History of the Advanced Transit Association (ATRA) Year by Year

by J. Edward Anderson, first ATRA President.

1991 – The Sixteenth Year.

At the January 13, 1991 meeting of the ATRA Board of Directors, the new ATRA Presi-dent, Bill Wilde, who had served on the Technical Committee that had prepared the Chicago RTA Request for Proposals, described the considerations that led the RTA to settle on a PRT ap-proach to aiding its mission in the Chicago suburbs. He noted specifically that the RTA judged that none of the non-PRT modes had cost or service characteristics that eventually would enable the RTA to provide a network of transit service adequate to suburban needs. He noted that the RTA followed closely the ATRA technical committee definition of PRT and then strictly ad-hered to it in winnowing down the 12 RFP respondents to the two announced potential awardees for Phase I of the RTA initiative. ATRA Vice President, George Billman, who was Stone & Webster’s designated manager of the S&W-Taxi 2000 Phase I program, described the roles/com-petencies of the participating units of his group.

On July 16, 1991, ATRA Chairman, Tom Floyd, informed the ATRA Board that he would not seek re-election at the Annual Meeting in January 1992.

ATRA’s Presi- dent, Bill Wilde, said that more than Chair- man, Tom had been, if the analogy would be accepted, our guideway, propulsion, and guidance system and source of energy during ATRA’s recent history. He had done far more than his share and left the question, “How do we continue without Tom in his key role? – or even, “Can we continue without Tom?” But, ATRA had unfinished business, Bill said, and needed to strengthen its capability to serve as a source of information about PRT to the growing audience of professionals and lay persons who were hearing about this technology and seeking non-biased answers to their questions.

ATRA Board member, Dick Wolsfeld, one of the authors of the ATRA 1989 technical re-port on PRT, was leader of a BRW team that had received a $300,000 preliminary feasibility study contract from the Seattle Metro. The contract focus was on internal circulation require-ments of the newly incorporated SeaTac community around the Sea-Tac Airport. The Seattle Metro Board members insisted that PRT be given examination in the context of the overall study. PRT was compared with buses and light rail. Since the Taxi 2000 PRT system was still on pa-per, Wolsfeld quadrupled its cost, and a 17-person steering committee voted unanimously for PRT. Market readiness of PRT was a crucial matter, because of which the project members monitored the Chicago PRT project with great interest.

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Not more than a week later, he and his wife left for a summer vacation in Norway. On the way out of the Oslo airport, the two of them were killed in an auto accident, ironical for a person who was working for a safer form of surface transportation.

In a memorandum to the ATRA Board in November 1991, Jerry Kieffer, as ATRA Secre-tary, discussed a proposed PRT Question/Answer Project as a means to further the process of en-couraging policymakers, investors, transportation planners, and consultants to give serious con-sideration to high-capacity, attractive service, very low cost, automated transit technologies as a means for extending transit service to poorly served, traffic-congested areas, and to provide a fo-cus for analytic efforts to identify key factors about PRT that remained valid subjects about which opinions differ. (In this regard, I attach the list of questions and answers that I have accu-mulated.)

My work on PRT during 1991. In February 1991, my friend Dave Goeres, an engineer in the Charleston, South Carolina, office of Wilbur Smith Consultants, invited me to give the key-note speech at their National Engineers Week celebration. Dave worked for many years to intro-duce our PRT system into his city planning projects.

At about the same time I got a call from Norman Westfall, head of the New Haven, Con-necticut, headquarters of Wilbur Smith. He wanted to meet me to talk about Taxi 2000 and sometime later invited me to give a lecture in New Haven. On May 21st, I took the train from Boston to New Haven and spent an enjoyable day at the Wilbur Smith headquarters. Westfall said that his office appreciated very much the characteristics of Taxi 2000 and what it could do in applications they worked on. Later Wilbur Smith was hired by the Chicago RTA to do the ridership studies on the candidate applications in the Chicago Suburbs.

On February 26th, George Billman, now manager of our Chicago PRT Study, told me that he had been to the office of TGI (Transportation Group, Inc.), a division of Bombardier located in Orlando, FL, that had been formed to upgrade the Disney Monorail that they had purchased. Their manager, Tom Stone, who had worked on the Colorado RTD transit-planning study, had been skeptical about PRT based on misinformation that he had received from one of the RTD studies. Bill Wilde, who also had worked at the RTD, had a chance to meet Tom and correct his impressions. As a result, TGI agreed to do the design of our PRT vehicle for the Chicago project and was quite enthusiastic about it. Billman had talked to Tom Stone and commented to me that they were now strongly supportive of the PRT project. Billman also commented to me that be -cause of conversations with Mark Hillier, the RTA head of their PRT study, that Hillier was “naive and neophyte” in working on a development project. This was an ill omen that reared its ugly head later. Unfor-tunately, a clash caused Tom Stone to withdraw from the Chicago Project. Since Bombardier was a strong and established company in the transit industry, the loss of their involvement in our PRT project was a factor that caused us decades of delay.

Having lost TGI, George tried to get other es-tablished transit-development firms to take the vehi-

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cle-design task to no avail. Finally, John David Mooney, the Chicago sculptor I have mentioned took on the vehicle design project. A model of his design is shown on the previous page.

Knowing that I would have to spend a great deal of my time during the next year working at Stone & Webster, I applied to the Engineering Dean’s Office to buy out of teaching one course – time had passed since I was required to teach only one course. After some investigation, I sent an email message to Associate Dean of Engineering William Taft. He gave me the necessary permission. The Internet was then yet to be established, but universities could communicate in-ternally, with other universities, and with government laboratories via the ARPA Net – the fore-runner to the Internet. With my relationship with Boston University clarified I could concentrate on the Chicago PRT design project. Our contract with the RTA was finally signed and we flew to Chicago to give the kickoff presentation on April 3rd, following which I took a train to Mil-waukee where I gave a presentation at Marquette University on April 4th.

Dick Daly and I were now in full partnership. He handled the business end of the com-pany, mainly efforts to attract funds beyond the Phase I study, and I concentrated on the engi-neering and planning. Ira Smith and I began working at S&W as close to full time as we could, Dick Radnor worked on the control system out of his home, Ron Riggert worked on the commu-nication system in his free time, and two of my graduate students, George Matisse and Deepak Devnani, also assisted.

Daly established our company office at 40 Salem Street in Lynnfield, and recruited Shep Arkin, a retired Manager at Raytheon’s Missile Systems Division, to assist him and later to be a member of the Taxi 2000 Board of Directors. Also, Tom Riley became part of our operation and participated in the RTA study in security issues. He also assisted us in our fund-raising efforts, which turned out to be far more difficult than we had imagined. Investing in a new form of pub-lic transportation was not on any investor’s list of potential investments. For most people the idea of a totally new form of public transit appearing was nowhere in their thinking, and because transit is virtually always connected with government, unknown delays in return on investment could be expected. The Dutch firm Chipshol Forward, however, funded our first video to the tune of $125,000, so they became deeply committed to us. On May 30-31, we held our first complete project review at S&W headquarters — this time the RTA leadership came to Boston.

Word about our Chicago project expanded globally, and I received many letters asking for more information, in particular one from Russia and two from Swedes interested in and want-ing to work on PRT. In July, we learned that Jan Poot, president of the Dutch company Chipshol Forward, created a company they called “Taxi 2000 Europe” to market and manufacture Taxi 2000 systems in Europe. They proposed the outline of an agreement with us.

On the 7th of June I was invited to a conference on PRT in Chicago, which was attended by many Chicago Area transportation planners. The feature was that I was to debate University of Pennsylvania Professor Vucan Vuchic, who we called the “Streetcar Professor.” He had spent his career studying, writing about, and giving engineering courses on streetcars or trams, as they called them in Europe, and was not about to be upstaged by a new technology. Thus, since the early 1970s he had strongly opposed PRT development. His arguments are well represented in

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the “PRT Debate” page on ATRA Board Member Professor Jerry Schneider’s web page http://faculty.washington.edu/~itrans/. As had been my custom in anything I had debated, I studied all opposing views. I had studied Vuchic’s papers very carefully and had concluded with others that his arguments were fallacious. During the debate, I realized that he thought of PRT only as the Morgantown system, the guideway of which was vastly overdesigned, while I had realized that the most fundamental aspect of PRT design was to develop a minimum-cost guideway. More-over, the minimum headway in the Morgantown system was 15 seconds, whereas I had always designed for as low as half a second. The combination of a large, expensive guideway and long minimum headway doomed Morgantown – no one ever built another system like it; but, since the Morgantown system was the only so-called PRT system running, Vuchic’s thinking never evolved beyond it.

On August 16, 1991, we submitted a three-and-a-half-inch-thick first draft of our final re-port to the RTA. Part of the project was to make a composite desk-top model with ten stations and showing features of a half-dozen sites for the Phase III demonstration system in a suburb of Chicago. I show here two pictures of parts of that model.

Meanwhile, Dick Daly had renewed acquaintances with key engineers and managers at Hughes Aircraft Company. Since Raytheon had declined to participate in our program, and since we needed the support of an established company, Dick invited Al Higashi, a manager in one of Hughes’s divisions, to visit us. We met at our Lynnfield Headquarters on Saturday, August 24, 1991. Higashi spent the whole day with us and left convinced that there was much reason for Hughes to become our partner. After much study and conversation among his people, he wrote a memorandum to the vice president and general manager of his division. At no cost to us, Hughes engineers became major contributors to the definition of our control system as it is de-scribed in the final reports of our PRT Design Study for Chicago, which was released on April 14, 1992 just a year after the project began. I made several trips to Los Angeles to discuss con-trol details with them. Hughes later declined to participate.

I have mentioned that we received a letter of serious interest in Taxi 2000 from the Dutch company Chipshol Forward N.V. We needed funding to match the Chicago RTA in the design

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and construction of our Phase II test system, so we were much interested in any party that might show interest. On September 29, 1991, Chipshol Forward sent us the script of a video and on October 29th a Letter of Intent to form a company that would be called “Taxi 2000 Europe.” Along with the letter was the artist rendering shown here of how Taxi 2000 could look at Schiphol Airport. T2 Europe would have the exclusive right to market and manufacture Taxi 2000 systems anywhere in Europe, and they proposed an initial investment of $5,000,000. The mar-keting video they developed cost them, we were told, $125,000. We used it in many presentations.

In October 1991 Professor Charles Harris and I were invited by Harvey Atchison, a plan-ning director in the Colorado Highway Department, to attend a conference in Snow Mass, Col-orado, which is close to Aspen. It was a great two-day diversion from the details of our Chicago project.

Now an interesting thing happened. I have mentioned that an engineer on the staff of the RTA, Mark Ahlheim, had the previous spring been assigned the task of representing the RTA in our study. At that time, he was quite hostile towards me for reasons I will never know, but what I did know is that the RTA had never been involved in a research and development project like ours – they had simply acted as a money pass-through from the federal government to the three transit organizations in Chicago: the “L”-system, the commuter-rail system, and the city bus sys-tem. Some and maybe all of them expressed resentment toward me perhaps because the PRT project upset their daily routine. Sometime during the summer of 1991, for a reason I never knew, Mark was relieved of his duties as the staff lead on the PRT study. By then he had spent a lot of time studying PRT. On September 7th, he called me, described some of the “goings on” among the RTA staff, and said that he would like to join Taxi 2000. This was when we were still in competition with the Swiss firm Intamin. I asked him what role he would like to play. He said that he could advise us on the RTA perspective. He made an appointment to come out to Boston and we met on Saturday, October 19th. We liked the idea of having him on our team, but at that point had no money to hire anyone.

Sometime before October, Washington State Senator Leo Thorsness had invited me to Olympia to testify before the State Senate Energy Committee, which he chaired. The meeting was held on October 28, 1991, and further cemented our relationship and added political strength to installing our system at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport as a first application in the Seattle Area.

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