KVNUFTP

Personalized Public Transit?

Meet the SkyPod.

Sept. 18, 2009 — A California firm thinks it has figured out how to get the masses moving on public transportation: Give them their own pods.

“If you look at what we’ve done in last 100 years in terms of how we’ve had the most market buy-in for personal mobility, we need look no further than the car,” said Christopher Perkins, co-founder of Unimodal Systems.

“With a car, it’s essentially one person, or so, and one destination. We don’t have to stop at all our friends’ houses to get to the store. Likewise, when you use public transit, the concept here is you don’t want to have to go to a bunch of stops on the way to wherever you’re going.”

The company this month signed an agreement with NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., to see if software developed to control robots will help development of a personal rapid transportation system known as SkyTran.

The system uses small vehicles that run on elevated, magnetically levitated rails.