The team performed planning studies of PRT for Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth and in this way became acquainted with the real-world problems of installing and operating a PRT system. The team conducted government-funded studies of visual impact, control, safety, and reliability of PRT systems. It organized the National Conference on PRT, held in November 1971; and International Conferences on PRT in May 1973 and September 1975, following which the Advanced Transit Association (ATRA) was organized with Dr. Anderson as its first President. Proceedings of these conferences can be found in many libraries. Dr. Anderson was chairman of these conferences, which enabled  him, during the 1970s, to visit England, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, France, and Japan as well as many locations in the United States and Canada to inspect every significant PRT program that was underway at that time.  

 

In 1974 Dr. Anderson was invited to work for the Colorado Regional Transportation District on the largest study of transit alternatives ever performed.   There he became thoroughly acquainted with the methods used to estimate ridership on transit systems, contributed to systems analysis of the economics of various types of transit, and made many friends who assisted later. In 1975 he was invited to work as a consultant to the Raytheon Missile Systems Division to assist a Raytheon effort to enter the field of PRT as a supplier. That experience enabled him to develop a sufficient body of engineering science to enable him to write the textbook Transit Systems Theory, available on www.advancedtransit.org.   As a result of his work at Raytheon, he was invited in 1977 to be the U. S. Representative for Cabintaxi, a system developed by the German joint venture DEMAG+MBB. In this capacity he visited many sites in the United States to discuss and plan applications.  One result was that the State of Indiana hired his group to supervise a series of Automated Guideway Transit studies for the City of Indianapolis, which showed that the system using the smallest vehicles (capacity 3 passengers) gave the lowest total cost per passenger-mile. 

 

German government funding for the Cabintaxi project was withdrawn in December 1980 due to military priorities. As a result, Dr. Anderson began thinking about a new design that would meet a more comprehensive set of criteria. By then he had accumulated 32 criteria for guideway design alone. In June 1982 the University of Minnesota gave him a $100,000 patent-development grant, which permitted him, with two graduate students, to devote a year full time to the development of the new system. In June 1983 a company, Automated Transportation, Inc., was inaugurated to commercialize the new system. In spring 1984, Davy McKee Corporation, with offices in downtown Chicago, hired Dr. Anderson to work full time with their engineers to further develop the system and to seek funding to build a test system. Under the leadership of a former University of Minnesota Institute of Technology Dean the program continued until it was taken over in March 1986 by a grandson of the founder of IBM Corporation, with the new name “Taxi 2000 Corporation.” That arrangement continued for only 3 months, following which Dr. Anderson was elected the company’s CEO. In the summer of 1986 it was clear that a new direction was needed. 

 

Dr. Anderson had previously been invited to join Boston University by its President as a professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. In August 1986 he accepted this opportunity, which required him to teach only one course. He was able to spend the rest of his time working to commercialize his new PRT system. He quickly was able to recruit a Raytheon Marketing Manager to serve on his Board of Directors, and in less than a year had recruited half a dozen senior engineers from Raytheon, Arthur D. Little, and the Volpe Transportation Systems Center who worked with him to develop the required control system and to define the development program in more detail than had previously been possible. The team also engaged in planning studies of several specific systems. Dr. Anderson’s work appeared at this time on Central Television in China, as a result of which two Chinese scholars each spent a year with him in successive years. By 1988 the project had the cooperation and involvement of two Raytheon Senior Vice Presidents, which led to the assignment of engineers and office space to the project. In May 1989 the group attracted the interest of the Chairman of the Northeastern Illinois Regional Transportation Authority (RTA), who, having a mandate from the Illinois Legislature to investigate new transit systems, initiated a program that led in April 1990 to a Request for Proposals for a pair of $1,500,000 PRT design studies. 

 

A day before the RFP came out, the new Raytheon President declined to bid, notwithstanding strong recommendations from the above-mentioned Senior Vice Presidents. This required a last-minute switch and in June 1990 the President of Stone & Webster Engineering Corporation, thanks to a friendship from Dr. Anderson’s Colorado RTD experiences, decided to prime the project. Twelve companies bid and two were selected: our consortium and Intamin of Switzerland.  

 

Hearing about the Chicago RTA PRT project, the Swedish government sent a group of their engineers, planners, and government officials to Chicago to learn the details, and as a result initiated the most comprehensive series of studies of PRT preformed anywhere in the world. These studies are available in a series of reports. 

 

The RTA’s PRT Design Studies were finished in spring 1992 while a search was underway for an investor for Phase II, which was to design, build, and operate a test system. S&W did not have the resources at that time to prime Phase II, but in September 1992 the Raytheon President, now CEO, renewed his interest. A process was begun that resulted in June 1993 in the RTA selecting Raytheon with the Taxi 2000 system over Intamin for the Phase II test program, the funding of which was to be split equally between Raytheon and the RTA. 

 

Interest in our system had been generated at the Seattle/Tacoma International Airport, the area around which had recently incorporated as the City of SeaTac. Based on two presentations by Dr. Anderson, a sum of $300,000 in local funds was secured for a comparative study of bus and light rail with the Taxi 2000 PRT system. Because this system had not yet been built, the consultant quadrupled its costs, yet it received the unanimous vote of a 17-person steering committee.

 

The Raytheon Phase II project was initiated in October 1993, but it was soon apparent that Raytheon management had decided that they should design the test system their way, using engineers who had no prior experience in any aspect of PRT. A key decision was to reject our truss guideway and substitute instead a 30-in-diameter steel pipe manufactured by a Raytheon subsidiary as the basic guideway structure. These decisions led to a guideway twice as wide and twice as deep as needed and to a vehicle almost triple the weight of the Phase I design. All this more than tripled the cost, as a result of which a few years later the Chicago RTA stopped talking about the program. Soon after, new Raytheon top management announced that Raytheon abandoned the PRT field, thus ending a significant chance to get true PRT underway.  These actions not only did not discourage interest in PRT, it increased it. Others were confident that they could do much better and today several are offering their own versions of PRT.  

 

In 1995, having returned to Minnesota, Dr. Anderson recruited a new Taxi 2000 Board of Directors and gave short courses on PRT analysis and design in Chicago, Minneapolis, and a two-week course at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden. In 1996 he consulted on PRT for a Korean company, which led later to entry of the large Korean steel company Posco into the PRT field, and on airport baggage handling for a Seattle-based company. Also in 1996 he gave a presentation that attracted the attention of a planner from Cincinnati, which led in 1998 to selection of the Taxi 2000  PRT system by a committee of a Cincinnati business organization as their preferred system over about 50 other elevated guideway transit systems. Details can be found on the web page www.skyloop.org. In the year 2000 the Cincinnati MPO rejected PRT in favor of trolley cars because the company did not have a test system in operation. 

 

By mid 2002 Taxi 2000 Corporation, with Dr. Anderson as CEO, had accumulated sufficient funds from private individuals to begin constructing one automatically controlled linear-induction-motor propelled vehicle and the 60-ft guideway on which it ran. The system was in operation by February 2003 only six months after the process of ordering components had begun and with an expenditure of only about $600,000. At the 2003 Minnesota State Fair it was the central exhibit in the Minnesota High Tech Association building where many thousands of people rode it. The only fault was that a cable that operated the door once slipped off. That door actuation mechanism need not be repeated – there are better ways. 

 

In December 2003 a new Taxi 2000 Board of Directors was elected. In 2004 the effort to find investment funds intensified and the Directors determined that a new CEO with more business experience was needed. A new CEO was elected and came aboard in September 2004. As a result, Dr. Anderson soon realized that, consistent with his vision, it was best for him to leave the old behind. With two former Taxi 2000 Board Members he formed a new company, PRT International, LLC, free of the encumbrances of the old.