MORGANTOWN PRT
The PRT proponents will point to
the Nixon-era Morgantown, West Virginia PRT as a success story until you find
the many flaws in the system...then they'll say Morgantown isn't real
PRT. Because it is essentially a "line haul system", Morgantown
is really an AGT, Automated Group Transport like the familiar "people
movers" you may have ridden in an airport. Not glamorous.
It shares some features with PRT. However, the Morgantown PRT has a lot of
problems, which is why it was never adopted elswhere.
Here's some descriptions of the Morgantown PRT by people who actually ride
the damn thing:
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"Ah, PRT, the future
of transportation. West Virginia University [wvu.edu] has had it's own PRT
[wvu.edu] (Personal Rapid Transit, also known by the students as Pretty Retarded
Train) system since the early 1970's. The PRT serves as the primary mode of
transportation between the two main campuses for thousands of students every
day.
In fact, this morning I was riding the PRT to my CS lab, when I experienced
first hand one of the minor glitches in the computer system that controls
the PRT.
The computer system is still the original one from the 70's, housed in a warehouse-like
building, mainframes with magnetic tape reels and all, running programs written
in Fortran by the engineering students that built the thing, with all the
processing power of the average digital watch.
Anyways, the PRT car I was in was right in the middle of the long straight
stretch, having reached it's top running speed of about 40 miles per hour,
when the power went out. The little electric cars are designed so that when
the power goes out, the wheels lock up.
So, our PRT car goes from 40 mph to a dead stop in under 1 second. I was immediately
reminded of physics class; objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless
acted upon by an outside force. I was standing up at the time. Fortunately,
the outside force acting upon me was the soft and squishy back of the person
in front of me. The people sitting in the front had the less pleasant experience
of having their faces acted upon at 40 mph by the front plexiglass window.
So, yeah, PRT all the way!"
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http://aredletterday.blogspot.com/2005/08/prt.html
"Personal Rapid Trash.
"Would you ride in a car that you know breaks down on a daily basis?
How about a bus? A train? A plane? One that doesn't run when you need it the
most (Saturday evenings and Sunday, *cough cough*) No, of course not. Being
the busy people we are, we depend on the reliability and availability of our
established modes of transportation to get us where we need (or want) to be,
in a reasonable amount of time.
"That's thrown right out the window here in Morgantown, West Virginia.
At least 15,000 students rely on the PRT's little yellow cars to get them
where they need to go every day. To class, to the Rec Center, to the store.
It will take you just about anywhere, when its working. First of all, it closes
at 5 on Saturdays and isn't open at all on Sundays. Yeah, if you live downtown
and want to work out during one of the few times you don't have class, too
bad. Live up on Evansdale and want to do anything but work out? Oh well. Wanna
go to church on Sunday? I hope your Methodist, or like hiking, cause those
are really your only options.
"OK, so maybe you just sit around on the weekends. The screwy hours really
don't matter then. But wait. What's that you say? You have engineering classes?
Oh, you poor baby. I hope your professor is OK with you being late at least
once a week when you're stuck in a 10x4x7 box for a good 30 minutes, in the
middle of nowhere, with a loudspeaker asking you to stay calm and not bash
out the windows. Good time to catch up on homework, eh?
"How is this acceptable, especially the breaking down? Seriously, if
this was a car, there wouldn't be a soul who'd buy it. Really, though, it
needs to be fixed. I almost want to make that some sort of senior project.
A handful of engineers and computer programmers could fix that thing up in
a heartbeat; it's not (At least it shouldn't be) a very complex system: You
press a button, a car pulls up, and takes you where you want to go, like a
horizontal elevator. Vertical elevators never break down, so what's wrong
with the PRT? It must be stupid. I mean, really, it, or the people working
it, must be stupid. It's the only logical explanation.
In conclusion, the PRT sucks."
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sdelling.blogspot.com/2005/02/diary-entries.html
"After the class, I headed to the PRT to come back to my room. As usual,
the PRT was not in motion."
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www.livejournal.com/users/saev/2307.html
"Well I went to go cash my check today, thinking it'd be a short 15 minute
walk down some snowy steps and icy streets to a PRT ride and ZIP I'd be downtown.
But Mother Nature pointed her fat finger at me and said "NO!... Today
shall not be so easy my little friend... today, you shall suffer the likes
you have NEVER suffered!"... I shuddered when I looked up at the PRT
sign, it's red lights mocking me in a little scrolling message that said...
"Gate 5 Closed".
bobslatt.blogspot.com/2004/10/highschool
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http://bobslatt.blogspot.com/2004/10/highschool-football-missing-explosives.html
"The distance is too far to walk to go from one part of campus to the
other so WVU built a factsimile of the Dinsey World monorail called the PRT
(Public Rapid Transit). It runs on electric rails above ground so when it
rains or if a squirrel is unlucky enough to touch the rails then it breaks
down. Nothing better than to look out the PRT window and see dozens of fried
squirrels. The PRT broke down this morning and the local bus system normally
picks us up when the PRT is down. There were no busses to be found. I went
into the restroom and changed from my jeans into my gym shorts, put my backpack
on my back and ran to class."
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Does that sound like success to you? Success like that doesn't come cheap. Here's some facts from Light Rail Now web site:
http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_prt001.htm
"The actual high cost of PRT could be illustrated in a number of examples, but perhaps the most dramatic has been the PRT demonstration at West Virginia University at Morgantown, viewed at the time (mid to late 1970s) as the "proof of the pudding" of Personal Rapid Transit, in the words of the Metropolitan magazine article already cited. Originally estimated at $14 million by Prof. Samy E. G. Elias, an engineering professor at WVU and a major advocate of PRT technology, in the end the WVU system, 3.6 miles end-to-end with 8.7 total miles of guideway and 5 stations, cost over $126 million (as of 1979) – about $319 million in 2004 dollars."
[William J. Sproule and Edward Neumann,"The Morgantown PRT: It Is Still
Running at West Virginia University", Journal of Advanced Transportation
, 25:3, 269-280 (Winter, 1991); Innovative Transportation Technologies website,
15 July 2003]