Traditional funding of transportation
systems has often been with Federal money along with
State and local matching shares. However, funding of
that kind has dwindled considerably in recent years.
In addition, with the widening recognition of the adverse
effects of carbon emissions, government agencies are
scrambling to identify ways of implementing new transportation
modes that are carbon neutral or better.
PRT is now recognized as providing new
opportunities to help avoid ominous climate change.
This is most apparent in the Report finalized February 11, 2008 by the California Air Resources
Board (CARB). See Report pages 3-4, 3-12, 10-85, and 10-92. Because of this, some new funding opportunities
have surfaced.
The most commonly discussed method of
financing a PRT system is a Public - Private partnership
where the municipal agency provides right-of-ways using
a franchise agreement and also oversight of engineering
and legal contract development. The private portion
of the project is expected to come from PRT developers
and investors.
Assuming That level of public committment, at
least one PRT developer has offered to build the entire
PRT system using his own capital investment sources and operate the new system to
obtain return on investment.
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