Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit
Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit
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Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit

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Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit

Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit (WVU PRT) is a personal rapid transit (PRT) system in Morgantown, West Virginia, United States. The system connects the three Morgantown campuses of West Virginia University (WVU) and the city's downtown area.

Developed from the Alden staRRcar and built by a consortium led by Boeing Vertol, the driverless system was a government-funded experiment in PRT systems. Upon its opening in 1975 with three stations, it had a fitful start, being three years behind schedule and costing 3–4 times more than estimated. It was expanded in 1978 to its current five stations, two maintenance depots, and 67 vehicles. Like all PRT systems, stations are built on sidings, which allows vehicles to bypass stations and permits express trips between any two stations.

While the system achieved reliability upwards of 98% for most of its life, its reliability declined in the 2000s – dipping to 90% by 2015 – and it gained a reputation for unreliability. In response, a renewal project was approved in 2012, which has so far replaced the vehicle control and propulsion systems, replaced parts of the power supply, and repaired other infrastructure. A new vehicle control system was commissioned in 2018, and the vehicle fleet is also being replaced.

The system has operated reliably, transporting students and staff daily.

Morgantown is a small city with about 30,000 permanent residents, with close to 140,000 in the metropolitan area. WVU adds 28,000 seasonal residents from August through May. As WVU expanded in the 1960s, geographic constraints – the city is situated in a mountain valley along the Monongahela River – forced WVU to build a second campus 2 mi (3.2 km) away in Evansdale. Free busing was offered to move students between the campuses, but all the roads led through the city center, creating gridlock more typical of a megacity.

In the late 1960s, Samy Elias, who led WVU's industrial engineering department, learned of experiments with PRT in the U.S. after the HUD reports were published. A minor PRT craze was being set off by a combination of federal funding and estimates that showed a PRT system would be far less expensive to build and install than any other form of mass transit. Elias felt a PRT would be a perfect solution to the traffic problems in the city.

Gathering support from WVU, the City of Morgantown, and West Virginia's congressional delegation, Elias arranged a $50,000 development grant from the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA) for a comparative study of three PRT systems: the Monocab, Dashaveyor, and the Alden staRRcar. The Alden staRRcar was found to be the most suitable system for Morgantown.

Political pressure by Senator Robert Byrd led Secretary John Volpe of the then-new United States Department of Transportation to propose that Morgantown be used as an experimental site for PRT development. President Richard Nixon had expressed strong support of the PRT concept, and Volpe was trying to arrange to have an experimental system well underway before the next presidential election, in November 1972.

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