Gist: Niche by niche, JPods will displace 60% of urban car-trips by providing 10X lower costs.

Cities: JPods pays 5% of gross transport revenues for Rights of Way use, complying with laws for private communications and power networks. JPods fund construction and operation. Goldman Sachs provided a Letter Interest. Investing $56 million in Glydway (a JPods competitor), Bill Gates noted: “...AVs [Automated Vehicles] will change transportation as dramatically as the PC [personal computer] changed office work.”

Videos: 90 second summary video and Red Bull TV Documentary (JPods section starts at 9:30). 

Traffic Problems - - JPods Solutions:

1. Commerce and community are pedestrian activities. World Economic Forum: Only 1.2% of land area in the 35 largest US cities are walkable land and generate 20% of GDP.

• JPods networks connect walkable nodes. The first market is to network airport terminals to hotels, to trains, to car rental, to parking…. DFW, Love Field, Atlanta, Boston, San Jose, BWI, etc…
• JPods networks will expand in cities by connecting walkable nodes to remove 60% of car-miles.

2. 2 million miles of urban roads are unaffordable, “D” grade with potholes. 60% of Americans cannot afford to replace their car. Highway traffic costs Americans $2.76 trillion/year. Each car costs a family about $9,282/year, that is parked 95% of the time with ~85% of car costs leaving the local economy.

• JPods provide Transportation As A Service, the personal service of cars, without user or government capital costs, and 10X lower operating costs. JPods mitigate existing sprawl.

3. Affordable oil is ending. The Dallas Federal Reserve forecast: “Shale core exhaustion and inventory concerns are mainstream and well-documented issues. Shale will likely tip over in five years, and U.S. production will be down 20 to 30 percent quickly. When it does—this feels like watching the steam roller scene in Austin Powers. Oil prices in the late 2020s will be something to behold.”

• Solar-collectors over guideways power JPods and integrated microgrids solve intermittency.

4. Grade-controlled freight railroads average 188 times greater efficiency than highways, 470 ton-mpg versus moving a person at 25 mpg (Warren Buffett). Link to a video of how foolish it is to move people in cities in 2-ton boxes.

• JPods are grade-separated guideways from which ultra-light self-driving vehicles move people and cargo using 10X less energy than cars, trains, or buses.

5. We have known grade-separated networks of self-driving electric cars solve urban traffic and oil problems since President Nixon sent his daughter Tricia to open the Morgantown PRT in 1972.

• JPods improve on the Morgantown PRT in two important ways (US Patent 6,810,817):

• Robots replace the central computer control system: “A method of controlling a transportation System for moving people, freight, and any combination whereof using a distributed network of intelligent devices without requiring the aid of a human driver”
• Networks are solar-powered: “The method providing Solar and wind power generators integrated into the physical Structure of Said transportation System”

6. Congressional study PB-244854, “Automated Guideway Transit” found the Morgantown PRT is the solution to the 1973 Oil Embargo and that “institutional failures” blocked PRT networks for “four to six decades”.

• JPods has broken the “institutional failures,” vote by the North Central Texas Coalition of Governments to allow DFW cities to have JPods networks.
• S.2159 Pending in the Massachusetts Legislature.