The future of sustainable motorized transportation is an enclosed driverless golf-cart-on-a-stick. Known by lots of names—Skyweb Express, Taxi 2000, MicroRail, Higherway, or Skycab—they’re all trade monikers for Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), a system for moving people in a manner similar to the way networked computers move bits of information around the Internet.
The PRT cars look like Jetsonesque enclosed golf carts that run on a narrow elevated guideway that very much resembles a life-sized slot-car track. Only the body of the car can be seen above the guideway. Underneath is a short post connected to an induction motor and a set of four tires on wheels that ride in the semi-enclosed guideway.
The guideway forms a network throughout a metropolitan area. Like the Internet, the PRT network itself is quite unintelligent; there’s absolutely no intelligence embedded within the PRT cars or the guideway. All intelligence, again like the Internet, is found at the edges of the network; in the case of PRT, the intelligence resides in the computers that control the cars. The result is maddeningly simple: PRT moves people the same way the Internet moves data.
