Morgantown, West Virginia is home to one of America’s most bizarre forms of transit: the Personal Rapid Transit, or PRT, a grade-separated transit system with individual pod cars that will take you directly to the station of your choice. When it was built as an experimental prototype in the 1970s, it was expected to be the future. Today, it’s the only one of its kind in the USA, and one of only a small handful worldwide. Why didn’t it take off? Let’s ride it and find out.
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Classy Whale – at-least-weekly misadventures with trains and transit!
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Please do a video on lisbons 100 year old trolley
Amazing video classy whale and keep up the awesome work with the videos
great video 😮
A video on how it works would be interesting.
Rode this a long time ago while visiting a wonderful friend who was on the WVU faculty at the time. While there, I also watched her using something called the DARPA Net — funny how both things worked out!
Thank you for making such great transit related content. :]
Corrections: This video was shot at West Virginia University, not the University of West Virginia, which doesn't exist, and HSC is the northernmost station, not the southernmost.
will you come to New york?
was the tom scott red shirt intentional?
Thank you very much for for bringing us this very interesting and informative video presentation. The principal of the idea seems a good one but the practicality thereof is not so good. Better to have a train that can take a large quantity of people at once and just stop at all stops. Rubber tyres on a road surface is also less efficient than metal wheels on metal rails and of course trains can be fully automated with no staff on board. These are magnificent video presentations you provide and are much appreciated by the people.
I didn’t realize the PRT was five linear stops and you were just bypassing stops. I thought some stops were on different branch lines, which would make sense with a personal transport system. Like imagine if PATH was a personal system with a shit ton of vehicles. But the extra engineering and complexity doesn’t justify the cost. Make it automated all stops and more frequent.
I've been past Morgantown on the freeway numerous times while heading from the Midwest to D.C. I've always wanted to see the PRT, but I never made the time to do it. Thanks for letting me explore it vicariously through your video.
This thing is very weird.
As a WVU Alumni I had to stop watching once you couldn't be bother to learn the name of the University .
PRT vs. Generic Rail is a very interesting debate… I would support generic rail because the better frequencies would probably cancel the time savings. Hey, at least Morgantown didn't try to fix the traffic with "Just one more lane bro"
Great content as always!
…And DID SOMEONE SAY MOROCCO???
Boondoggle!
Morgantown is landlocked and the PRT has been a tremendous asset to the university community. Traffic was an absolute nightmare last year (even worse than usual) when the PRT was down for repairs and WVU had to utilize shuttle buses to transport people between different points. Know that WVU has several separate campuses (downtown, Evansdale, Health Sciences, Law) which had to be built away from the landlocked main campus downtown as the school expanded. The system was "overbuilt" because the original plan was to allow for expansion to other parts of the city, not just between campuses. The PRT has been described as a "horizontal elevator" and is really quite efficient.
I wonder if Morgantown is the smallest city in the world with a rapid transit system? I can't think of anything smaller (maybe small towns in Germany served by a larger regional S-Bahn or light rail system, if that counts).
You did a terrific job with this one, super fascinating. seems like the hyperlopp before the hyperloop, maybe a couple of upgrades could make it revolutionary
Thanks for showing the system and how it works. It seems to do a good job for where it is located. I was surprised at your comment complaining about having to wait five minutes for your pod to leave the station hoping for more passengers. On any other transit system a five minute wait for service would be considered great service. While this system would not work in many cities it would do a good job acting as a feeder system to a larger line between smaller towns and a larger city. About the only other system that I rode that while not the same was in Miami where their metro system connects with a smaller unmanned local system that servers various stations in the downtown area away from the main metro line.
5:40 As a WVU student, this car is used for an event we have at Mountaineer Week called the PRT cram. It is a modified car and students compete to see how many people can fit in a PRT car. The record was set at 97.
They have tried to expand this system but have had no luck in finding anyone interested in building or supplying cars.
I agree that it's overengineered. When I rode it in 2018, it was only running in all stops mode for some reason, and the dwells were SO LONG! Not to mention that the trains can sense if they have too many people (about 15) on them and refuse to move. It just feels a lot lower capacity than a light rail or metro system would be.
This is really cool and is probably best gadgetbahn, but I'd argue that longer term you could build automated light metro (think Vancouver Skytrain) infrastructure at about the same cost as this, and wind up with like 100x the capacity.
Just a footnote about the PRT system. Although WVU and also Boeing publicly deny this, it's urban legend that in the first few years after the PRT opened, that University interns assigned to the system began hacking the not so sophisticated computer. Late at night close to the shut down of the system they would have the cars running the entire track and not stopping or just have a car pull up, open the door and once people got inside simply not move anywhere after locking them inside. In at least one instance, the interns purposely made the cars do head on collisions. They also disabled the emergency call and auto shutoff systems. After a few years, they upgraded the computer and no longer let University students be interns. This was told to me by multiple people who attended WVU in the late 1970's
Why are they wearing masks? It’s over.
My alma mater, Old Dominion University was building a maglev in the early 2000s. The structure was built but was never opened to the public. It would have been the first maglev this side of the planet.
I feel like the main advantage of something like this is the fact it is DIRECT transport with no intermediate stops. Yes, this adds complexity, but in congested areas, it makes the most sense. In a way, I feel like this was technology ahead of its time, and for better or worse, were so used to how things are. I could see this working for large airports with multiple terminals and multiple people going to various terminals.
Great video! I remember taking a bus road trip to WVU back in 2011 for a basketball game and was so disappointed that we couldn't ride it. It was so futuristic looking, wish more places would consider it especially since it's much greener than buses.
Well done, well explained.
Is that real time? Or sped up?
This is what the boring tunnels should have been but ELon
Another gimmickbahan to make the EL sexy and futuristic; heaven forbid we use lower friction 100% recyclable steel wheels.
A majority of the PRT's usage is on the section between Towers (dorms) and Beechurst (downtown campus). Each of these stations has a second dedicated platform that just goes to the other station during peak times. If you ran the PRT in all stations mode all the time, without the ability to turn around at stations, you would need a lot more vehicles running over the entire length of the system just to provide adequate capacity between Towers and Beechurst.
I never knew this existed. Interesting concept. Thanks.
Hi classy, I work there. If there's anything you'd like to know, I can answer it.
Considering this is essentially a prototype system with only 5 stations and a maximum of 3 stops that can be bypassed it doesn't really seem like it saves that much time, but just imagine the possibilities with a much larger system with dozens of stations providing every passenger with nonstop service. Not only would it be faster than driving, but more people might actually ride it.