Similar to several Swedish concepts, in the Personal Rapid Transit category.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UO26lYB8CI

It Sounds Cool,
but hard to be the future,
This cant Be Much fast,
But its good for the first step

Love it! How clever. Think about how much money is saved building something like this with the elimination of stations. The idea that it can stop anywhere to pick-up or drop off people is so worthy.

i like the idea in a general since. but it's kinda weird cause the buses there arnt incredibly busy (it's the next town over).

Is it safe to presume that while a pod is extended to pick up/drop off a passenger that other pods coming down the track are able to continue past without being forced to stop and wait?

This seems like a very good alternative to current US public transportation. Major US cities have a hodgepodge approach to public traansportation(NYC, Boston, Chicago, DC excluded) and are either poorly developed at best or unsafe at worst (passenger attacks in Baltimore, my home city). This concept reduces the risk of public transportation and can allow the system to serve passengers on their timelines instead of rigid route schedule.

If it can pick up anywhere, how does the potential passenger let the thing know where to stop? And if you say at predesignated stop, that's not anywhere.

Cool, this actually looks like it was designed by someone who has had to ride a bus. I don't mean that disrespectfully to the design students. I would be cool if the pod were bypassed by other pods as passengers were loading, otherwise someone could just jam a stick or box into the door while it was on the ground and bring the whole transportation system to a halt. Now if they would just add solar panels all along the top of it to power the thing instead of grid...

1. Boston is definitely a hodgepodge
2. Wouldn't people on the ground be crushed by the pod?

"2. Wouldn't people on the ground be crushed by the pod?"

Yes, those dumb enough to stand under it would be crushed. It's called "thinning the herd."

I like the concept, but how many pods can the system handle? Would it be just like the freeways - single car occupants? There's always the safety issue (inside and outside the pod). We have something similar called BART, but they are trains running on elevated tracks and unfortunately they don't go everywhere and you need bus/car to get to BART. Keep working on it and don't give up.

I'm assuming that the "stop anywhere" should really be "stop at any one of the multiple stop locations" instead. I mean, it's a fixed monorail, you can't truly go "anywhere" and you'd need some type of protected loading/offloading platform to prevent things like SPEEDRACER's observation of crushed idiots. It would probably be something like a slightly elevated bus stop thing, with those little platforms all along the route it follows.

Now, if they could incorporate this with a switching system to move a pod from 1 line to the next, it could truly be a great transportation solution that could rival a cab's flexibility. But for now, it's just a glorified bus on a single set path, with a much smaller passenger capacity, as far as I can tell.

I hope you guys aren't serious.. This is not a serious solution. This maybe suitable as a cheap amusement park ride, but as a modern, reliable, and effective alternative to only singularly occupied cars, this barely rates amature status.

A well designed public transit system is comprized of fixed guideway sytems augmented by a well developed bus system, to fill in the gaps between transit stations. Otherwise, the fixed guideway systems coverage would have be dense enough to to cover the entire service area.

Using this system, what would our cities look like? Given a typical urban transit system; say Atlanta, you would have a line of these GANTRIES along every street that would otherwise carry a bus or a train, and two crossing where-ever two bus lines cross now. This would be a tangled, elevated grid which would be in the forground of almost every view angle you took!
Each of the pods would have to be indivisually maintained and equipped. That would at be least one pod for every individual needing transport at any given moment. Every time a rider is picked up or discharged the system in the immediate area upstream from this point would come to a stop. Imagine a heavily used stop, and that's without getting into the safety issues of this boarding process, on trying to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
CfPT is a serious transit advocacy organization. We fully in support of well founded and vetted ideas which will forward the process of increasing the reach of public transit systems to their respective riders. We will continue to work very hard to convince the unconvinced that spporting public transit is a worthwhile endeavor. This does not meet that goal.