Personal Rapid Transit considerations and our dangerous obsession with phones.
Get Untrained
Re: “Waiting for a Train” (Posts, June 5): Reader Drew Lewis, responding to a recent transportation-oriented article in the Weekly (“Jammed”), challenged fellow readers to imagine a light railway along Santa Cruz County’s rail-trail corridor. When I worked in the Silicon Valley, I did not have to imagine light rail, it was immediately available to me, since the satellite office of the company I worked for, and our headquarters, were each next door to VTA stations. Light rail in San Jose was expensive to construct, and remains costly to operate and expand; for all that expenditure, it should be good for something. But even with the most convenient access possible to VTA light rail, it was still better for me to drive to company functions at the HQ. Why? Because VTA’s trains were just abysmally slow. How much better it would have been, to be able to board a vehicle that would transport me and perhaps a colleague or two directly to the HQ without having to stop for traffic or to load or unload other passengers: an express horizontal elevator, if you will. Light rail cannot feasibly do that, but a much less expensive, train-like transportation technology can: Personal Rapid Transit (PRT).
PRT is real. Those interested can now sample differing approaches to PRT at Heathrow Airport in London, UK, Masdar City in Dubai and Suncheon Bay, South Korea; other systems are being developed in Mexico, India and elsewhere around the world. Those who cannot travel overseas to try out PRT can at least surf the web to learn more. Search for “Santa Cruz PRT” on Facebook, for example. A series of local PRT systems in our key towns and cities, linked by a backbone along the rail-trail corridor, would serve this county well, being more conservative of resources, and more practical overall, than light rail, heavy rail, buses or even the (someday self-driven?) personal automobile. We should at least learn about and fairly consider PRT before making any long-term transportation commitments.
James Anderson Merritt
Santa Cruz
Cones for Phones
There was recently a wonderful cartoon in the New Yorker depicting a man and a woman standing around in a bar. The man is wearing one of those ridiculous cone-shaped collars normally seen on dogs to keep them from scratching, and he's saying to the woman, “It keeps me from looking at my phone every two seconds.”
People of Santa Cruz, it would do me a world of good if you could look up from your hand-held pacifiers every so often, because I'm tired of playing dodge-the-distracted when strolling down the sidewalk. Not that long ago, our ancestors climbed down from the trees and ventured onto the savanna, and you can bet that cousin Izzy walked bolt upright and with his head on a swivel—he never knew what was behind the next rock. Today, of course, few such immediate threats exist. Nevertheless, we still carry our stone-age brains into the space age; when we use our cell phones, we still talk with our hands like we used to do around ancient campfires.
The point, I guess, is that our biology will never catch up to our technology. So heads up, humans, lest that predatory lamppost dead ahead knocks you silly.
Tim Rudolph
Santa Cruz
