I've mentioned this before but gotten no response - I'll throw it out again here.  

The solution is electric cars that can ride on some kind of light rail.  The cars are individually owned and can be driven on normal roads at up to 40 mph.  For longer distances, they drive to a station and get on the rail, at which point the driver selects an exit station and relinquishes control to a central computer, allowing 100+ mph speeds with tiny gaps between vehicles.  While on the rail, the car is charging as the rail supplies the power, so that the car arrives at the exit station fully charged.  I especially envision very low cost versions used for daily commutes, which cars after all spend most of their time sitting in parking lots.  I know I'd buy one.

Yes, there are issues, especially relating to battery life and infrastructure cost.  But overall, it seems like the best plan going.  I recently saw in the paper that some guys down in Cincinnati have tested a version that hangs from a monorail: <a rel="nofollow" target="_new" href="www.monomobile.com/.../a>.  Although I"m mad they "stole" my idea, I really hope they can make it work.

dhauck...

I like that solution but how will I get my electro-rail H3 hummer car to that out of the way hiking trail for some back country fun?

Don't rag on monorails in general, James. They're a perfectly valid (and probably undervalued) form of mass transit. Although they still have a "pie in the sky" flavor to them, a number of monorail systems have been working reliably and successfully for decades in Japan and - of course - Seattle.

Forget it. We can't afford it. The age of personal transportation, whether by car or pod, is coming to an end because of the end of cheap energy. We will have to live in denser, more walkable, communities.  As for Professor Burke's claim that "Because it operates over existing streets and sidewalks, there are few costs for rights of way or taking of private property.", we could just as easily take over existing streets and highways for mass transit.

Why not have slower ground level PRT system. We could just lay rail lines on our current streets. That should be a lot cheaper and easier to implement. Also we could have computers drive our current automobiles. They could be more efficient and avoid congestion, though there is a lot of engineering required to make this safe and they wouldn't be as efficient. More important instead of crazy high tech solutions we need more people to do simple things like live closer to work, use current public transit or ride bikes and walk. To get these behavior changes we need a price on CO2 emissions. Some people will still drive and waste energy but they will pay its true cost.

single -

Who the hell takes a Hummer off-road?  I haven't seen a Hummer yet (outside of their commercials) that wasn't spit-polished to a high-gloss shine, with every chrome option known to man.

Craig -

Ground-level is fine by me.  In fact, the elevated monorail was thier idea, not mine - I proposed ground-level track (or originally, underground tunnels, but that would *really* be cost-prohibitive.)  However, the monorail systems do have the advantage that they are capable of being mounted over existing highways or rail lines, without disturbing their current traffic.

Regarding computer control on our existing cars, I can tell you as one who has designed and built self-steering robotic vehicles, there is a big difference between simply controlling speed on a rail and actually steering a car in two dimensions.  Of course, my project was back in the early 90's, and vision systems have come a long way, but still - *big* difference.  Of course, we could tear up our highways and put guide wires down the centers of them, but now you're back to a big infra cost, and with little more CO2 reduction than could be gotten from, say, a peak-hour usage toll, similar to what they have in London (not that I'm advocating that, mind you.)

As to charging people for their long commutes, I understand the rationale, but I am someone who has a long commute.  As I've said in these pages before, the bus time to work is prohibitive, and packing up my family and moving closer to work is not an option (especially in this housing slump, of course, but even so, my prior job was close to where I live, this one is distant, who knows where the next one will be?)  Without trying to hammer on you too much, I need to emphasize that not everyone with a long drive is a Hummer-driving hedge-fund manager living in some gated community 50 mi outside the city.

The relevant cost metric would seem to be dollars per person-mile, not dollars per mile.  Using this yardstick, my guess is that the cost of PRTs is comparable (at best) to transit within metro limits, and far greater than cars outside metro limits.