Transport networks must be allowed to innovate. JPods will trigger this change in 2023.

Streets are for people, shops, restaurants, and commerce on a human scale. Turning streets into roads for automobiles over the past century was an epic engineering and policy mistake.

Roads are the wrong networks for cities. Moving 2 tons to move a person in a car or mass transit is the wrong device for cities. Traffic costs Americans $2.76 trillion per year, oil-wars since 1991, and Climate Change.

Change the network. Known alternative networks are 188 times efficient and 3,000 times safer.

Efficient Network: The 140,000 miles of freight railroads average 470 ton-mpg, or 188 times the efficiency of moving a 200 pound person with the 25 mpg efficiency of the Model-T on roads.

Safer Networks: The Wuppertal suspended train carries 25 million people a year with one fatal incident since it opened in 1901. The Morgantown PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) is a grade-separated network of self-driving cars. Since President Nixon sent is daughter, Tricia, to open the network in 1972 it has had 5 minor injuries. Grade-separated theme park thrill rides have an injury rate of 3.7 per million while roads have 11,200 per million.

JPods grade-separate networks of guideways from which suspended, ultra-light, self-driving cars move people and cargo approaching freight rail efficiencies. The structure of the guideways are used to deploy the solar collectors that gather the energy to power the networks. Microgrids store the energy night-time use.

Grade-separating, personal on-demand service, removing repetitive applications of power is start-stop traffic, cutting the parasitic mass of the vehicle by 75% combine to cut energy costs by 95%.

Two key aspects of JPods patent:
1. Robot vehicles: “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”
2. Using the distributed structure of the transport network to deploy the solar collectors to power the network: “The method… providing… Solar and wind power generators integrated into the physical Structure of Said transportation System….”

Congressional Study PB-244854, Automated Guideway Transit, 1975 identified the Morgantown PRT as the solution to the hardships of the 1973 Oil Embargo and traffic problems. It noted that access to Rights of Way (ROW) had blocked such innovation for "four to six decades".

JPods has broken the ROW barrier to sign agreements or pass government votes in Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia, and China. We will start building in 2023.