Here is a report on the USA's only "Personal Rapid Transit" System

[happyslug]

2. No Transportation system has EVER broke even...

Even Adam Smith in his "Wealth of Nations" reported that already known fact at that time (1770s). Transportation has always been subsidized by other parts of the economic system for that reason.

Report from the City of Seattle that general revenues provide TWICE the revenue for road repairs and construction then gasoline tax:
http://publicola.com/2010/08/31/we-all-pay-for-the-roads/

Nationally, Gasoline taxes pay barely 50% of the cost of building and maintaining the road system in the US:
http://subsidyscope.org/transportation/direct-expenditures/highways/funding/analysis/

Report that Gasoline and other user fees pay only about 80% of the direct costs to maintain the current road system:
http://marketurbanism.com/2008/07/30/urbanism-legend-gas-taxes-covers-all-costs-of-road-use/

Here is a right wing site, but gives a good history of when Gasoline taxes where passed in every state, it gives the right wing position of NOT increasing gasoline taxes:
http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp56%20final.pdf

Just to show that even the Highway system is subsidized.

As to PRTs, they can be "profitable" if you ignore the cost to build the system. (i.e. only count the cost of operating the system). Given that such costs are the main cost involved, PRTs can, in theory, be cheap to operate once opened.

The primary reason for this is that roughly 80% of almost every public transportation system is the cost of drivers and maintenance. No drivers, lower cost of operation.

The problem is such no operator systems, even today, require exclusive right of way that is isolated from most foreign objects (i.e elevated or underground so to avoid any animals running on the Right of way and getting hit by the PRT). No exclusive right of way, no PRT. Thus construction is the single biggest cost, and the best way to keep such costs low is to build a very limited system. Thus Morgantown system was built and has NOT been copied. To limited except in a situation much like West Virginia University with its two campuses.

Furthermore even the PRT has maintenance problems, tires have to be replaced, power cables have to be replaced. The cars have to be cleaned every day. This all requires people, which cost money. Once you add these costs to most proposed PRT systems, any savings in term of operating costs, i.e. no drivers you have to pay, is offset by the fact the cost to collect fares, clean the cars and maintain the right of way would still exists. Furthermore, people want security, the driver provides that security, no driver some sort of security will have to be provided by having an on car security guard or police officers, thus off setting any savings do to NOT having a driver.

In the Skybus proposal, cameras were proposed on all cars and stations, till the federal government ask how would such camera PREVENT a crime? Cameras can record a crime, but unless you have someone watching the camera it 24/7, cameras can NOT even increase the speed of reporting such crimes (and again the people watching the Cameras would have to be paid, thus again killing any savings in NOT having a driver).

Yes, the problems of having a driver-less system slowly increase till the cost savings of such driver-less systems no longer made economic sense. Morgantown avoids this issue by being in a small town, larger cities that have looked into PRTs keep running into this problem. The small cars of the Morgantown system would NOT work in larger systems, the cars are to small for the volume of traffic (The Pittsburgh Skybus proposal involved much larger vehicles then the Morgantown System).

My point is PRTs tend to have very low operating costs, but much higher construction costs and continued maintenance costs. Together with the limited number of stops such a system can operate with, limits the usability of PRT systems. LRVs can handle larger number of people per worker (Driver AND maintenance personnel) over more stops AND have lower cost of construction given they have human operators and thus can operate with traffic OR on their own right of ways THAT are not cut off from interaction with nature (i.e. the operator can stop an LRV to let a deer cross its path, a PRT can not, this ability permits lower constriction cost of LRV's right of way over PRT's right of ways).

In my example I gave, I tried to set up a system that used the best of both the LRV (ability to use existing rail corridors and carry large volume of people) with PRT's ability to have a lot of cars moving all the time to other high population areas. This would require transfers, but is doable (Through it may be better to set up the proposed PRTs as Streetcars that connect with the LRV's line, i.e. on street streetcars on the proposed PRT lines, but when they hit the LRV line in Oakland they take the LRV line stright to downtown Pittsburgh as they own LRV, thus avoiding the need for transfers).

But back to my point, no transportation system has ever broke even, even the Airline industry depends on Federal subsidies in construction of Airport runways (and local subsidizes in construction of terminals). To demand any transportation system to break even is to ignore the long history of such systems NEVER making money.