 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.