It makes me wonder if it wasn't a scam at all, but just a really bad idea with believers that wanted to make it real?
It's like murder. There's first degree premeditated murder, crimes of passion, insanity, and manslaughter. Manslaughter can in some cases be charged for gross negligence, or the death can occur as a result of another crime where murder was not the intent.
Scams can be similar. A pure scam is like first degree murder. The scammer(s) plan it as a scam and execute it with intent. But sometimes a failure or misadventure can evolve into a scam.
This happens when those behind it double down in the face of clear evidence of total non-viability. When the tech doesn't work for fundamental reasons, nobody is truly interested, etc., but the operators keep ratcheting up the salesmanship and doubling down, they are heading into scam territory.
You see this a lot with quack medicines backed by people with actual medical degrees. Sometimes a doctor or researcher comes up with an idea and then their ego gets into it. They start fantasizing about being the greatest genius in medicine, the person who cured cancer, etc. So even when the data comes in and shows that their treatment doesn't work any better than placebo they refuse to "see" this. Their ego won't let them and they delude themselves. Over time they devolve much like Walter White from Breaking Bad, going from legitimate doctor to quack. It's rarely a sudden thing.
Your idea for the next breakthrough technology might be the very thing some parasite "angel investor" is looking for to be the crystal at the core of their next big scam. Watch who you team up with.
Another options is you placed them on slightly elevated tracks and add bridges over intersections, the larger problem is they need a lot of space above them which means overpasses etc could limit placement without major investments and it really just reinvents the monorail concept.
So, IMO it's unlikely to work in most cities, but there are a lot of city's and you only need a few. Thus, it probably did not start as a scam even if evolved into it.
I think of it as the Theranos cycle where something seems possibly viable, but not 100% viable. However, with a closer look it's probably not going to work. But, at that point it's only the people doing the investigation that know this, thus making for a good investment scam. AKA getting other people to throw good money after bad let's you extract some value from a failure.
IMO, a better fit would be to scale down and have two way bike lanes and pedestrian traffic beneath them vs. car only traffic. But, scaling these up to say 16' of clearance could also be viable, just more expensive.
Again, these could be built to spin in place they simply can't turn sharply when cars are under them. So, they could do a 90 degree turn as long as they had a separate turn signal or bridge over traffic to do so.
However, even if they where limited to nearly strait lines many city's like NYC for example have a lot of strait lines.
So, yea it would be cheaper to build something that can't turn, but turning radius is simply an engineering trade-off.
Although to be fair, can't you pre-sell condos to finance their construction?
Yes, but the real message here is "we'd rather you spend your money than save it, so we're going to charge you money to keep it with us"
The whole point of a negative interest rate is to try and drive up spending/investment. If it costs money for banks to keep their deposits in the central bank, then there's (theoretically) more incentive for the banks to loan the money to someone.
It's meant to be a means of economic stimulus, and the government isn't the one setting the negative interest rate, that would be the central bank (in Europe's case, the ECB).
The same would still be true if you kept gold under your mattress.
More typically in modern history, banks can deliver decent rates of return by capitalizing loans with deposits. Risk gets reduced by FDIC or other insurance.
As recently as 2006, savings accounts with zero risk for >80% of the US population paid 4-5% interest.
I was gonna ask how was that "zero risk" possible, but I'm thinking the answer is "it wasn't actually possible as we all found out the following years."
(It might help if you think of risk as a scale, and the "zero" as an arbitrary point in that scale. It's useful to set the "zero" to "the lowest risk you can actually get", even though there might be something with an even lower risk.)
The problems we found out later were with banks packaging loans into more complex securities of and selling them to third parties.
You have "zero risk" with bank deposits because FDIC insures deposits up $250k (today, $100k previously) with the full faith and credit of the US Treasury.
That has always been true. Look, you can't save grain to eat in your old age unless you build a freaking grain silo, and even then the grain rots. Money is just little pieces of paper with value attached, they don't actually have value in itself (the same is true for gold). Whatever happened in the past, e.g. savings account with higher interest rates, was more related to the demand for capital rather than in the intrinsic property of the money itself.
I could be wrong though, but that's the only way negative interests make sense to me.