pairs, insurance, and countless other things.
One large effect of a SkyTran grid-system is that car-related spending would rapidly decrease. This would most likely cause economic trauma in all sectors dealing with cars, and job losses to match. About 30% of retail spending is on cars, and a rapid change in such a large market would be devastating to those areas. The devastating effects on sectors serving the needs of automobiles will produce a barrage of political resistance, since this sector of the economy is controlled by powerful interests.
Local pollution would also greatly decrease. Automobiles generate about 60% of all harmful emissions, and SkyTran would decrease the use of cars by a significant percent - perhaps reducing emissions by 20% or 30%.
If the system were much larger (say extending throughout California), it would usher in an age of unprecedented mobility and transform the climate of the transportation industry. One effect is that gas prices would go down because of decreased demand. This probably wouldn't happen right away, because gas prices are more determined on the supply side - but oil prices would drop. A more important change would be that people could commute and travel farther. If SkyTran was built in a grid system throughout California more than 1/2 of the entire state could commute to San Francisco (in less than an hour and a half). This would have profound effects on the employment situation in the US, allowing people to take jobs that wouldn't previously be feasible.
A more obscure but significant effect of a large grid system is reducing airport gridlock. Billions of dollars are spent yearly to solve airport gridlock problems, and those billions could be saved if the SkyTran system covered more than 300 miles surrounding an airport. Airports could focus on longer distance flights, and could use space previously used for car parking to expand the airport.
SkyTran is a unique PRT design that has obvious advantages and could provide enormous benefit to any area that built the system. The monetary benefits alone of this system would be incentive for any private investor to support this system, but the benefit the system could provide for its users would overshadow any profit. The time and money saved by using SkyTran over a car would drastically improve the quality of life of its users. The automobile industry should jump at adopting this new system - and gain some of the profit themselves - rather than fighting it. Transportation has come to a crossroads, and Personal Rapid Transit seems like an inevitable advance in transportation technology that will take us where we've always hoped we could go.
The following spreadsheet outlines every assumption and calculation I used in the above summary. The calculations are written like a receipt, adding up benefits and costs to yield the overall benefit to the city and its people. Note that the excel file is much more up to date than this page is.
Download the spreadsheet: SF SkyTran report calculations and assumptions may 2008.xls
The "underestimates" written at the bottom of each list of figures and calculations in the spreadsheet are meant to detriment the system. This means that almost every figure you see in the spreadsheet is not ideally efficient. The calculations are done in such a way to show that these predictions are not idealized and are realistic predictions of what would happen. The lists of "underestimates" are there to tabulate exactly how the predictions are non-ideal.