The paper begins with a review of the rational for development of personal rapid transit, the reasons it has taken so long to develop, and the process needed to develop it. Next I show how the PRT con- cept can be derived from a system-significant equation for life-cycle cost per passenger-mile as the system that minimizes this quantity. In the bulk of the paper I discuss the state-of-the-art of a series of tech- nical issues that had to be resolved during the development of an op- tiumum PRT design. These include capacity, switching, the issue of hanging vs. Supported vehicles, guideways, vehicles, control, station operations, system operations, reliability, availability, dependability, safety, the calculation of curved guideways, operational simulation, power and energy. The paper concludes with a listing of the impli- cations for a city that deploys an optimized PRT system.
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