-initiated PRT effort of the Sixties, the leading PRT efforts of the 1990s-Early 2000s welcomed publicity, and actively disseminated the results of their work. That Raytheon was playing with millions in public funds obligated some openness, but that doesn't explain why the private Taxi 2000, and later university spinoff Ultra, was open with the public to varying degrees.

But today's would-be pod transit makers are keeping their cards close to the vest. In some cases the caginess is due to an enterprise not being on the up-and-up (e.g. Maglev Movers, IPERT1, 2, 3), but in most cases the caution arises out of business security. Four, count them, pod transit systems now exist in the world, and the competition to be the fifth might be just that tight.

MISTER - MISTER - Update 1

Mikosza (top) and Choromanski

Ollie Mikosza says a well-connected academic stole his PRT design. Guess who's winning.

©MMXV The PRT NewsCenter

We began corresponding with Olgierd "Ollie" Mikosza in 2006, shortly after "MISTER" (Metropolitan Individual System of Transportation on an Elevated Rail), his suspended (vehicle below the guideway) personal rapid transit concept, first came on the scene. With Heathrow Pods and the Masdar City PRT still four years off, Mikosza exuded confidence and optimism that his design would be the one to break through.

In an article in EV World earlier that year, in which Mikosza announced MISTER to the world, he reported already securing letters of intent from interested cities, and that his plans had been endorsed by academic and transportation experts. The engineering, he seemed to say, would be straightforward by comparison.

Artist conception of
Mikosza's vehicle.

The MISTER project did appear to move ahead with some speed: in mid-2006 a grant was announced from the Warsaw Technical University (Warsaw Polytechnic); in 2007 Mikosza made the rounds of TV news shows with a mockup of the MISTER pod.

By the end of 2007 he was competing for capital -- and publicity -- on Polish television's version of Shark Tank, making it all the way to the finals, in the end losing to the inventor of a new kind of eyeglasses.

MISTER seemed to be going places.

It was all heady stuff for Mikosza, who already seemed to have spent his life going places -- a native of Poland, trained as an electrical engineer, working in South Africa, Asia, and New Zealand (becoming a citizen of the latter), and spending time as a software engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He told a columnist for the New Zealand Sun Herald in 2010 that he got the idea for MISTER while sitting in California traffic. (goo.gl/fMfHEU)

But for all his efforts, Mikosza's program is about in the same place today as nine years ago. And he points the finger of responsibility at someone he had counted as a supporter.

The meeting

Ollie Mikosza says he first encountered Wlodzimierz Choromanski in December 2005, when he was giving a presentation on MISTER at a conference at the Pulaski Technical University in Radom. Mikosza remembers Professor Choromanski as being delighted with MISTER, and offered Mikosza support and help in promoting it to scientists and the government. (goo.gl/Wrarbp)

Mikosza probably couldn't believe his luck. By every indication Wlodzimierz Choromanski (who did not respond to inquiries when we began working on this story) is a brilliant and accomplished guy, a member of the Transport Faculty at the Polytechnic, specifically the head of the Department of Transportation Equipment Construction Theory (his most compelling invention is a stair-climbing wheelchair). And he appeared to love MISTER.

In a document dated April 2006, Choromanski declared enthusiastic support for MISTER, which he called "a new solution proposed by Mr. Olgierd Mikosza... which, and I am stating this with full conviction, may potentially revolutionize transportation systems in cities." (goo.gl/CgtVn7)

And the partnership seemed to produce results, quickly racking up agreements with a number of cities, official cooperation with the Polytechnic, and finally a grant of over 200,000 zlotys (today about $54,000) from that institution.

During this period Choromanski personally gave a presentation about MISTER at a Polytechnic seminar, utilizing a number of slides created by Mikosza (goo.gl/vxyOPz, Slide 8).

Choromanski and the Polytechnic also submitted MISTER to the government's Technology Initiative development fund.

Such were the heady days when MISTER seemed to be going like gangbusters.

In 2009 MISTER was awarded a $10M grant from the EU toward the costs of a test track in southern Poland, in the city of Opole, one of the cities with which MISTER had signed letters of agreement. But by then it had already gone to hell.

The turning

According to Mikosza, Choromanski had been copying key elements of his PRT design -- for in 2007 Choromanski had begun seeking funding for his own PRT design called Merkury. It also became known as Eco-Taxi and the punny 'Sitin.'

Sitin bore a striking resemblance to MISTER. Like MISTER it was a suspended system, and an illustration even gave it a similar goldenrod yellow paint job.

But Mikosza's main gripe was with Sitin's bogey, or drive unit. A key contention by Mikosza is that Sitin violated his patent application on MISTER's switch.

Switching 101

In rail transit, switching is how the vehicle gets from one line to another. Conventional train switches consist of movable rails installed at junctions; these function in the classic manner with which most people who have seen cartoons and movies are familiar.

Movable rail switches won't do for PRT. Under normal conditions a line of pods would approach a junction with only seconds separating them, or even less than a second. Some would take branch A, others would take branch B. Each pod would have to separately signal the switch to be in position A or B, the switch would have to move back and forth reliably, in time, and fully -- not stuck part-way between A and B. A movable section of rail might have to do this thousands of times a day; challenges of reliability and wear are obvious.

The challenges were so obvious that designers worked out a solution about five seconds after Donn Fichter finished writing the definition of PRT. The method varies according to vendor but, basically, each vehicle guides itself through the junction. The granddaddy PRTs at West Virginia University do it by feeling their way along guiderails; the pods at Heathrow and Masdar steer like cars.

The other method of switching is to grab one side of the guideway to take branch A, or the other side to take branch B. In 1968 the Aerospace Corporation scale model PRT used electromagnets to do the grabbing. Other companies' designs employ pivoting or hinged arms with wheels on the ends, which engage guides on the inside of the guideway at junctions; notable examples in this group include Taxi 2000 and Vectus/SkyCube.

Patently "idiotic"

MISTER switches using a clever take on the grab method. When a MISTER vehicle on branch A comes to a junction with branch B, the drive unit's set of wheels on the B side engage with that branch, and the set of wheels still on branch A are lifted away, disengaging. The drive unit has transitioned smoothly to the other branch.

Mikosza calls this 'contactless' switching, and thought it to be so innovative that he filed an application with Poland's patent authority in 2005.

A tale of two switches

Sitin's switch basically operates the same way as MISTER's (at least the original version of Sitin did, more on this later), except that on the Sitin drive unit, one set of wheels are above the other set.  Mikosza derides this vertical orientation, calling it "idiotic," for a couple of reasons, but the more visible one is that the drive unit would have to be nearly 10 feet tall, and therefore so would the guideway.

Even so, Mikosza complained to the patent authority that Sitin's switch infringed on his patent application, in that any final configuration of MISTER's drive unit could switch by engaging any branch that is adjacent, whether vertical, horizontal or in between. According to Mikosza, Choromanski countered that the illustrations in MISTER's patent application depict only horizontal engagement. Mikosza says those illustrations were merely examples, and even got a patent attorney to submit an opinion that Sitin was a copy of MISTER.  But the authorities agreed with Choromanski -- who then received a patent for a vertical contactless switch (#PL210396B1). Mikosza's original application is still pending.

Mikosza says Choromanski had moved to poison the well against MISTER prior to the patent fight, despite the earlier written and verbal support. He says that Choromanski used his connections in academic, scientific and government circles to block MISTER from receiving funding and forming partnerships.

Also according to Mikosza, Choromanski backtracked on his earlier glowing endorsement, by telling Opole officials/media MISTER wasn't worth anything and making personal imprecations against Mikosza.

In an amusing 2007 episode, a person in an online forum posted attacks on MISTER's plans for Opole. Although the commenter was posting anonymously, Mikosza says he was able to trace the IP address back to Choromanski's department server at the Polytechnic.

MISTER had been put forward for funding from the government's technology development fund. But by 2009 government co-financing ended up with Choromanski's program -- now called Eco-Mobility (also the name of the branding strategy for a number of mobility technologies being developed at the Polytechnic). Mikosza learned about it when he read the announcement in the press; the article included photos and illustrations of MISTER, misidentified or misrepresented as Eco-Mobility.

But Eco-Mobility was to undergo changes in the next five years. These amounted to much more than a makeover.

Choromanski and the Eco-Mobility vehicle
at 2014 launch event.

A publicity push by the Polytechnic in 2014 about Eco-Mobility (goo.gl/t7m2nw) was striking in how unlike MISTER the former Sitin had become, the most obvious difference being that it had become a supported PRT (vehicle on top of guideway).

Furthermore, a video of Eco-Mobility's drive unit on a test track showed its switching mechanism now used the hinged-arms 'grab' approach (goo.gl/Pssd8U).  Gone was the vertical contactless switch, won at (presumably) great cost in the patent battle with Mikosza.  One wonders what that fight -- as well as the well-poisoning -- was all about.

Unless the patent fight was just a strategy in a war to undermine MISTER, and the vertical switch was just a tactic. Eco-Mobility is now the only PRT effort in Poland -- Mikosza is now based in New Zealand.

Different directions

The fortunes of MISTER and Eco-Mobility have diverged in the last few years.

Choromanski's monograph,
Eco-Mobility on the cover

Choromanski continues to work on PRT at the Polytechnic, this year publishing a monograph, Systemy Transportowe PRT. The wider Eco-Mobility brand now includes an 'eco-car,' an exoskeleton and prostheses for people with physical challenges, a lever-propelled wheelchair, and the stairclimbing wheelchair.  He is on the preliminary list of presenters at the Podcar City 9 conference to be held in Mountain View, California, November 4-6, 2015. Update 1: Choromanski is on the conference agenda for Nov. 6. 

MISTER changed its name to Metrino in 2014. We still get the periodic email from Mikosza, describing Choromanski with choice adjectives when the subject comes up.  From his Auckland headquarters, Mikosza bounces around the world seeking media exposure, financing and development deals in such places as Southeast Asia, India, and Brazil. But the first installation -- and capital -- continues to prove elusive. 

A Plague Of Coffee Pods

I'm a coffee person, I usually start the day with an Americano or three.

For a couple years I've made do with one of Krups' $60 espresso makers. Design-wise it's a disaster: the On light is dim, the basket usually falls out when being emptied, the lid can't be removed from the carafe, and a rubber foot went missing. But its only waste product are the grounds that go into the kitchen compost.

Which is an order of magnitude better than the rampant 'coffee pods' craze featured in yesterday's Seattle Times.

A great day in Kirkland -- but someone was missing

©MMXIV The PRT NewsCenter

Saturday's Cross Kirkland Corridor Advanced Transportation Symposium ("the Symposium") was, in this participant's estimation, a smashing success in terms of establishing policy gravitas and as a successfully planned and executed event.

Held February 8 at Google's Building B in Kirkland, the Symposium drew federal, state and local lawmakers, business people, transportation officials, and a variety of vendors and activists from the field of high-technology transit, for an all-day program of presentations and panel discussions.

Finding Freely - 4 Updates

Part III of the IPERT series (Updates 2 & 3 May 31, 2014)
©MMXIII The PRT NewsCenter

The International Personal Express Rapid Transit story so far has been defined by what Ivan Workman has voluntarily claimed, contradicted, and contra-contradicted. And that is the problem -- all we know about him and IPERT is what he has chosen to make public.

But what about Roger Freely? When he has had anything to say it has been second hand, passed along to the public by Workman.

Why? Who is Freely? Is he even real? We have determined that he is -- and this is where the trail took us:

IPERT Part II - Update 4

©MMXIII The PRT NewsCenter

International Personal Express Rapid Transit President & Co-Founder Ivan Workman, apparently displeased with the publicity in "A Brief Look At International Personal Express Rapid Transit" (Nov. 19, 2013), finally decided to re-contact the NewsCenter on Nov. 26, writing among other things:

For your information, the maglev & prt patents are all under my partner Roger Freely, not me, get your information right David.

Those who have been paying attention will recall Workman already stated in The 2nd Email that, "my brother and I are the inventors and patent holders for the technology". (Oh, and the patent search for Roger Freely comes up zilch too.) 

A brief look at 'International Personal Express Rapid Transit'

©MMXIII The PRT NewsCenter

Part I

People who follow developments in advanced transit may have noticed and wondered about 'International Personal Express Rapid Transit' (IPERT).

Recently the NewsCenter (wearing our GetThereFast.org webmaster hat) was contacted by a person identifying himself as Ivan Workman. Workman said he was interested in hiring the creator of the GetThereFast.org "Better Campus" video to perform similar work for his PRT effort, IPERT. Workman's email ended with the following passage, which cried out for further information:

IPERT's PRT system is based on the only operational Maglev PRT system (since 2004) that has been built and operated successfully, profitably, and large enough to transport people and freight for a city covering 12 square miles and a population of 200,000 people at the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory in New Mexico, which was developed by IPERT's team in conjunction with the Army Corp of Engineers. IPERT has 5 patents for this technology.

More bad news for would-be US coal exporters

Demand for your dirty product keeps falling.

Shanghai to ban coal burning by 2017 (Think Progress)

Smartphone-Dependent Transit - No thank you

To all those working to design automated transit and improve conventional transit: If you're trying to gear scheduling and/or fare payment to smartphones, please stop.

A number of years ago, well before smartphones were a thing, I spoke with a PRT designer who was planning to make smartcards the preferred means for users to access the system. At the time I counseled him that a public system required anyone be able to pay a fare in cash -- what if the smartcard was lost, or damaged, or forgotten at home or office? What about members of the public who don't have a smartcard, for whatever reason? Tourists for example.

Reminder - Robocars aren't PRT

A pair of thoughtful pieces on driverless cars (Driving Sideways, NY Times, 7/23; How will the driverless car affect the design of our cities? Treehugger, 7/25) are a welcome contribution to the discussion of the problematic nature of 'robocars.'

However the small size of pod transit (PRT) vehicles still serves to confuse them with driverless cars in the minds of many.

So let's reacquaint ourselves with what pod transit is and is not (chiefly):

Caution on public-private partnerships

Public-private partnerships have been in vogue in the arts, education, and other facets of civic life for a while, and now they're coming to transit projects (The Planning Report, 7/8).

I suppose PPP sound appealing to the American ear, conditioned by corporate media to the couplet 'Private Good/Government Bad.'

But the public sector exists for solid economic and political reasons, no finer an example of which being the delivery of transit service.

Which is to say patterns and levels of service are critical determinants of urban form and function as well as civic life, and therefore there is an overriding public interest in planning, funding and operating transit systems.

The Human Factor

What does it mean to be a sustainable business? If you look at how a lot of companies and groups portray themselves, something's missing.

• Your Silver LEED building is impressive and beautiful. The rainwater catchment and onsite composting are nice touches. But oh, you forgot to get health insurance for your employees.
• The coffees you sell are delicious, organic and shade grown -- but it's not fair trade. And you use biodegradable sporks -- but your all-part time staff don't get any benefits and have to get health care paid by Medicaid, as if they are working at Walmart and not a self-styled 'sustainable' business.

What these (actual) example companies miss is the reality that they aren't truly sustainable if their workers are treated as disposable resources.

Bad Supreme Court News...

...if you're a fan of planning and common sense environmental protection:

Private property advocates cheer Supreme Court ruling
By Michael Doyle | McClatchy Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — A legal dispute that started with Florida wetlands ended Tuesday in a Supreme Court victory for conservatives and private property advocates nationwide.
     In a 5-4 decision that could impede government regulators at all levels, the court effectively made it harder for public agencies to demand property or money in exchange for issuing a land-use permit. At a certain point, the conservative majority reasoned, these demands amount to an unconstitutional taking of property without compensation.

A wrinkle in the CRC debate

Every so often I turn my attention to the Columbia River Crossing project, the plan to -- among other things -- replace the Interstate 5 bridge between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington.

Because the plan is to include the means to send Trimet MAX light rail across the river to Vancouver, I suppose it's been easy to lean toward support of this freeway enhancement program, while dismissing the (voluble) opposition as north-of-the-river manifestation of right-wing, anti-government, anti-transit resistance to progress.

But now comes The CRC Mega-Highway Project, a three part series beginning today at the Seattle Transit Blog.