SEATTLE, WASHINGTON 98195

Department of Civil Engineering 201 More Hall, FX-10

November 22,1994

Palle R. Jensen

Head of Development

RUF -International

Forhaabningsholms Alle 30

1904 Frb. C., Denmark

Dear Palle

I am writing in support of your efforts to expand and intensify the design, development and testing of the RUF system. I have been learning about it over the Internet and from the materials you have sent to me during the past 8 months. In my opinion, your concepts represent the transportation solution that I have been looking for during the past two decades. I believe that RUF can deal effectively with the transportation problems being faced by major urban centers all around the world and has the very great advantage of fitting in well with current life styles and human behavior in Western societies (and, to a lesser extent, those in developing countries). I am very excited about the RUF concept and intend to devote an upcoming class to a detailed examination and analysis of its various characteristics and performance expectations. I have already spent considerable time learning about its and thinking about it many ramifications and relationships to current transportation modes.

As you know, I have been working actively on another innovative transportation concept, called Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), for the past 20 years. It has finally reached the stage where it is now being actively developed in a joint effort being conducted by the Regional Transportation Authority of Chicago and the Raytheon Company , headquartered in Massachusetts. This $40 million effort is expected to produce a working PRT system sometime in 1997 or 1998. Plans to deploy a small operating PRT system in Rosemont, Illinois would follow a successful testing program.

I believe that your work on the RUF system has the potential to produce a technology that would be superior in many ways to the PRT system being developed for the RTA/Raytheon project. I hope that you will be able to gain the financial support necessary to carry your ideas forward into a development and testing phase. It appears to me that a RUF technology would cost the public far less than conventional transit and highway systems and, for that reason alone, should be given the highest priority possible. Its potential benefits to improvement of the air quality of cities is another of its very exciting prospects. Furthermore, I believe that it would achieve acceptance in most of the world's major cities in a very short period of time. This suggests that its development would be very helpful to the maintenance of a strong Danish economy.

 An effort to design and develop a technology that is highly similar in concept to RUF is just getting started at the California State University at Long Beach. The ideas being put forth by this group represent a reinvention of your concept to a large extent and should be regarded as a positive confirmation of your work. Your work on the RUF concept to date gives you a substantial lead on this effort but that could diminish fairly rapidly as the CSULB effort gains speed. It is supported by a federal grant of $1.7 million and will move forward quite rapidly, largely in response to the need to find employment for hugh numbers of recently unemployed aerospace workers in the Southern California region.

 Finally, let me say that I have been impressed with the depth of your thinking about the many complexities involved in designing a new transportation concept that fits in well with the existing infrastructure present in most major cities of the world. Via our discussions on the Internet, I have been trying to find some flaws in your thinking but am happy to report that I have yet to find any serious problems in your solutions to the various questions that I (and others) have raised during the past 8 months. In fact, I printed out all of the discussion that has taken place about the RUF system on the Internet the other day and it came to a total of 99 pages of very interesting material. This level of interest from people from around the world is highly unusual in my experience. It definitely provides a further confirmation of the perceived utility and functionality of the RUF system as a valid solution to the very serious problems presented by the large and growing number of conventional autos in the major cities of the world.

 I wish you the best of good fortune in the pursuit of ways and means to continue the design, development and testing of the RUF concept. You certainly deserve the opportunity to expand and intensify your RUF investigations.

Yours sincerely

Jerry Schneider

Professor of Civil Engineering