Raytheon PRT 2000

From Light Rail Now: Fast-forward to the middle to late 1990s. J. Edward Anderson, the USA's leading PRT guru, managed to convince Raytheon, a major military hardware contractor, to buy into his PRT technology (a scheme developed in 1981), which he licensed to Raytheon in 1993. Raytheon then poured R&D money into the concept, bringing forth PRT 2000, a proprietary Personal Rapid Transit product. One way or another, PRT promoters had managed to attract the interest of the Northeastern illinois Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) in the concept, and a study concluded in 1992 that a suburban PRT system appeared feasible. [R. Tauber and A. Fergione, "Raytheon's PRT 2000 (TM) Personal Rapid Transit System Project", monograph, c. 1994-95] Lured by Raytheon's promise of a 1.3% commission on any additional sales of the PRT 2000 technology, RTA bought heavily into the venture, investing tens of millions of dollars in a proposed PRT system in the Chicago suburb of Rosemont, illinois, where a conference center and hotel complex near the Chicago O'Hare airport were planned. A 3.5-mile (5.6-km) triple-looping layout with about 8 stations and 40 cars, operating 20 hours a day, was intended to feed passengers to the RTA's Blue Line rail transit station (actually, not a bad test application for PRT). The system was projected to attract about 2 million rider-trips a year, at a cost of $1.00 a trip. [Peter Samuel, "Status Report on Raytheon's PRT 2000 Development Project", ITS international, November 1996; UTU Daily News Digest, 9 November 1998] Raytheon PRT 2000 car on Massachusetts test track in 1997. Actual costs quickly exceeded designers' dreams. [Photo: Raytheon] Raytheon launched into the Rosemont venture with gusto. Raytheon's 1995 Annual Report, for example, enthuses: "Personal Rapid Transit. How can technology offer urban and suburban dwellers the personal convenience of the car without the headaches? One solution is Personal Rapid Transit (PRT)." Peter Samuel's 1996 article in ITS international (cited above) gives some of the flavor of the self-confident approach of these haughty aerospace and industrial engineers who were convinced that existing mass transportation technology was obsolete and that their bold "new" approach, replicating the private automobile but in a controlled, automated environment, represented a high-tech, high-value alternative which would work far better and cost much less: PRT has the support of a small number of very bright U.S. engineers and other transport specialists, who say that mass public transit with its large vehicles and many station stops is a hopeless loser in the dispersed decentralized suburbs of modern America. And they say that in the present political climate it has to be able to be financially self-supporting, unlike buses and rail. Raytheon and CRTA have embraced that idea and hope to produce a system costing around $14 million/km [$23 million/mile] to build. Even more important they say it has to offer a high standard of individual service at very low operating cost. Raytheon's design assumed a 2.5-second headway for PRT 2000, although the engineers hoped to eventually achieve one second. Curiously, banging into the car in front doesn't seem to have been as much of a consideration as the problem of branching, or switching, off the guideway, which was absolutely critical to the concept. As Samuel explains, Headway is limited by the switch maneuvers – the handling of cars moving toward converge points at the same time, slowing one to give priority to the other. PRT with its many stations, all off-line, and its looped-grid layout of one way track is probably the most switch-intensive transport system yet conceived. The system has to handle repeated close encounters at switches requiring enormous reliability in sensing, computing, braking, and other controls .... But designers were confident they could solve these and other technical challenges. Their computer simulations also optimistically predicted that the whole system could be delivered at bargain-basement prices. As Tauber and Fergione exuberantly declaimed, "Detailed cost estimates repeated in successive stages over a period of six years show that in many reasonable applications PRT 2000(TM) can be built and operated at far lower cost than existing rail transit modes." Their optimism continued into a vision of success: The hardware development program will prove the performance of PRT 2000(TM) on an oval track with one off-line station and three prototype vehicles at Raytheon's Electronic Systems Division facility in Marlborough Massachusetts USA. The prototype test program is expected to begin in 1996 following which the Rosemont demonstration is planned. Additional deployments in the United States and abroad are being considered in parallel. Reality began to hit about 1998, particularly as it began to appear that costs were soaring far above the initial rosy estimates of $23 million/mile ($14 million/km). RTA was getting decidedly nervous about the escalating costs, which by late 1998 had climbed about 50% above the original per-mile projections. In addition, there may have been other concerns as well (possibly over the running of cars on one another's tails with no safety-braking margin). RTA director Valerie Jarrett, who also chaired the Chicago Transit Authority Board, in late 1998 worried that there were too many "unanswered questions" about the plan. [UTU Daily News Digest, 9 November 1998] But the cost overruns were the killer, and the RTA put the whole Rosemont project on hold – a lockdown from which it was never to emerge. "Some members of the RTA Board had said they would not approve the plan if it had been presented at last week's regular meeting" reported the UTU Daily News Digest. Valerie Jarrett raised what the UTU described as "substantive questions" about the plan. "The RTA has not done any independent analysis of the ridership projections and financial plan" for the system, she said. An article in Mechanical Engineering Design (2004) relates that "after eight years and $40 million, the system proved to be unworkable." (Actually, according to another report in the Advanced Transit Association Newsletter (Spring 2000), total public and private investment in the project came to $67 million, virtually all of it wasted.) In any case, work on PRT 2000 was discontinued by Raytheon and the RTA in 1999 ("Raytheon's PRT 2000", innovative Transportation Technologies website, 18 August 2002). An interview with Raytheon's project manager (ITS international, November/December 1999) notes that the company gave up after realizing that they could not build the system for less than $50 million per mile – and that for single-direction guideway loops. "The RTA has officially pulled the plug on the proposed PRT project (personal rapid transit) in Rosemont" reported The Weekly Breakdown (a Chicago-area "urbanophile" and tech-oriented online newsletter). "This in the face of the increasing costs of the system." [The Weekly Breakdown, Vol. 3, #17, 2000] http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_prt001.htm

Blip | February 27, 2008

Tags:. .reliability. .lured. .cited. .headaches. .contractor