podcar

Use of electric personal rapid transit systems within the city.

They represent a personal rapid transit system, an idea that has been around since the 1950s.

Slope cars are similar in some ways to personal rapid transit systems.

The company recently won the personal rapid transit competition for Masdar.

Various personal rapid transit systems in the 1970s reduced the headways considerably.

People movers and personal rapid transit are even "lighter," at least in terms of capacity.

Personal rapid transit cars seat four to six people and go directly from one stop to the next, bypassing any stations in between.

Matra attempted, and failed to produce a personal rapid transit system, Aramis.

Personal rapid transit is an automated cab service that runs on rails or a guideway.

The result was the personal rapid transit concept, or PRT.

Other options, including personal rapid transit systems, shuttle buses and community buses, were also proposed.

The book is a quasi-mystery, which attempts to discover who killed Aramis (personal rapid transit).

These systems were first employed as part of personal rapid transit research, but later using conventional cars with autopilot-like systems.

The PRT - personal rapid transit - will run 6m under street level across the city.

On the other end of the scale were the personal rapid transit systems, or PRTs.

A personal rapid transit system operates in Morgantown, West Virginia.

What set Aramis apart from other personal rapid transit projects were non-material couplings.

Shweeb is a proposed personal rapid transit network based on human-powered monorail cars.

Personal rapid transit systems attempt to eliminate these wastes by moving small groups nonstop in automated vehicles on fixed tracks.

In 1975, the Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit project was completed.

It's called personal rapid transit.

Additional individual modes of transport, such as personal rapid transit could serve as an alternative to cars if they prove to be socially accepted.

Hovertrains were also developed for smaller systems, including personal rapid transit systems that were a hot topic in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Will you commute via 'personal rapid transit?'

These taxi-like systems are more usually referred to as personal rapid transit (PRT).

As a starting point, pilot podcar networks can be built along existing infrastructure, supporters say.

Detractors, mainly light-rail advocates, say a podcar system would be too complex and expensive.

The podcar is not entirely new.

This test system was presented at the 2007 PodCar City conference in Uppsala.

"It works almost like an elevator, but horizontally," said Roberts, adding podcar travel would be safer than automobile travel.

Next year, Heathrow Airport outside London will unveil a pilot podcar system to ferry air travelers on the ground.

Santa Cruz, California, recently hired a contractor to design a small solar-powered podcar system that would loop through the city's downtown and along its beach front.

Personal rapid transit (PRT), also called podcar, is a public transport mode featuring small automated vehicles operating on a network of specially built guideways.

Designers are planning a podcar network for Masdar City, outside Abu Dhabi, which is being built as the world's first zero-carbon, zero-waste city.

You could have a high-speed rail line, or even buses, deliver travelers to the podcar stations, and the podcars take them wherever they want to go in the city," he said.

The Institute for Sustainable Transportation predicts a podcar system will be installed in an American city within the next five years, although it is likely to cost tens of millions of dollars.

"In the podcar ... it creates the perfect blend between the privacy and autonomy of the automobile with the public transportation aspect and, of course, it uses clean energy," Roberts said.

Ithaca Mayor Carol Peterson said a podcar network could be part of her upstate city's long-range transportation plans and its mission of developing urban neighborhoods that are environmentally sustainable and pedestrian-friendly.

Cars have dominated the cityscape for nearly a century, taking up valuable space while polluting the air, said Magnus Hunhammar, chief executive officer of the Stockholm-based Institute for Sustainable Transportation, the world's leading center on podcar technology.

But podcar developers say they have overcome most technological obstacles and now must overcome the political and cultural barriers that lie ahead, equating it to the mind-set revolution that occurred when Americans hitched up their horses for good to become a nation of motorists.

"It's time we design cities for the human, not for the automobile," said Roberts, president of Connect Ithaca, a group of planning and building professionals, activists and students committed to making this upstate New York college town the first podcar community in the United States.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen cities in Sweden are planning podcar systems as part of the country's commitment to be fossil-fuel-free by 2020, said Hans Lindqvist, a councilman from Varmdo, Sweden, and chairman of Kompass, an association of groups and municipalities behind the Swedish initiative.

Although the plan for Ithaca is only in the conceptual stages, Roberts sees the city as a logical place for the country's first community-wide podcar network, noting that construction of the Erie Canal across upstate New York in the early 1800s revolutionized commercial transportation in a young America.