They sure as hell are not. For someone to work for you, you have to be giving them something. That contract is just a load of crap your lawyers wrote so they could harass people -- harassment being a lawyer's strongest weapon.
If those people really were working for you, there would be a tremendous number of legal and tax implications. Even in the case of something casual like a beta test -- especially if you present it with such uncasual contractual terms. You can't have it both ways, and I know you aren't filing 1099's on those people, giving a monetary value to your bartered transaction, or otherwise living up to your duties when receiving hired work.
Well, actually you can have it any way you want when you only expect use the law to bully individuals, which is all I expect that contract could ever be used for.
Advertisers should penalize sites that use no-cache to increase ad impression counts.
Do advertisers reward impressions at all these days? I don't sell or buy ads, so I don't really know, but my impression was that only clicks counted for anything in these days of diminishing returns.
But if you're going to knock Java's performance, explain why or shut the f@#* up.
Okay, Java will be a much worse performer than C, because in C you can design your own object model (without the overhead of one object model layered over another -- which is a massive overhead). In an environment like this it could really make sense.
There are real performance issues here, to the point (if you want to do it right) you need to think of it as systems programming. You'll have non-systems programming as well, which doesn't have to be in straight C, but I think there would be wisdom in a C-based foundation.
The typical place where Java is used as a server would be web pages, but there really isn't a big need to perform well there. Obviously, since people even use Tcl for that. A multiplayer game can't be batched in the way web requests are, so it's a very different performance situation.
Second: Ignore the nay-sayers who say it's too big of a project.
By the time they give you a full, thought-out reason why you can't do it, you'll be half-done.
The nay-sayers are probably right here, and if you research to people who've done it before (rule 3), you'll notice the vast majority of such projects fail.
You must break a project like this into smaller pieces. You must have a forseeable point when you can release something. You can't forsee the end of a project as big as this, so you have to design intermediate points into it where you have something that is at least interesting to other developers, but much preferably is of some interest to gamers (even if only forgiving gamers).
Open Source ideals aside, it's very hard to maintain dedicated to something that only you have ever seen. Also, incremental development is just more likely to be successful.
Remember you are talking about a different group of people. Artists who become "known" have some kind of fanbase and possibly some level of talent. There are a great many who sink into obscurity, e.g. the "one hit wonders".
I was speaking specifically of those who don't have talent, and yet don't sink into obscurity -- e.g., the Backstreet Boys. (Or at least what talent they have isn't well-rounded)
This article confuses the notion of personal safety with "comfort". Television is not a necessity, nor is radio, or the Internet, or your cell phone, or any telephone for that matter. These are luxuries, and having to go without them will not kill you.
Telephones are not a luxury. By far the majority of people in the US and most industrial nations are not self-sufficient -- even the farmers, while probably better able to cope, are hardly self-sufficient. That's a lot of people to feed, clothe, and house. To do that requires a lot of coordination. To coordinate on current scales and with current infrastructure, you need something like the telephone (and a lot of other technology too).
I try my best to live simply and to recognize my luxuries for what they are. But I also don't fool myself, and I know how dependent I am on the wider society. Things that are very simple for me now could become very, very difficult if the systems of this country fell apart.
Well, one "new" trend might be metal. Really it's just another form of recycling -- but perhaps there's something new about it since it incorporates rap.
I suspect that most truly new music is now hip-hop inspired, which is a bit alien to me -- and probably many of us here:) So there is the chance that things have shifted enough that we just don't see what's really happening -- maybe we're like some guy in the 60's complaining that there's no good jazz anymore, there's barely any big bands left and they just play the same old songs.
And sure, even I can tell that a lot of mainstream hip-hop is just plain bad. But pop has always been saturated with bad music, which we later forget about. I think I need to go listen to something new before I feel too old... (and I'm not old, dammit!)
You're not making it based upon the music industry's marketing campaign. The industry pushes select artists that they have an investment in and want to succeed, and they would rather that you made your decisions on what to buy based upon they're selling, not upon what your friends like or what you find appealing.
I also have a theory that there's a direct conflict there -- labels have a tremendous amount of power over the artist when they are unknown. However, once an artist becomes known the power shifts dramatically -- contracts help keep artists from reaping those benefits, but all contracts run out eventually.
I've personally noticed that pop music has hitten a real low in the last few years -- and I really think I'm being somewhat objective in this, not just square and living in the past. Pop music is being recycled longer, and bands aren't being cycled in as fast. Even three or four years ago it seemed considerably better than now.
Many of those long-lived groups are really just corporate machines. No single part of the group has enough talent to go on their own. You can't be successful based on your singing talent and dancing alone -- someone has to write the songs, someone has to play the instruments behind them, and in the case of so much boring music lately, there has to be a lot of marketing to get people to think they like the music at all.
As a result the Backstreet Boys are never going to assert their independance, or Christina Agilera, and I think a surprising number of the "Alternative" bands are in the same boat -- they are really so boring, their lyrics are so pat, their voices so cliche, that they'd go nowhere on their own. Metal is growing into a pretty boring field as well.
Given this, there's much more incentive for the labels to make sure that people don't buy according to their informed preference. If it was really just straight free market capitalism, and the labels just wanted to sell as much music as possible, then a well-informed listening audience would be great. But that well-informed listening audience would, I think, be very likely to buy from a lot of independent labels.
I honestly do not know who to believe when I hear stories like this. But our government has a much better reputation than many of the local Afghans, and especially over Palestinians.
When did we get that reputation? From the false reports of attrocities in Kosovo? (All reports before the bombing have been shown to be false) From out past wartime records -- Vietnam (Gulf of Tonkin, My Lai), Iraq (where there were also accusations of killing soldiers who wished to surrender), Kosovo (the Chinese embassy)...
The US government has a horrible record for honesty. Past lies come out over and over, and no one ever gets punished -- hell, Colin Powel himself was involved in trying to cover up the My Lai massacre, and look where it's gotten him. Why would the government and military suddenly be honest now?
That doesn't mean they necessarily lied, but their credibility is nil.
Call it stereotyping, but the people who engage and support terrorism use tricks like this to gain sympathy.
The government hasn't even released any evidence to show they were associated with 9-11. Well, except that video of bin Laden: a blurry video with distorted sound of a man who gained weight in wartime and suddenly became right-handed, found in some random location in Afghanastan by somebody-or-another, in which he makes statements that totally contradict everything he has said before.
There is no other evidence. And there certainly isn't any evidence linking this small village to 9-11.
While a trained lawyer can take any document out of context and manipulate, your trained lawyer has the opportunity to put that document back in context -- if other documents are still available. Documents -- especially electronic documents -- can be saved from destruction fairly easy. Do you think an employee is more likely to save the vast number of documents that help prove good intentions, or the one document that does not?
Also, documents can be useful to the company itself. While for the most part, you are innocent until proven guilty and thus less evidence is better, a document can provide evidence of any number of things that the company would want to keep. For instance, employee theft, that someone independently created something before or in parrallel with another company, etc.
Also, you should be honest about who you are protecting. Are you protecting the company, or some of the employees of the company? Enron's destruction of evidence does not seem to be to protect the company. The company is nearly dead, and the company is made up of the shareholders, not the executives. Any document destruction at this point is clearly not to the benefit of the company.
Okay, a little math here. If in one period there's a 33% chance of downtime, over three periods there's a 70% chance of downtime. That's because there's a 67% chance of no downtime in a period, and to combine those chances over the three periods you multiply:.67*.67*.67 =.30, i.e., a 30% chance of no downtime, or a 70% chance of downtime.
The second they find statistical evidence that SUVs (and SUVs alone, they control for the usual supsects: age, gender, marital status, past history, etc...) are causing them to lose more money (due to claims) than any other vehicle you can bet your bottom dollar that rates on SUVs are going to rise (if they haven't already).
My impression is that liability insurance for SUVs is significantly higher than for cars. Collision isn't, as that covers the risk to yourself and your own vehicle. Liability for motorcycles, in comparison to cars, is extremely cheap (for all the same reasons).
However, insurance doesn't address the less tangible detractions of cars in general, and SUVs in particular: the fact that, as a benign pedestrian or biker, you have to spend lots of mental energy to keep yourself from getting killed. While you don't endanger anyone else, you are at constant threat by people who are not significantly endangering themselves. It's asymmetric, backwards, and very frustrating.
At least motorcyclists are endangering themselves more than the world around them, which some people consider stupid and destructive, but a more socially-minded person would see as good, because there is little virtue in protecting yourself, but much more virtue in protecting those around you.
Cars also require a dedicated right-of-way: roads. The advantage of roads is that they are very flexible -- supporting passenger and cargo traffic -- and that access points are almost free, just consisting of a driveway.
Of course, in the suburbs they don't even take advantage of that simplicity. Little street parking, cargo trucks usually go through weird access roads in the back of the strips, medians you can't cross, little opportunity to pass, you can't double park... they really don't take good advantage of their roads.
I've seen proposals for PRT systems that support cargo. They all came out of Europe -- I assume this is because it's more of a problem over there. Memepool had a link to an underground system like this in Chicago that operated for a little while -- miniature trains, probably more useful when there was a lot of coal-related freight.
Anyway, I'm not so sure about cargo-carrying PRT, but if it happened it would be possible to have no roads in an area, with only rails. The only problem at that point would be stations, which I've found in general to be a serious lack in PRT plans. Just how the station will be layed out to have minimal impact while still being useful is not well addressed.
To find an equivalent traffic flow and scaling to PRT for automobiles, you have to look to freeways. And freeways are even more similar to PRT in terms of limitations. They are wildly expensive, require tremendous right-of-way, and have very limited access points. They also create limitations on how people move about -- as people change from going to and from downtown to going between non-downtown locations, current highways are insufficient and traffic becomes limiting.
PRT is like highways scaled down, with the possiblity of having a fairly dense network of lines. The only problem is how to get from the station to your destination. Maybe PRT with the Segway would be perfect:)
Nothing beats the freedom of hopping into my car, when I want to and not waiting for public transportation, on their schedule. And taking the long way home, instead of the fastest route when I want to.
That would be quite possible with PRT. You do not wait for scheduled stops -- the automated cars would roam the system waiting for someone to need them, with a goal of most people being served in under a minute (similar to taxis). Choosing your route is an interface and policy issue, but it would certainly be possible and has been proposed. With elevated rails, I imagine the routes could be quite attractive -- certainly better than your average freeway.
Larger cities have no way of building such infrastructure and already have subways which can carry far more people than this system.
Subways are not extremely effective. PRT proponents believe a modest PRT system could easily have more capacity for less cost and overall intrusiveness.
The reason is that PRT stations are offline -- when one car stops at its destination, all other cars continue unhindered. So the overall speed of the system is constant -- about 30mph for initial systems. A subway may go even faster, but it is constantly stopping, so the average speed is much slower.
As we should all know, the capacity of a connection is not just based on how fat your pipes are (subways having fat pipes), but also how fast you can move stuff through. While you can fit less people on a given length of PRT line, they are moving considerably faster.
You can also fit quite a few people on a bit of line, because PRT cars can be much closer together than subway trains are -- again, due to the offline stations. This is essential to PRT, and why past People Mover experiments (which other people have mentioned and dismissed) don't really apply -- that is, it's much more than just an automated rail car.
It also allows for more decentralized transportation. The El' here in Chicago is okay for going to certain locations, but it's limited because all the lines go to and from downtown. When I want to travel around non-downtown areas (which is most of the traveling I do), it's not a convenient or direct form of transportation.
Because my route on a PRT doesn't have to be anyone else's route, I could go much more direct than I can with traditional rail mass transit. A more direct route with less transfers also increases the capacity in comparison to subways.
Automated cars wouldn't help parking either, which is a pretty big deal some places and for certain destinations.
Some people are shelling out $30,000 for parking spaces here in Chicago -- and not even downtown. I also blame that on SUVs. If I bought a car, I'd get a really small one -- not for the fuel efficiency or cost, but because it's easier to find parking spaces.
It could still work with a park-and-ride model, at least for the suburbs. You still need good density of stations on the destination side -- since you won't have a car then -- but you can potentially drive to the suburban station (located in a mall or something)
You could also have commuter rail connecting to a PRT system, as commuter rail is actually fairly efficient, but doesn't quite get people where they need to go.
PRT should be fairly compatible with a heterogeneous transportation system.
While it's not a problem everywhere, dual mode doesn't address parking. Also, a dual mode car would be considerably more expensive than a PRT rail car -- if only because it's larger and can do two things. So dual mode means a much, much higher capital expense. You have to build much heavier rails to hold the heavier cars (which must be road-ready), and each of the cars is much more expensive. Also, there's a very high cost to start using the system, not just as a society, but as an individual. You can't just use a dual mode system to the degree its useful (assuming it will become more useful as tracks are extended over time). You have to make a huge initial investment to buy the special car.
And dual mode won't particularly address the social aspects of public transportation -- providing transportation for the young, old, and disabled. These are really essential, and why every (responsible) community has to provide some public transportation system even with the availability of cars.
That these are on a dedicated track is absolutely essential. The individual cars are meant to be as light and simple as possible. Having them share the road with cars would be absolutely impossible -- not only the technological pipe dream that we could implement such a thing, but they would lose nearly all the advantages they have.
A PRT system, in some environments, can be significantly faster than a car, even going just 30mph, because it is on a completely automated system. PRT cars merge onto different tracks seemlessly, there are no traffic lights, no entrance ramps, nothing of the sort. So you would hopefully be traveling 30mph the entire way, with no delays. I know where I live (Chicago), being able to go a consistent 30mph would be a tremendous improvement for travel time (compared to car, bus, or El').
To do this, the system has to be insulated from any human error or interference. This means an elevated track. Hopefully (and ideally) a cheap, light, and simple elevated track. But it just can't be on the road. The ideal is that tracks are very cheap, so it's viable to create a fairly dense network of tracks, and most destinations will be within easy walking distance of a station.
PRT can potentially handle a good volume, because the train cars can follow more closely than normal cars can (since they are automated and on tracks). A single track might be able handle, oh, perhaps half the capacity of a highway lane (which is quite a lot, and far more than traditional rail). However, that single rail is far smaller and has less impact than a highway lane, because the cars are lighter than normal cars and are electrically powered. Also, interchanges should be much more compact, again due to automation.
PRT isn't generally meant to replace cars or to replace all other forms of public transportation. It is easy for a PRT system to hook up with whatever other forms of transportation exist. Hopefully a bit better than Park-and-Ride, though.
Do you mean it isn't safe because the trains derail and such, or because the people on the train create an unsafe atmosphere?
I can't say PRT addresses the derailing issue particularly -- though I'm sure MARTA and PRT would both be far safer than a car in this regard. PRT does address the safety -- real and perceived -- of being in a shared environment. You never ride with anyone unless you choose to do so. You stop only at your destination, so there's no chance of interaction outside of the station.
It does seem possible that someone could force their way into your car while you are boarding, or that you could be accosted in the station. I believe proposals have all included a variety of safety measures to deal with these issues. I think these should be as easy to address as are safety issues in parking garages.
This is called Personal Rapid Transit, and the first PRT system in use was a "demonstration project" in Morgantown, West Virginia, funded by the U.S. Dept of Transportation.
Equivalent projects have been successfully, and I believe economically, used in a number of airports. Neither the Morgantown system, nor these airport systems, are the same as PRT.
PRT suffers from a relatively simple problem: massive capital costs.
PRT has the potential to have very cheap capital costs. Unfortunately, the first implementations will probably not be very economical.
A PRT rail is much cheaper than a monorail rail, or light rail, or the People Mover. It holds a much lighter car, with a 3-person capacity. It does not require a large right of way: the cars are narrow, the supports can be narrow as well. I'd imagine it could fit comfortable on a road with the parking lane removed.
An extremely key feature of PRT is the use of very small cars. This distinguishes it from light rail and monorail -- as well as the WVU system. It means there is the potential for very reasonable capital layout. It also means it has the potential to provide good service, something buses do not do.
Buses are alright at providing service to key areas where driving is not reasonable (downtown) and providing service for people who have no car or cannot drive. These are important things to provide. However, buses do not, and never will, provide anything more than that. Never. They are absurdly oversized for most operation, uncomfortable, inconvenient, expensive to operate, and incredibly slow. They don't just lack sex appeal, they are simply a horrible means of transportation. Buses are what people stuck in traffic wish other people were taking so there'd be less traffic. No one wishes they themselves were on the bus. I say this as a rider, who has time while riding to curse the system I'm riding on.
First, Pittsburgh is very spread out geographically (and economically), while the places people want to go are generally concentrated. How do you balance the load to guarantee availability of thes small cars in the sparse areas that people are living, and not have an overload at the destinations?
The PRT cars are automated. When there is unbalanced load, they will drive themselves (unoccupied) to the high demand areas.
Third, the infrastructure cost would be beyond prohibitive. Look at how crappy the current belt system is, with a maze of poorly maintained roads through BFE. If you think that the Mag-Lev train will cost a lot, this track mesh would take much new construction that would cause the local taxpayer base to revolt!
The track is cheaper and does not have to support a heavy train car. It has the potential to be considerably cheaper, even while providing a better standard of service (because stations are more plentiful and travel times are less). Considering the costs of "light" rail (which is actually heavier than "heavy" rail), it's not that hard to beat.
Fourth, if these little electric cars are supposed to provide inner city transportation, can they handle the hills in Pittsburgh? The whole reason the infrastructure in the inner city sucks is because the hills are outrageously steep and the streets are poorly laid out.
Pittsburgh would be quite a struggle for any system, I am sure. PRT is generally proposed with rubber tires on a metal track. As such is can handle considerably steeper grades than light rail. It should be equivalent to monorail, though I imagine maglev could in theory handle steeper grades.
Finally, I doubt that it could be economically implemented anywhere on earth, as buses and trains are cheaper because they use economically feasible infrastructures (existing roads and tracks) , and many more specially designed small cars would have to be designed and built from scratch. This system would need near 100% utilization to even come close to being economically feasible.
Existing tracks don't do a whole lot, because most existing track isn't situated to serve passenger traffic. Pittsburgh's certainly isn't.
Buses suck so much, so incredibly much, that they are hopeless. They will always be (considerably) slower than traffic, they have huge operating expenses, which they can never cover from fares. It is very hard to even imagine a situation in which fares would cover expenses for buses. With PRT, at least self-sufficiency is within the realm of the imaginable.
It doesn't make that much sense to back tried-and-failed technologies. Yes, PRT is very risky. But at least you don't know that it won't work. Light rail and buses are guaranteed not to work, at least if past experience means anything.
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If those people really were working for you, there would be a tremendous number of legal and tax implications. Even in the case of something casual like a beta test -- especially if you present it with such uncasual contractual terms. You can't have it both ways, and I know you aren't filing 1099's on those people, giving a monetary value to your bartered transaction, or otherwise living up to your duties when receiving hired work.
Well, actually you can have it any way you want when you only expect use the law to bully individuals, which is all I expect that contract could ever be used for.
There are real performance issues here, to the point (if you want to do it right) you need to think of it as systems programming. You'll have non-systems programming as well, which doesn't have to be in straight C, but I think there would be wisdom in a C-based foundation.
The typical place where Java is used as a server would be web pages, but there really isn't a big need to perform well there. Obviously, since people even use Tcl for that. A multiplayer game can't be batched in the way web requests are, so it's a very different performance situation.
You must break a project like this into smaller pieces. You must have a forseeable point when you can release something. You can't forsee the end of a project as big as this, so you have to design intermediate points into it where you have something that is at least interesting to other developers, but much preferably is of some interest to gamers (even if only forgiving gamers).
Open Source ideals aside, it's very hard to maintain dedicated to something that only you have ever seen. Also, incremental development is just more likely to be successful.
I try my best to live simply and to recognize my luxuries for what they are. But I also don't fool myself, and I know how dependent I am on the wider society. Things that are very simple for me now could become very, very difficult if the systems of this country fell apart.
I suspect that most truly new music is now hip-hop inspired, which is a bit alien to me -- and probably many of us here :) So there is the chance that things have shifted enough that we just don't see what's really happening -- maybe we're like some guy in the 60's complaining that there's no good jazz anymore, there's barely any big bands left and they just play the same old songs.
And sure, even I can tell that a lot of mainstream hip-hop is just plain bad. But pop has always been saturated with bad music, which we later forget about. I think I need to go listen to something new before I feel too old... (and I'm not old, dammit!)
I've personally noticed that pop music has hitten a real low in the last few years -- and I really think I'm being somewhat objective in this, not just square and living in the past. Pop music is being recycled longer, and bands aren't being cycled in as fast. Even three or four years ago it seemed considerably better than now.
Many of those long-lived groups are really just corporate machines. No single part of the group has enough talent to go on their own. You can't be successful based on your singing talent and dancing alone -- someone has to write the songs, someone has to play the instruments behind them, and in the case of so much boring music lately, there has to be a lot of marketing to get people to think they like the music at all.
As a result the Backstreet Boys are never going to assert their independance, or Christina Agilera, and I think a surprising number of the "Alternative" bands are in the same boat -- they are really so boring, their lyrics are so pat, their voices so cliche, that they'd go nowhere on their own. Metal is growing into a pretty boring field as well.
Given this, there's much more incentive for the labels to make sure that people don't buy according to their informed preference. If it was really just straight free market capitalism, and the labels just wanted to sell as much music as possible, then a well-informed listening audience would be great. But that well-informed listening audience would, I think, be very likely to buy from a lot of independent labels.
The US government has a horrible record for honesty. Past lies come out over and over, and no one ever gets punished -- hell, Colin Powel himself was involved in trying to cover up the My Lai massacre, and look where it's gotten him. Why would the government and military suddenly be honest now?
That doesn't mean they necessarily lied, but their credibility is nil.
The government hasn't even released any evidence to show they were associated with 9-11. Well, except that video of bin Laden: a blurry video with distorted sound of a man who gained weight in wartime and suddenly became right-handed, found in some random location in Afghanastan by somebody-or-another, in which he makes statements that totally contradict everything he has said before.There is no other evidence. And there certainly isn't any evidence linking this small village to 9-11.
In the OJ Simpson case there was no real question of whether the prosecution really wanted to prosecute.
Also, documents can be useful to the company itself. While for the most part, you are innocent until proven guilty and thus less evidence is better, a document can provide evidence of any number of things that the company would want to keep. For instance, employee theft, that someone independently created something before or in parrallel with another company, etc.
Also, you should be honest about who you are protecting. Are you protecting the company, or some of the employees of the company? Enron's destruction of evidence does not seem to be to protect the company. The company is nearly dead, and the company is made up of the shareholders, not the executives. Any document destruction at this point is clearly not to the benefit of the company.
However, insurance doesn't address the less tangible detractions of cars in general, and SUVs in particular: the fact that, as a benign pedestrian or biker, you have to spend lots of mental energy to keep yourself from getting killed. While you don't endanger anyone else, you are at constant threat by people who are not significantly endangering themselves. It's asymmetric, backwards, and very frustrating.
At least motorcyclists are endangering themselves more than the world around them, which some people consider stupid and destructive, but a more socially-minded person would see as good, because there is little virtue in protecting yourself, but much more virtue in protecting those around you.
Of course, in the suburbs they don't even take advantage of that simplicity. Little street parking, cargo trucks usually go through weird access roads in the back of the strips, medians you can't cross, little opportunity to pass, you can't double park... they really don't take good advantage of their roads.
I've seen proposals for PRT systems that support cargo. They all came out of Europe -- I assume this is because it's more of a problem over there. Memepool had a link to an underground system like this in Chicago that operated for a little while -- miniature trains, probably more useful when there was a lot of coal-related freight.
Anyway, I'm not so sure about cargo-carrying PRT, but if it happened it would be possible to have no roads in an area, with only rails. The only problem at that point would be stations, which I've found in general to be a serious lack in PRT plans. Just how the station will be layed out to have minimal impact while still being useful is not well addressed.
To find an equivalent traffic flow and scaling to PRT for automobiles, you have to look to freeways. And freeways are even more similar to PRT in terms of limitations. They are wildly expensive, require tremendous right-of-way, and have very limited access points. They also create limitations on how people move about -- as people change from going to and from downtown to going between non-downtown locations, current highways are insufficient and traffic becomes limiting.
PRT is like highways scaled down, with the possiblity of having a fairly dense network of lines. The only problem is how to get from the station to your destination. Maybe PRT with the Segway would be perfect :)
The reason is that PRT stations are offline -- when one car stops at its destination, all other cars continue unhindered. So the overall speed of the system is constant -- about 30mph for initial systems. A subway may go even faster, but it is constantly stopping, so the average speed is much slower.
As we should all know, the capacity of a connection is not just based on how fat your pipes are (subways having fat pipes), but also how fast you can move stuff through. While you can fit less people on a given length of PRT line, they are moving considerably faster.
You can also fit quite a few people on a bit of line, because PRT cars can be much closer together than subway trains are -- again, due to the offline stations. This is essential to PRT, and why past People Mover experiments (which other people have mentioned and dismissed) don't really apply -- that is, it's much more than just an automated rail car.
It also allows for more decentralized transportation. The El' here in Chicago is okay for going to certain locations, but it's limited because all the lines go to and from downtown. When I want to travel around non-downtown areas (which is most of the traveling I do), it's not a convenient or direct form of transportation.
Because my route on a PRT doesn't have to be anyone else's route, I could go much more direct than I can with traditional rail mass transit. A more direct route with less transfers also increases the capacity in comparison to subways.
Some people are shelling out $30,000 for parking spaces here in Chicago -- and not even downtown. I also blame that on SUVs. If I bought a car, I'd get a really small one -- not for the fuel efficiency or cost, but because it's easier to find parking spaces.
You could also have commuter rail connecting to a PRT system, as commuter rail is actually fairly efficient, but doesn't quite get people where they need to go.
PRT should be fairly compatible with a heterogeneous transportation system.
And dual mode won't particularly address the social aspects of public transportation -- providing transportation for the young, old, and disabled. These are really essential, and why every (responsible) community has to provide some public transportation system even with the availability of cars.
A PRT system, in some environments, can be significantly faster than a car, even going just 30mph, because it is on a completely automated system. PRT cars merge onto different tracks seemlessly, there are no traffic lights, no entrance ramps, nothing of the sort. So you would hopefully be traveling 30mph the entire way, with no delays. I know where I live (Chicago), being able to go a consistent 30mph would be a tremendous improvement for travel time (compared to car, bus, or El').
To do this, the system has to be insulated from any human error or interference. This means an elevated track. Hopefully (and ideally) a cheap, light, and simple elevated track. But it just can't be on the road. The ideal is that tracks are very cheap, so it's viable to create a fairly dense network of tracks, and most destinations will be within easy walking distance of a station.
PRT isn't generally meant to replace cars or to replace all other forms of public transportation. It is easy for a PRT system to hook up with whatever other forms of transportation exist. Hopefully a bit better than Park-and-Ride, though.
I can't say PRT addresses the derailing issue particularly -- though I'm sure MARTA and PRT would both be far safer than a car in this regard. PRT does address the safety -- real and perceived -- of being in a shared environment. You never ride with anyone unless you choose to do so. You stop only at your destination, so there's no chance of interaction outside of the station.
It does seem possible that someone could force their way into your car while you are boarding, or that you could be accosted in the station. I believe proposals have all included a variety of safety measures to deal with these issues. I think these should be as easy to address as are safety issues in parking garages.
Was there another safey issue you had in mind?
A PRT rail is much cheaper than a monorail rail, or light rail, or the People Mover. It holds a much lighter car, with a 3-person capacity. It does not require a large right of way: the cars are narrow, the supports can be narrow as well. I'd imagine it could fit comfortable on a road with the parking lane removed.
An extremely key feature of PRT is the use of very small cars. This distinguishes it from light rail and monorail -- as well as the WVU system. It means there is the potential for very reasonable capital layout. It also means it has the potential to provide good service, something buses do not do.
Buses are alright at providing service to key areas where driving is not reasonable (downtown) and providing service for people who have no car or cannot drive. These are important things to provide. However, buses do not, and never will, provide anything more than that. Never. They are absurdly oversized for most operation, uncomfortable, inconvenient, expensive to operate, and incredibly slow. They don't just lack sex appeal, they are simply a horrible means of transportation. Buses are what people stuck in traffic wish other people were taking so there'd be less traffic. No one wishes they themselves were on the bus. I say this as a rider, who has time while riding to curse the system I'm riding on.
It has links to a number of debates, history, etc.
Buses suck so much, so incredibly much, that they are hopeless. They will always be (considerably) slower than traffic, they have huge operating expenses, which they can never cover from fares. It is very hard to even imagine a situation in which fares would cover expenses for buses. With PRT, at least self-sufficiency is within the realm of the imaginable.
It doesn't make that much sense to back tried-and-failed technologies. Yes, PRT is very risky. But at least you don't know that it won't work. Light rail and buses are guaranteed not to work, at least if past experience means anything.