Dean Zimmermann Pushing Pods at MnDOT Workshop

From Personal Rapid Transit Workshop 2010, A Summary Report (Aug. 18, 2010, PDF)

Former Minneapolis city council member Dean Zimmerman: People love their cars for three reasons: 1) It’s sitting there waiting for you when you’re ready to go; 2) It goes where you’re going; 3) It gets you out of the weather. Everything else about cars we love to hate … PRT satisfies those three elements and totally erases every other single reason you love to hate the automobile … So, if you build a transit system that mimics the reason why we take the automobile and takes out the things you don’t like, people will switch from the automobile to that system.In terms of cost, the legislature is willing to spend all kinds of costs to subsidize all these kinds of transportation. No one is dif-ferentiating between capital cost and operat-ing cost … Every single vendor in here will tell you if we build this system, it will pay back its cost with revenue. Light rail takes $10 million a year of public subsidy. The bus system, 25 percent paid for by users, and let’s not even go into the automobile, the most heavily subsidized transportation system. PRT is the only system mentioned that will pay for itself in terms of operating cost.

Not mentioned is the fact that Dean Zimmermann was convicted on 3 counts of bribery in 2006.

This San Jose Podcar conference newsletter also has a PRT map created by Zimmermann.

Click on the screenshot to make it bigger:



In addition to taking bribes, Dean Zimmermann tried to convince real estate developer and government witness Gary Carlson to invest $250,000 in PRT:



Last year, I videotaped Zimmermann protesting reality-based transit and promoting Personal Rapid Transit at a transportation forum. Zimmermann gave me a tortured explanation for accepting cash from FBI witness Gary Carlson and refused to sign a waiver for the FBI tapes shown at this trial:



Members of the LRT-hating/pod-promoting Citizens for Personal Rapid Transit (CPRT) also spread the nonsensical conspiracy theory that Zimmermann was framed: