VIDEO: LaGrange factory prototyping novel JPods transit idea

Bill James now has something to show for all his years of advocating a novel form of personal rapid transit. He has a prototype in a factory in Poughkeepsie.

James, who devised an idea for overhead people carriers called JPods, needed a company to provide the energy end of his plan, and he was determined to use something other than fossil fuels.

His outreach landed him at Atlantis Energy Systems, which is in the Town of LaGrange but bears a Poughkeepsie address. Atlantis makes solar panels, but not ordinary ones; they are building-integrated photovoltaic systems, which are specialized formats that are not stuck on or near a building but that become a part of its architecture.

Frank Pao, chairman of Atlantis, provided an extra piece of the puzzle to James, which was helping him build a prototype inside the factory. The building is otherwise filled with various solar arrays and the gear needed to produce them.

So what is JPods? At this point, it's an idea. In James' vision, it will require a host city and private investors willing to put millions into it. Also lying ahead is much development work to lead to a buildable set of specifications for the supports, the pods, the computer controls and the energy system to make it work.

If realized, it would create a public transit system that gives even a single user his or her own pod to ride, with as many as six riders in a single pod. The pods would hang from an overhead structure, a sort of upside-down railway, and move from station to station on the command of the rider.

The solar part comes in as the source of electricity from panels mounted atop the support structure. But just as remarkable is James' concept for power storage. He's working on using electrolysis of water into oxygen and hydrogen that would be converted to methane, a fuel that can be burned at any hour to generate electricity.

"It's a private pod," said James, showing off the prototype recently. "We're going to build a physical version of the Internet."

"The Internet is a distributed, collaborative computer network that moves data packets. My patent is for the use of a distributed collaborative computer network that moves physical packets," James said.

So in this vision, you would go to a station, program in your destination, and the system would route you there via the overhead network of inverted rails. Odds are that most of that would be done by your own smartphone, suggested Pao.

James believes the fundamentals of economics and physics undergird his idea.

"It is very expensive to move a ton to move a person," he said. Cars, buses and trains are heavy; the JPods' estimated weight will be around 1,200 pounds, which is half to a third of the weight of typical passenger cars.

"By striving to move only the person and removing the repetitive start-stops of traffic, 90 cents of every dollar spent on urban traffic can be recovered as profitable revenue and customer savings," James said.

Building any kind of fixed public transit is costly, which is why most smaller communities rely on buses that travel existing streets.

James estimates the cost of a JPod system at $10 million per mile, far lower than light rail, and with lower operating costs because it needs fewer personnel and uses solar generation for the electricity.

James, who lists the United States Military Academy at West Point as his alma mater, sees geopolitical implications in his work because it reduces the use of fossil fuels, including foreign oil.

"We will continue to fight oil wars until we stop funding these guys," he said.

So far, there are no systems like the JPods that James is developing. There are monorails and there are some overhead pod-like transporters that run in theme parks, but nothing that serves as an overhead point-to-point personal transit system.

The closest reality out there now is the Personal Rapid Transit system in Morgantown, West Virginia, running since 1975 and ferrying students among several stops at the spread-out campuses of West Virginia University. During school days, its 71 eight-seat vehicles run on grade-level tracks, controlled by a computer that monitors each car's position on the line.

James managed to get the Secaucus, New Jersey, government to adopt a "performance standard" that would permit rights-of-way access to "transportation innovations" that would be privately financed and not use public subsidies. But he learned that the New Jersey Department of Transportation would have to grant an OK to cross state highways and found the agency was not interested.

James is undeterred.

The rig at Pao's Atlantis Energy Systems is full-size, though not elevated, and serves as a proof-of-concept demonstration and enables the tinkering needed to work out the motor apparatus and related mechanical issues.

James' background includes software development for industrial purposes. In this case, it will have to control numerous individual pods that go where riders send them.

Pao hopes the idea becomes real, not just because the panels could help his solar business.

It will help the Poughkeepsie area, which is positioned to become a supplier of components, he said.

"We can go back to a manufacturing base," Pao said.

Before that happens, BIll James' JPod idea has a long route to travel on the development track.

Craig Wolf: 845-437-4815; cwolf@poughkeepsiejournal.com; Twitter: @craigwolfPJ

VIDEO

For a video of the demonstrator setup, see www.poughkeepsiejournal.com