Pod cars back in the news

NYT reports, but shows very little substance.

In California’s Silicon Valley, San Jose has just begun a yearlong study to evaluate the use of a P.R.T. system around San Jose airport, with connections to local transit hubs and hotels, said Laura Stuchinsky, the sustainability officer in the city’s transportation department.
Even a co-founder of Google, Larry Page, touted the P.R.T. concept in his 2009 commencement speech at the University of Michigan, his alma mater. In February, the city council of Mountain View, Calif., passed a resolution supporting the concept of personal rapid transit as a “safer quicker and healthier alternative to the automobile.” Google is located in Mountain View.

PRT salemen have scheduled the Pod Car conference in San Jose:

This debate will be one of the topics covered next month when experts from the around the world convene in San Jose for the fourth annual Pod Car City Conference (PCCC4).

I have always liked Pod cars, but they should operate like BRT, they can have specially marked lanes, no problem. Guideways are a nuisance and unnecessary. Also Pod cars need to be speeded up.

Note the interest by a Google exec. There is a race on between Google, Oracle and IBM to garner business in the intelligent transportation sector. We are all trying to sort out the market at the moment.  Actually it is Cisco that has the momentum because the problem is one of networking cars.  John Chambers (CEO Cisco) hasn't quite got the clue yet, but Cisco does have a transportation networking division.  John doesn';t yet ssee the growth of that market relative to something like social networking.

How does this market achieve economies of scale?
The vehicles need a standard architecture for the navigation brain such that the software chain from passenger to vehicle is exposed for applications.