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Thursday, March 11, 2010

Up in the Air

by Reeve Hamilton
February 2, 2010  |  3

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When President Barack Obama doled out $8 billion in stimulus dollars to fund high-speed rail development last week, Texas got a paltry $4 million — one half of one-tenth of one percent of the total. This will fund improvements that will increase the speed and reliability of the section of Amtrak’s Texas Eagle line between Fort Worth and the Oklahoma border. Even when added to more than $7 million secured in additional federal funding for other rail projects, this will not bring high-speed passenger rail to Texas anytime soon. Speaking in Dallas at the Texas Rail Advocates conference just a ...

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Comments (3)

  • mh wrote on 2/2/2010 10:13 a.m.

    Seems like this offers very few benefits for those of us who already have personal rapid transit: cars.

  • garypenn wrote on 2/2/2010 10:09 p.m.

    PRT, small automated electric vehicles operating on dedicated, elevated quideways is an idea that has been incubating for more than forty years and now has a large number of manifestations worldwide. A good Texas-based introduction to the range of ideas being discussed is at http://www.acprt.org/. ACPRT stands for Austin Citizens for Personal Rapid Transit. It predates and is independent of Mr. Garriott's website http://www.austinprt.com/ although it does have a link to an audio interview with the computer games guru and space traveler. Another website with a wealth of information about a very wide range of innovated transportation ideas is Professor Emeritus Jerry Schnieder's web site at the University of Washington: http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/ . Visiting that one after hearing about PRT for the first time can be rather overwhelming but does illustrate how many alternatives there are out there.

    As to MH's comment about what is in automated guideway transport for car drivers, some of the answers are: reductions in noise, air pollution, greenhouse gases, accidents and an opportunity to speed over the daily traffic jam. To me the really attractive feature is the potential ability to take a "horizontal elevator" to where I am going without having to deal with other auto drivers' raging emotions.

    Gary in Austin

  • adaviddelcolle wrote on 2/3/2010 12:42 p.m.

    Another fine example of a PRT system is in Morgantown, West Virginia. The elevated railway connects West Virginia University's separate campuses and has been a huge success.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Transit