Morgantown PRT

The West Virginia University was growing very fast in the 1960's with a lot of new students enrolling into the university. This was why the University had to build another campus 3km away from its original campus. 

Now free buses were provided between the 2 campuses to help seamless transfer between the two campuses, however it was forming massive traffic jams in a city with small roads. 

In a city with 30,000 Permanent residents, 140,000 in the Metropolitan area and approximately 28,000 seasonal students in the college year, there was growing pressure to address this problem of traffic.

• Morgantown was in a very complex situation as the town was not as big as New York or Los Angeles that it directly thought about building a large and expensive metro system, however it did indeed face significant traffic volume even though it was not a metropolitan city.
  
  

• The City went through various PRT ideas to solve the problem such as the Monocab, Dashaveyor, and the Alden staRRcar. The Alden staRRcar was found to be the most suitable system for Morgantown. The Alden staRRcar is the system that was built and functions today.
  
  

• Due to the size of the project (passenger volume), the system was not just built by Alden, but also the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to take over as systems management role, signing a contract with them in December 1970.
  
  

• Boeing Vertol was selected to build the vehicles, Bendix Corporation supplied the control systems, and F.R. Harris Engineering would design and build the guideway, stations, and other facilities.

The PRT consists of 70+ Vehicles that run on guided roads, which look identical to metro system tracks, however the PRT system has rubber tyres and runs on a road. 

The system connects the university's campuses via five stations (Walnut, Beechurst, Engineering, Towers, Medical) along a 3.6 mi (5.8 km) route. All stations are on sidings, which allows vehicles to bypass stations. 

It takes 11.5 minutes to ride the entire length of the system from the Walnut Station to the Medical Station, which is a fair speed for a system that runs automated and has not encountered any fatalities from 1975 until 2016. 

It is very impressive that such a kind of system was built in the United States in a time period when aviation and automobiles dominated the environment. 

While there doesnt seem to be any scope for expansion in the near future, it sure remains as a reminder that the United States is not entirely against Public Transportation but can achieve it when the factors are right.