Personal Pod Transport: A Cost Analysis of What We Could Have Had

The premise

A go-kart sized electric pod. You lie in it, wear a helmet. It runs on a guided track like a slot car. No driver, no steering, no human error. The track manages everything.

The numbers

Pod cost

| Component | Cost | |---|---| | Electric go-kart chassis | $2-3k | | Lie-down shell/fairing | $1-2k | | Helmet | $100 | | Motor, battery, electronics | $2k | | Total per pod | $5-8k |

Less than a wheelchair. A tenth of a cheap car.

Track cost (ground level, like a bike lane with rails)

Guide rails + flat surface: $1-3M per km

Comparable to existing bike lane infrastructure

Could go where bike lanes already go or are planned

Track cost (lightweight elevated)

Traditional monorail: $10-50M/km (because it carries 50,000kg trains)

Pod track carries 150kg. Not the same engineering problem.

Lightweight elevated: $3-8M per km

For reference: a normal road costs $2-10M per km anyway

Suburb-scale deployment

| Component | Cost | |---|---| | 20km ground-level track | $40-60M | | 200 pods | $1-1.5M | | Control system & software | $2-3M | | Total per suburb | ~$50M |

Perth metro scale

~200km of track to meaningfully connect the metro area

Total: ~$500M-$1B

The comparison that should make you angry

Perth Metronet extension: $5.7 billion

$5.7B ÷ $50M per suburb = 114 suburbs covered

Perth has ~250 suburbs. That one train project could have given nearly half of Perth point-to-point, on-demand personal transport.

All of Perth (250 suburbs): ~$12.5B. Roughly two Metronets.

What Metronet delivers: trains on fixed routes, fixed schedules, to fixed stations you drive