[Novacek]

So here's a basic truth and rule of life:


Engineering innovation usually follows scientific innovation.

Almost any new engineering advancement, if you look at it closely, was enabled or made easier by some scientific advancement or refinement behind it.

There are exceptions, and that's where true genius lies, but it's rare.


So (again being critical and skeptical) when some new engineering it proposed, you can look at it and try to figure out what new science enables it.
Is there some advancement in metallurgy? Some new battery chemistry or innovation? Miniaturization of electronics? Information science. *


If there's nothing of that sort, and there's a new system being proposed that could have been built with 1970s technology, then my immediate question is: Why wasn't it? Why didn't we have this in the 70s?
It sets off my alarm bells, and makes me doubt it. It usually means that someone did look at it, and it just doesn't make sense.

Again, there can be genuine innovation. But something like this doesn't look like anything of that sort. It's a monorail/PRT. Both of which have been tried before and both of which usually fail for good reason.


*There are ideas in transportation that show these attributes. They have their problems and limitations, but self driving vehicles (non-tracked) require advancement in computational science and sensor technology that are new (or even not here yet). Even Uber was enabled by information technology advancements.