Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit

Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit

Morgantown PRT vehicle near Beechurst Avenue
Overview
Locale	Morgantown, West Virginia, United States
Transit type	Personal rapid transit/People mover
Number of lines	1
Number of stations	5
Daily ridership	16,000
Operation
Began operation	1975
Operator(s)	West Virginia University
Technical
System length	3.6 mi (5.8 km)

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

Developed as the Alden staRRcar, the Morgantown system was built, starting in 1970, by a consortium led by Boeing Vertol as a government-funded experiment in personal rapid transit (PRT) systems. It had a fitful start, and entered operation in 1975, three years behind schedule and at a cost 3-4 times more than had been estimated. Yet notwithstanding the issues at inauguration, except for a short closure to accommodate a major expansion, the PRT operated continuously with 98.5% reliability from 1975 to 2005.

Morgantown is a small city with about 30,000 permanent residents. West Virginia University adds another 28,000 seasonal residents from September through May. Estimates from 2009 place the Morgantown metropolitan area population near 120,000. The city sits in a mountain valley along the Monongahela River, and as WVU expanded in the 1960s, its geographic constraints forced it to build a second campus two miles (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 the PRT experiments being carried out 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.