The Oil Drum

I have had several successful real estate bets by simply betting that property prices will increase faster than inflation in walkable areas. These sorts of neighborhoods have done well all up and down the Pacific Coast. Try South Beach in San Francisco, the north end of Seattle's downtown. Downtown Olympia, Washington. Don't even try to mention property prices in Vancouver or Victoria, BC. They are ridiculously high because of the walkability of these neighborhoods.

Perhaps the communities being discussed here make it difficult for folks to walk safely downtown or maybe they are extremely good a designing communities that drive property prices down by making it dangerous or uncomfortable to walk. Perhaps they should use their sales techniques to convince their real estate developers to make more profit.

I've been looking into PRT for the last few weeks.  As far as transport concepts go, it ranges from pie-in-the-sky utopian to not enough improvement over cars to justify the expense.

We have tens of trillions of dollars in car-based infrastructure built right now.  It's the solution that we developed for the go-anywhere culture, and the energy situation doesn't look like it will support another go-anywhere culture being built, in whatever form.  PRT is somewhat interesting as a logical way we could have developed instead of cars, but it's laughable as far as a way to solve our current problems.

All the PRT essay's I've read tend to be utopian - they highlight the positive aspect of one feature, then the positive aspect of another feature which is mutually exclusive of the benefit already mentioned, and go on for pages and pages.

When in car mode, dual-mode PRT (which the "realists" have settled on) has all the problems of car culture as well as the technical problems of an electric car.  Furthermore, they can't operate in AI mode safely on normal roads by any stretch of the imagination, leaving them out of the active vehicle pool when one has to go to an area without guideways.

When in guideway mode, PRT proponents imagine impossibly close spacing of cars on a single cheap guideway (rather than double or triple guideways for accel + decel + stopping), with many-times-per-second highspeed switches.  Many of them want vertically elevated track (Good luck with the drop, or the track, when something breaks down), and most of them require wide loops for every dead end, large turnways, etc.

It all comes down to this: A guideway is inherently much less 'open' than simple pavement.  
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We pay (and have invested) a LOT for the car culture.  The externalities dwarf any other aspect of the economy other than perhaps weapons-making.  It wasn't so much to pay when we were the best automakers, oil producers, and empty-land-owners in the world - but we're not anymore.  Things are getting pricier, both in terms of blood and money.  In the past, people thought that to replace the car, one had to best it in every way - this is where PRT came from, and it succeeds in some aspects of this (while failing miserably in others).  But personal, private, high-speed transit from home to work to the other side of the country without getting off my ass, with room for 5 kids, a dog, and  groceries is not necessary for the vast majority of us to live our lives.

Changing the culture is a nearly impossible thing, looking at it as an individual - but it's  far easier and more practical than implementing PRT in a fashion anywhere near universal enough to allow us to keep our current land-use practices.