WVU Personal Rapid Transit

The PRT was conceived in the early 1970s, when the federal government was funding experiments in new forms of urban transit and West Virginia University faced a real problem: its campuses were spread across steep hills and separated by a congested downtown, making it hard for students to get from class to class. A demonstration project promised a solution and a showcase for a bold new technology.

The system that resulted was one of the first automated, driverless transit systems anywhere. Small computer-controlled cars, each holding a modest number of passengers, run along a dedicated elevated guideway, stopping at stations on request rather than following a fixed schedule of stops. In its day it was hailed as a vision of the transit future, and it drew engineers and planners from around the world to study it.

Rather than running like a fixed train, the PRT works more on demand. A passenger enters a station and selects a destination, and cars are dispatched along the guideway to carry riders where they want to go, in many cases running non-stop between the origin and destination stations. The cars are electric, automated, and controlled by a central computer system rather than drivers.

The elevated guideway carries the cars over Morgantown's difficult terrain and around its downtown congestion, connecting the historic downtown campus with the newer Evansdale campus and other points across the city. For students, it turns a slow, hilly trip into a quick ride, and it has become an essential part of daily life at the university.

Many of the ambitious automated-transit experiments of the 1970s were eventually shut down or never expanded, but Morgantown's PRT endured. It has been repaired, modernized, and updated over the decades to keep it running, and it remains a working transit system rather than a museum piece, carrying students year after year. That longevity has made it a point of local pride and a genuine landmark of the city.

The system's quirks are part of its charm. Generations of WVU students have their own stories of the PRT, and its distinctive cars and stations are as much a part of the campus identity as the clock tower of Woodburn Hall. For a visitor, riding it is a chance to experience a piece of living transit history that most cities only dreamed of.

The PRT is inseparable from Morgantown, the spirited college town that grew along the Monongahela River and up its surrounding hills. The university shapes the city's rhythm and energy, and the transit system was built precisely to knit its scattered campuses together across that difficult ground. The river valley setting gives the elevated guideway some fine views along its route.

The Monongahela valley was ancestral homeland and shared hunting ground of the Lenape, the Shawnee, and the Haudenosaunee, who traveled and hunted the river corridor long before the town and university rose. None of those nations is federally recognized in West Virginia today, and their descendant nations continue in other states, but the river valley they knew still shapes the city the PRT crosses.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.