Trouble in Transitland

Thank you for including some healthy skepticism about personal rapid transit (PRT) in “Made-to-Measure Mass Transit” [June]. PRT has had a long history of expensive failures and controversy, notably here in Minnesota. In recent years, bills and amendments were introduced into the state legislature to promote a PRT industry; not one of these bills survived the legislative process. But they did provide a platform for politicians like U.S. Reps. Michele Bachmann and Mark Olson, as well as others, to denounce conventional transit as too expensive or old-fashioned and to promote highways.

For over 30 years, PRT had support in this state from members of antitransit, prohighway groups but had no support from traditional transit advocacy groups. Perhaps the high point for PRT promoters in the Minnesota Legislature was the 2004 session when the House passed a PRT bonding bill for US $4 million, only for it to be extinguished in a conference committee. Things went quickly downhill after that.

Late in 2004, PRT visionary Professor J. Edward Anderson was prevented from regaining control of the Taxi 2000 Corp., a PRT system he cofounded in 1983 under Automated Transportation Systems. Some of the company’s shareholders were bitter. One shareholder wrote in a letter to the Pioneer Press, “I was present at all of the relevant shareholder meetings and can affirm without reservation that this company was taken over by a gang of political opportunists.” In 2005, Taxi 2000 filed a lawsuit against Anderson and two associates.

The lawsuit was settled, but Taxi 2000 has shown few signs of life since then (its Web site has not posted any news since the lawsuit). Also, in 2005, one of PRT’s most energetic promoters, Minneapolis Councilman Dean Zimmermann, was investigated and ultimately convicted on three counts of bribery. PRT has lost its support among liberal and moderate Minnesota politicians. An attempt by Rep. Mark Olson to attach a PRT amendment to a bonding bill in the Minnesota House on 12 April 2006 was voted down 107 to 26. Mark Olson was re-elected last November but was arrested and jailed for domestic assault five days later and was expelled from the Republican caucus.

Although the Taxi 2000 lawsuit and the legal problems of its most prominent promoters, Olson and Zimmermann, likely sealed PRT’s fate in Minnesota, a far more important factor in the demise of PRT here was the phenomenal success of the Hiawatha Light Rail Line.

Ken Avidor

Minneapolis

Climate (Over)Control

I don’t know which aspect of William B. Gail’s “Climate Control” [May] discouraged me more: his focus on high-tech, high-cost, high-risk, and highly impractical solutions or his near total disregard of the low-tech, lower-cost, low-risk, practical solutions that we can begin to implement now. They may not be the complete answer, but they start to address the problem without waiting for long-term hypothetical solutions. Instead of making the societal adjustments at some future time in response to possible solutions, why not start now and educate the public on the need for recycling, reuse, and lower energy demand?

The engineering talents challenged by the high-tech solutions could be focused by research into fuel efficiency, new materials to reduce energy use, and increased energy conservation, but no one ever got rich (or received large research grants) by having people buy less.

 A final thought: all the solutions that can be developed will be doomed to fail unless slowing the growth of the world’s population is not also included as a solution. Janet Rochester

IEEE Senior Member

Onancock, Va.

It is refreshing to get an article with a positive viewpoint that is not just hype about global warming. I would like to inject a layman’s observations of a few neglected points. Besides the sun, there are four major contributors to global temperature and weather, which are:

1. The effect of all the atmospheric components, including carbon dioxide.

2. Radioactive decay and core cooling.

3. Nature’s CO2/oxygen-balancing cycle of life.

4. The ice ages that have occurred for more than a million years.

While the article’s major thrust is on possible methods for control, it comments primarily on the effects of CO₂, (item 1, but also items 2 and 3). Item 4 is nowhere to be found. Yet we all know that the miles-thick sheet of the last ice age, which extended to about the 40th parallel, has been receding for more than 10 000 years because of temperature equalization by water and weather. That is the major cause for the receding glaciers as shown in your story. The meltdown has now reached the Arctic Circle, and that condition introduces a critical change to weather behavior.

A map of the Arctic Ocean shows it substantially landlocked at the Arctic Circle. The ice, only recently melting in its openings—the Norwegian Sea, the Labrador Sea, and the Bering Strait—now allows warm ocean currents to circulate deep into the Arctic Ocean. That, in turn, melts its ice at a much faster rate, as further seen in your article, and accounts for the recent substantial and unpredictable changes in ocean currents and weather patterns. They can not be accounted for just by temperature. Melting ocean ice will not change the sea level. Land ice has been melting for eons and will continue to do so. We can presently neither control the sea level nor influence the weather.

The article illustrates some possible future answers to CO₂ global warming, but many current practical nonregressive answers are already here. I could name at least 10 categories. It’s no longer a technology issue; the real problem is in ourselves. There is an immediate answer to those who reject effects of the above scenario but believe global warming is due to CO₂. It is to build nuclear reactors as fast as possible in order to tide us over until we can resolve the many issues outlined. That the problems of nuclear storage must first be solved to infinity is a vain excuse.

As the article states—to predict our world’s climate we need supercomputing power (its emergence is on track), a much more detailed measurement of the temperature/climate interactions involved and a deeper understanding of climate physics. Item 2 is sadly deficient. It is the key to productive use of item 1 and to the mastery of item 3. Thus, the satellites and so on required for that measurement should be our highest priority now. It is encouraging that this issue is finally being recognized at such events as the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (http://www.igarss07.org). But the discussion does not yet appear adequately focused. If global warming is to attain universal respect from all of us, it must be divorced from the-sky-is-falling rhetoric and environmental extremism.

Clayton A. Washburn

IEEE Life Member

Monroe, Utah

Chipped, Perhaps Broken

The lure of “chipping” [“Hands On,” May], from the beginning, has been convenience and “security,” but the downside is huge. It is not secure, because it transmits an RF signal that anyone with a receiver can capture, in the same manner that is used to capture PINs at ATMs and keyless entry codes for automobiles. In addition, we all know the long history of Washington turning a “gee wiz, ain’t that cool” idea into a government mandate.

I would never even chip my dogs, no matter how many times the evening news broadcasts stories of dogs being returned to owners years later because of a chip.

Chipping is already being marketed to parents as a means to track their children in case of abduction. Such marketing campaigns rely on exaggerating the possibility of something happening to induce fear.

I don’t care how many “conveniences” can come from RFID implants. Hollywood sci-fi flicks are full of not unrealistic portrayals of what can go wrong when the government can mandate such conveniences.

Mark F. Kelcourse

IEEE Member

Lowell, Mass.