There are investment opportunities in changing our economic lifeblood from oil to ingenuity, preempting the need for oil in urban transport.
Unexpected innovations (positive Black Swans) such as personal computers, the Internet, lasers, penicillin, often require preparation to allow investment. The objective of this paper is to alert investors so those interested can exploit current opportunities and organize their charter to for direct investments in the Personal Rapid Transit [PRT] industry - the Physical-Internet.
Government management of infrastructure created our oil addiction. Bureaucracies developed plans to maximize consistency (know-how), minimizing the messy process of innovation (know-what). For a century the technologies of Ford, Bell, Edison and the Wright Bothers have been frozen in time (Bell until 1984). Alternative technologies based on computer networks, such as PRT, have not been allowed because they were not in the plan. The consequence of a century of better know-how but the same know-what has resulted in Peak Oil and Global Warming.
Peak Oil, with rising gas prices, is forcing a change and an investment opportunity that will cause the cost to travel a mile to drop from 56 cents to 4 cents. This savings applies to about 4 billion of the 8 billion miles Americans drive daily. The Physical-Internet will grow in the next 15 years to about 1.4 million miles of packet-switched, ultra-light rail networks. The world market is about 5 times larger.
Following is a summary of the paradigm shift, PRT compared to existing transport modes, how to invest today, status of the industry and companies that are leading in the PRT effort.
Paradigm Shift: PRT is a double paradigm shift from individual devices to networks that system integrate transportation and power generation:
- PRT is a shift from moving a ton to move a person in congested, repetitive travel, towards moving just the person
