Robotaxis almost happened in 1964—with help from the U.S. government | Popular Science

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Donn Fichter tried to revolutionize public transit in 1964, but it never happened.

Image: Popular Science Composite by Jeffrey Hazelwood

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In 1953, Donn Fichter, a graduate student at Northwestern University in Chicago, had a simple transportation idea: What if you tipped an elevator on its side, enabling it to run horizontally, and set it loose in a city? Unlike conventional urban mass transit, elevators are responsive to individuals, callable with the push of a button, and not subject to schedules.

After completing his dissertation in 1958, “Automated Urban Circulation,” Fichter spent years turning that idea into a complete transit system design he called Veyar. At its core, Veyar would offer small automated cars running on lightweight guideways. The electric cars would be available at any hour and travel directly from origin to destination without stops, schedules, or drivers. “Personalized transit,” he called it, in which each car “is a self-operating vehicle which can go unattended.” To keep infrastructure construction costs low, he explained, “they have to utilize existing public right of way: the streets.” Fichter self-published the design in 1964, calling it “Individualized Automatic Transit and the City.”

For 60 years, personalized transit systems like Veyar gained support from generation after generation of transportation engineers, but none were ever built. That’s because personal rapid transit systems demanded infrastructure cities couldn’t afford and automation technology that didn’t yet exist. What finally solved both problems wasn’t a transit agency or a federal program, but rather the autonomous vehicle industry. Companies like Zoox and Waymo built Fichter’s system more practically, starting with the automation and letting existing streets serve as the guideways.

The origins of personal rapid transit

Donn Fichter was born in Minneapolis in 1926. After serving in the Army during World War II, he earned engineering degrees from Brown and Northwestern. He was the first serious advocate of what urban planners would eventually call personal rapid transit, or PRT—a vision of on-demand, automated, point-to-point city travel.

Fichter conceived Veyar at a time when traffic choked American cities. Cars gave riders individual freedom at the expense of gridlock. Buses, subways, and elevated rails offered more efficiency but subjected riders to fixed schedules and routes.

What no one had yet built, Fichter argued, was a third system that combined the automobile’s spontaneity and the subway’s separation from traffic, available to anyone at any hour without a driver, a schedule, or a transfer. Gridlock notwithstanding, the environmental stakes, he believed, made the solution urgent.

Even before the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970, Fichter foresaw the “ecological imperative” to reduce our dependence on private automobiles. He made this case explicitly in a 1968 PRT planning paper, “Small Car Automatic Transit.” Fichter claimed that small, electrically-propelled, autonomous cars running on guideways would mean cleaner air, quieter streets, and cities less congested with the machinery of driving and parking.

Personal rapid transit systems catch on in the 1970s

“Your car is waiting,” wrote journalist Paul Wahl in a 1971 Popular Science feature on personal rapid transit systems. “On entering the car, you push a button to select your destination, then take a seat. The cabin is roomy, automobile-like in accommodations.”

Wahl went on to describe how a PRT trip might unfold: “The automatic vehicle moves away on the station spur, accelerating until it enters the stream of traffic on the guideway.” The car would then switch off the guideway at its destination spur, “with a central computer doing the driving.”

The experience Wahl described was precisely what Fichter’s Veyar system proposed. Small electric cars—sized for just a few riders—would run on slender elevated tramways threaded along existing streets. Stations every few blocks would keep cars queued and ready. Just like an elevator, a rider would board, close the door, press a button, and go. The car would merge into mainline traffic automatically, travel nonstop to the destination, and pull itself into the arrival station without further instruction. Then it would wait, callable for whoever needed...