Is even more rabid and hype-overloaded than what you accuse the PRT-backers of being. You would do well to rewrite it.

There obviously are problems in front of PRT. I don’t think it’s entirely crackpot, because take a look at the alternative and how crazy it sounds:

• Almost everybody will buy and maintain a huge complex machine weighing 2,000 to 6,000 pounds and costing several tens of thousands of dollars
• In addition, almost every dwelling will, at large expense build a room to house this machine, usually with automatic door and a paved path from the road for it.
• Every office and shop will have a giant lot or structure for these machines. In addition, in most places, 10 feet on the side of each street will be allocated to storing the machines.
• All told, between 35% to 60% of our land area will be devoted to streets and parking for these machines!
• A major component of our air pollution comes from these machines, up to 90% of CO, 20% of CO2. People die daily from the particulates. Wars are fought over the fuel.
• Each machine is used briefly for a few trips, then stored for the rest of the day.
• Each machine requires an individual human to handle the rote tasks in controlling it while it is in use, time that could be spent working or reading
• Some shared machines (Taxis) exist but still require a human to operate them.
• The machines kill 42,000 in the USA every year, far more than wars, terrorism, guns, falls, poison or in fact any other non-disease reason.

You have to admit, a system like that sounds insane, far more insane than PRT for the problem of inner-city personal transport.

Mass transit sounds better but in fact because it involves long waits, long transfer times and big giant vehicles running mostly empty outside of rush hour, it sometimes isn’t much more efficent in cost per passenger mile and people pick the car over it in almost all wealthy cities.