What a long, strange trip it’s been for West Virginia University’s PRT.
IF YOU’VE EVER BEEN A STUDENT AT WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY, there’s a good chance you’ve ridden the university’s personal rapid transit system, the PRT. Unique in all the world, the PRT was the right solution to the right problem at the right moment in history. It marks 50 years of service this October—but it didn’t have an easy start.
The booming decades following World War II led to unbearable urban traffic and smog across the nation. That was true in Morgantown, where the city’s roadways just couldn’t keep up with the growth of the local economy and WVU student enrollment.
At the same time, transportation planners around the world saw an opportunity in the newfangled science of computation to revolutionize public transit. Instead of making everyone ride to every station, a system equipped with a computer could route vehicles non-stop directly to their destinations—combining the efficiency of mass transit with the on-demand, point-to-point convenience of the automobile.
In the early 1970s, that idea, called personal rapid transit, was a holy grail for transportation planners, never yet tried. But Samy Elias, a professor of industrial engineering at WVU, thought Morgantown’s hilly terrain, icy winters, and multiple student rush hours every day made it an ideal test location. The federal Department of Transportation thought so, too. The DOT was desperate for ways to address the nation’s urban traffic problems, and it agreed to pay for WVU’s system.
You may know all of this. Maybe you even rode the PRT the day it opened to the public, October 3, 1975. But do you know what happened in between? It involved threats and bluffing in the national media and a congressional hearing, events that turned into a half-century setback in the modernization of public transportation—a setback the nation may only just now be overcoming.
Read the whole story on Morgantown magazine’s website.
READ MORE ARTICLES FROM WV LIVING’S FALL 2025 ISSUE
Leave a Reply