In a nondescript office park off Fridley’s University Avenue, you can walk through the door of the business with the sci-fi name “Taxi 2000,” make your way past the front-office suites and empty cubicles and find yourself in an expansive warehouse home to the prototype of the “Skyweb Express,” a sleek, modish, roughly hemispherical pod of red metal and tinted glass that can be propelled by linear induction motor along a 60-foot length of guide-rail.

If you ask Mike Lester, Taxi 2000’s CEO and sole employee, he’ll tell you that the Skyweb Express and other Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) systems are a proven and implementation-ready solution to the question of urban public transit. The pods, Lester says, are capable of moving and merging at speeds as fast as 70 miles per hour and transporting as many as 320,000 people in a two-hour period along a personalized route—all for a cost of $16 million–$20 million a mile, a fraction of the cost of light-rail lines.

[see VIDEO: Fridley Company's Concept—Personal Transit Pods]

But PRT has vocal and skeptical opponents who point to a long and rocky history and the lack of successful large-scale implementation; personal transportation pod projects have been discussed since the early 1950s but apart from a few small systems—Lester mentions 1975’s five-station West Virginia University system and Heathrow Airport’s three-station network—PRT has not gained much global traction.

An untested system

Ken Avidor is a local artist and environmentalist who has been an anti-PRT activist since 2003, when he attended a transportation conference at Macalester College, where he encountered a proponent who, he said with a laugh, "threw Taxi 2000 brochures at everyone." 

Avidor has since started a blog where he collects “pod flops and fiascos” and become an unofficial anti-PRT spokesman, speaking with legislators and the media.

In a chapter titled “Bachmann’s Pod People” in his recently published screed against the Minnesota congresswoman, “The Madness of Michele Bachmann,” Avidor and his co-authors, Karl Bremer and Eva Young, write that Bachmann’s bill in support of Personal Rapid Transit is “perhaps [her] most bizarre and least reported legislative endeavor.”

Avidor said he believes that legislators' support for what he calls a futuristic, impractical mass transit panacea allows them to dismiss existing systems such as light-rail and buses.

“In my opinion what the Personal Rapid Transit people are doing is dishonest: They’re saying to people that we should be delaying investment in transit today because there’s something better tomorrow,” Avidor said. “There are anti-traffic groups that are very upfront and say they think that highways are better, others have that agenda that we should be using cars, we should be burning oil, we should be widening highways—that’s at least honest that they’re saying that.”

State Sen. Scott Dibble (DFL-Minneapolis), who heads the senate’s transit subcommittee, said that he thinks the proponents of PRT are sincere, but he dismissed their plans for implementation as that of “technophiles” who are not interested in examining the ramifications of a PRT line in terms of the overall multi-modal scheme, land use, economic development, mobility, urban form and the environment.

“There’s this constant refrain, ‘Build PRT everywhere, all your problems will be solved,’ with no acknowledgement that it is a political impossibility and that we would be throwing a bunch of money at something that’s completely unproven with a lot if implications that haven’t been addressed,” Dibble said. “All I ever here from folks is personal-freedom rhetoric about going anywhere and everywhere, but what happens to the urban forest if you’re running these things all over the place.”

Several legislative supporters of PRT, including Sen. Gen Olson and Lt. Gov. Yvonne Prettner Solon, declined to be interviewed for this story.

Lester, the Taxi 2000 CEO, disputed the PRT’s critics’ claims and said that the company has its “base engineering issues worked out” and that the resistance to PRT is to be expected for innovative breakthroughs.

“Early adoption technologies are always difficult, whether that’s the fax machine or the pager,” he said.

Financial issues

Taxi 2000 was incorporated in 1983. The company has yet to sell any systems, instead earning revenue from private investors and from feasibility studies funded by cities around the globe.

“We haven’t deployed any systems anywhere in the world,” Lester said, “But, as we move forward, our target clients are anybody who would use a transportation circulation system in a downtown metropolitan area so you can take light-rail or a bus into the city.”

Lester said that while he would not disclose financial information about Taxi 2000 since it is a private company, his investors have taken a long-term interest in the company.

“This is your standard legacy investment. It’s not your quick turnaround,” he said.

A 2002 Taxi 2000 business report (see PDF) predicted a return on investors’ money by the end of the decade.

"After the first few installations have had several years of operating experience, which can be expected to occur in about six or seven years, explosive growth in deployments can be expected until the market saturates," the report stated.

Michael Andregg, a geneticist who teaches at the University of St. Thomas, was an early investor in Taxi 2000.

“I didn’t put money into it as an investment,” he said. “I put money into it as an investment into a visionary company.”

Andregg is still hopeful about the future of PRT, but since Taxi 2000’s founder, J. Edward Anderson, left in 2005 and the company’s new leadership sued him for retaining proprietary information, Andregg said he has seen minimal efforts on the part of the company to reach out to shareholders and he considers the company’s promise to be lost.

“They exist but they’re kind of moribund in Fridley,” he said. “I don’t pay any attention to Taxi 2000.”

Taxi 2000 had as many as 14 employees during its design phase, but now Lester is the only full-time staff member.

“This is a company that’s been around for a while and it’s not produced a single pod system anywhere,” Avidor said. “How do they produce a profit?”