Agent 99,

This reminds me of the downtown people mover back in the mid/late 80's. They modeled a ridership that was not capable of being carried by the cute little pods, and the stop and start to actually load and sort people is also a major show stopper. How and where they load and "fire" this system will be interesting to see.

Margaret,

I've watched lots of incompetent traffic engineering being done by so-called "new urbanist" architects, without any need for that pesky quantitative analysis of actual things like intersection capacity or trip generation rates from various land uses, just believe in "new urbanism" and "imagine" the traffic away.

And, why should it stop there....maybe we can have our chiropractor do some brain surgery on us, too.

Then again,

We live in the era of some real interesting ideas, but how many of us are taking blimps to work from GM's world of the future (1940)? Things like this have been proposed since before Jules Verne, some become doable, some don't.

I'm betting on totally automated vehicle within 5 years. Why, because the basic work is done, now it is a matter of perfecting the final details. But, this sounds pretty flaky, thus far, at least until they can show me a model, or simulation that answers those pesky quantitative questions, especially about boarding and alighting.....?