Ancient Web: Jerry Schneider Mapped the 1990s Automated Transit Dreams

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Before driverless taxis became a familiar headline, transportation engineers were drawing entire networks of automated passenger pods, elevated guideways, and freight vehicles. Jerry Schneider's website tried to keep the competing concepts in one place.

Visit Innovative Transportation Technologies.

Schneider's University of Washington reference began during the 1990s; its homepage says some material was developed by graduate student Rich Komerska in 1995 and records yearly visitor counts beginning in 1997. It describes itself as a compendium of next-generation surface-transportation alternatives, with decades of proposals, assessments, and links.

A catalogue of roads not taken

The scope statement distinguishes vehicles supported from below on guideways from suspended systems, and sets out a third group for planning, modeling, and background research. The site also covers personal rapid transit, automated freight, maglev, dual-mode roads, and ideas for reducing the urban dependence on private cars.

The comparison matrix is particularly revealing. It names proposals such as Cabintaxi, Aerobus, Cybertran, and 2getthere's CyberCab, comparing engineering status, guideway design, testing, commercialization, and operation. The page explicitly warns that some development claims were self-reported by inventors and companies, with much of the matrix reflecting the situation in early 2013. It must not be treated as a current transit procurement guide.

That caveat is useful historical evidence. Readers can see when a technology was considered market-ready, what its promoters thought would happen, and which anticipated deployments failed or changed direction.

The main page is organized into deeply nested indexes, comparative studies, debate pages, conference reports, and old mailing-list links. A visitor can explore both practical systems and futuristic concepts without an algorithm deciding that everything involving pods is the same.

The homepage was last modified in 2018. Its accumulated project statuses therefore make more sense as a record of what engineers thought possible at particular times than as a description of today's transport industry.

A proposal does not need to win in the marketplace to be worth documenting. Sometimes the losing branches of engineering history explain the ambitions of an entire era.

Browse the system comparison and historical source links.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.