Editing Personal rapid transit (section)

===Origins===
Modern PRT concepts began around 1953 when Donn Fichter, a city transportation planner, began research on PRT and alternative transportation methods. In 1964, Fichter published a book<ref>{{citation
 | author = Donn Fichter
 | year = 1964
 | title = Individualized Automatic Transit and the City
 | publisher = B.H. Sikes, Chicago, IL, USA
}}</ref> which proposed an automated public transit system for areas of medium to low population density. One of the key points made in the book was Fichter's belief that people would not leave their cars in favor of public transit unless the system offered flexibility and end-to-end transit times that were much better than existing systems &ndash; flexibility and performance he felt only a PRT system could provide. Several other urban and transit planners also wrote on the topic and some early experimentation followed, but PRT remained relatively unknown.

Around the same time, Edward Haltom was studying [[monorail]] systems. Haltom noticed that the time to start and stop a conventional large monorail train, like those of the [[Wuppertal Schwebebahn]], meant that a single line could only support between 20 and 40 vehicles an hour. In order to get reasonable passenger movements on such a system, the trains had to be large enough to carry hundreds of passengers (see [[headway]] for a general discussion). This, in turn, demanded large guideways that could support the weight of these large vehicles, driving up capital costs to the point where he considered them unattractive.<ref name=a>Anderson</ref>

Haltom turned his attention to developing a system that could operate with shorter timings, thereby allowing the individual cars to be smaller while preserving the same overall route capacity. Smaller cars would mean less weight at any given point, which meant smaller and less expensive guideways. To eliminate the backup at stations, the system used "offline" stations that allowed the mainline traffic to bypass the stopped vehicles. He designed the [[ROMAG#Monocab|Monocab]] system using six-passenger cars suspended on wheels from an overhead guideway. Like most suspended systems, it suffered from the problem of difficult switching arrangements. Since the car rode on a rail, switching from one path to another required the rail to be moved, a slow process that limited the possible headways.<ref name=a/>