Cars are unsafe. Morgantown's PRT network has been operating without injury since 1975. In that same period of time, cars have killed 1.3 million Americans. That is 437 times the number of deaths suffered in the 911 terrorist attacks.

Delays to transportation innovation is not about safety, it is about bureaucratic avoidance of something different.

Mobilizing to fight World War I, bureaucracies were formed the manage the effort. They institutionalized the great innovations at that time of Ford, Edison, Bell and the Wright Brothers.

Infrastructure innovation was blocked by monopolies for a century. It was not until AT&T was de-monopolized in 1984 that Bell's analog networks came under competitive pressure. In the last 25 years, communications infrastructure has been re-tooled twice; from analog to digital to wireless.

Transportation and power generation infrastructures remain locked in government monopolies. Infrastructure so poorly conceived and so brittle at adapting that, aside from the traffic deaths, they created civilization killers of Peak Oil and Global Warming.

Locked in place for a century is the mandate to use 1,000 watt-hours per passenger mile. Populations grew from one to six billion, exhausting the Earth's resources. Net Oil Exports stopped growing in 2005 (Peak Oil), forcing the downward spiral of foreclosures, financial collapse, jobs collapse, and soon food production/distribution collapse. We must either reduce watt-hours per passenger mile by 80% or nature will forcibly reduce the number of passengers by 80%.

Safety, on the scale of the environment, requires adapting before catastrophe. Lack of automobile safety and convenience is underscored by a March 2008 AAA study:

• Congestion costs each American $430 per year
• Accidents costs each American $1,051 per year.

Elevators, theme parks, JPods, any private business, would be driven out of business by lawsuits if they had a safety record as bad as cars.