Are "personal pods" the next thing in transportation?

Writing in Business 2.0, Chris Morrison extols the virtues of "The Next Pod Revolution," or what he calls 'the best transit system you've never seen." The article is about personal rapid transit, or PRT. Roughly speaking, PRT is an expanded version of a monorail, but automated. (Washington University has a few web pages on the subject.)

According to Morrison, a PRT planned for London's Heathrow Airport should be ready for operation in 2008, and it should cost "no more than $16 million per mile of track, compared with an average of $40 million per mile for light rail in most cities."

No PRT is actually in use, though a few systems come close. Why not? Morrison asked Edward Anderson, a professor who has worked on the subject for about four decades. "The real problem was political, not technical," says Anderson." Morrison sums it up: "Chicago, Minneapolis, and Seattle killed PRT projects, fearing opposition from transit drivers and the embarrassment of failing with an untested system."

Opposition from transit drivers. There we go again, with the inmates running the asylum.

Then again, perhaps we're not missing so much. Randal O'Toole argues "We already have a personal rapid transit system. It is called the automobile."