MAINTAINING SUSTAINABLE MOBILITY BY USING PERSONAL RAPID TRANSIT

There is no doubt about negative effects of traffic on the environment: it pollutes the air, the water, the soil, it raises the noise and vibration level, it leads to other climate changes and it also affects human health. The increasing number of motor vehicles makes these problems even worse every day. Therefore the priority for traffic organisation and urban environment lies in finding ways to reduce the number of vehicles on the roads with the purpose of reducing environment pollution, but also in keeping at the same time the reached mobility level of people and goods. One of the ways to achieve the balance between environmental pollution reducion and people and goods mobility level is Personal Rapid Transit (PRT). Personal Rapid Transit is an attractive public city transport system that enables constant people and goods mobility, from one spot to another, with minimal environmental pollution. So far this system has been implemented in several cities and it corrobates all its advantages. However, a lot of PRT systems have been proposed, but most of them, unfortunately, have not been implemented, even though PRT is a completely ecological transport system and has an enormous potencial for solving current transport problems. At the same time it is also quite complicated and easily misunderstood. PRT has not yet been put into practice and is not widely used therefore it is still relatively unknown, although it has the potential to change the transport system and public city transport history. The purpose of this article has been to show some positive sides of PRT system and to illustrate it with a concrete example of the city of Masdar where transport problems have been solved and environmental pollution reduced. The aim of the article is to show the PRT system as a new and attractive form of public transport.