Personal rapid transit (PRT)

Personal rapid transit is a form of public transport made of small, driverless pods — each carrying a handful of passengers — that run on a dedicated guideway. Instead of a timetable, you board on demand and travel point-to-point, skipping every stop in between, a bit like a horizontal lift that comes when called.

The promise, chased since the 1970s, was the convenience of a private car with the footprint of transit: no driver, no waiting, no traffic. The best-known real example rode at Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, where driverless PRT pods shuttled people beneath the raised streets of the would-be zero-carbon showcase.

In practice PRT has barely spread. Building a separate guideway network is costly, its passenger capacity is low next to a tram or metro line, and Masdar's system proved short-lived — cut back rather than expanded across the city. As self-driving cars and buses matured on ordinary roads, the case for bespoke podcar infrastructure largely faded, leaving PRT more a recurring experiment than a mainstream mode.