Pushing 50, WVU’s PRT is still a rare species of people mover.
It hasn’t seemed quite like our Morgantown for the past year-plus without PRT cars whisshing by on their tracks all day long. WVU’s Personal Rapid Transit system closed down on April 3, 2020, for COVID-19 and didn’t start running again until August 2, just a few weeks ago—we were 16 months without it.
WVU Transportation took the opportunity of the downtime to get completely caught up on maintenance and track repairs and to make some upgrades. Here are a few of the changes.
- PRT cars were refreshed on the interiors but, more importantly, they got bigger tires, as The Daily Athenaeum reported earlier this month. A PRT car seats 8 and is designed to take up to 15 passengers but, as we all know from the Mountaineer Week PRT cram record set in 2000, as many as 97 students could stuff themselves into one if they were late for an exam. Bigger tires will allow the cars to take more weight, reducing the chance of overloading and downtime.
- Beechurst Station—the one across Beechurst Avenue from the new WVU business school that’s been under construction—got some upgrades, says WVU Director of Transportation Jeremy Evans. That was Phase 1 of a project that has a Phase 2 we’re all going to love: “A big piece of that will be a redesign of the ugly fascia panels you see around town, especially over roadways,” Evans says—an upgrade we’ll all enjoy when we’re sitting in stopped traffic, viewing our surroundings.
- PRT fans will recall that part of what made the system special when it opened in 1975 and makes it interesting to transportation designers from around the world even today is its rare on-demand design—it’s a people mover that combines the direct-to-destination convenience of the automobile with the efficiency of mass transit. For the past two years, the system has not operated in that way. But an upgrade to the computer-based train control system has made it possible to go back to demand-mode operation, Evans says.
So ride the PRT! It’s a rare species of transit system that takes countless busses and cars off of our streets, and it’s better than it’s ever been. And yes, with an average 15,000 riders a day, it still experiences downtime, but you can always find its current operating status and instructions about shuttle busses @WVUPRTstatus on Twitter.
The PRT is free for WVU students, faculty, and staff, and it’s the same 50¢ a ride it’s been forever for the rest of us townies. It operates 6:30 a.m. to 10:15 p.m. weekdays and 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, and mask-wearing is in force at least into January.
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Was a PRT system operator in 1975 during the testing phase. Spent a good bit of time sitting stranded in a car on the guideway due to a technicality we were trying to solve. Sometimes had to shut everything down to capture and remove dogs that made it onto the track lest they get hit. Lightning and heavy snow sometimes caused problems too….. Interesting to see it still functioning all these years later.