Glydways has put a formal proposal before Palm Beach County to build an elevated network of on-demand autonomous electric shuttles linking Palm Beach International Airport to Downtown West Palm Beach. The company's Instagram describes the roughly 4-to-5-mile system as capable of moving passengers between major stops — including CityPlace and the Brightline station — in under 10 minutes. County commissioners are evaluating the plan.
The Brightline connection is the most consequential piece of the proposal. A traveler arriving at PBI who wants to reach downtown West Palm Beach without a car currently depends on a Tri-Rail transfer at the airport — a multileg trip that adds considerable time. A direct shuttle to the Brightline station would compress that into a single connection, folding PBI into the same transit network that already links West Palm Beach to Miami and Orlando.
Glydways describes its system as autonomous, electric, and elevated — vehicles running on a raised guideway above street traffic, dispatched on demand rather than operating on a fixed schedule. The on-demand model separates it from conventional automated people-movers, which typically run continuous loops regardless of passenger load. Whether the Palm Beach system would allow flexible routing between any two stops or operate between fixed stations only has not been detailed in public materials.
The company told its Instagram audience the system could be operational within five years of approval, putting a hypothetical opening in the early 2030s if commissioners move forward in the near term. No cost figures, funding mechanism, or agency partnerships have been disclosed publicly. The proposal remains at an early stage.
The corridor it targets has seen sustained development investment. CityPlace — repositioned in recent years under the Rosemary Square rebrand — anchors the retail and hospitality cluster at the center of downtown. The Brightline station on Tamarind Avenue has catalyzed a pipeline of transit-oriented residential and commercial projects in the surrounding blocks. An airport connector threading through those nodes would extend the transit-accessible zone that developers have been building toward for the better part of a decade.
For commissioners, the outstanding questions are financial and operational: who funds construction, who operates the system, and what the county's exposure is if ridership falls short of projections. Autonomous guideway transit has a mixed track record in Florida — Jacksonville's Skyway people-mover, built in the 1980s, is a frequently cited example of a system that never achieved its promised ridership — and a new proposal in Palm Beach County will almost certainly require detailed demand modeling before advancing to any formal process.
The threshold to watch: whether Palm Beach County opens a formal feasibility study or procurement process, which would move the proposal from social media into a structured public review. Without that step, Glydways' pitch sits alongside the many transit concepts that cycle through Florida commissions without advancing. The corridor's fundamentals — a major commercial airport, an intercity rail terminus, and a growing downtown residential base — make the underlying logic durable enough that some version of an airport connector is likely to resurface, regardless of what the county decides about this one.
