WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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This is one of the Personal Rapid Transit
pods at London's Heathrow Airport.

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It'll take you from one of the car parks to
Terminal 5,

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and from Terminal 5 to one of the car parks.

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And that's about it.

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When it was installed in 2011,

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oh, this was going to be the future of transport.

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But it hasn't really worked out that way.

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And more than that:

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they got beaten to the punch by 35 years.

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Because in 1975, West Virginia University
opened this:

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their own Personal Rapid Transit system.

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The pods here in the city of Morgantown might
not be quite as sleek and rounded...

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but there's 70 of them, they carry more people,

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and they go to five stations along an eight-mile
track.

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This really is personal transit: you push
a button,

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and a car arrives to take you where you want
to go, non-stop.

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At peak times, there'll be a car along every
few minutes

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for each separate destination.

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PRT never shuts down.

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We have run 40 years without any major incident.

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10 inches of snow and we’ll be fine.

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That’s because we had a heated track here.

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Kids don’t like it because we keep the school
open!

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There are no variables; if I’m going from
point A to point B,

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if it’s eight minutes, it is eight minutes.

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Back in the 1970s, the only option for getting
students

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between all the separate university campuses
here was a fleet of buses.

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But Morgantown is a city with steep hills
and narrow roads,

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so the result was gridlock.

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And at the time,

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American politicians were actually having
a bit of a craze for systems like this.

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Richard Nixon announced that there was development
money available,

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and West Virginia senator Robert Byrd,

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who was famous in part for just how much money
he managed to bring back to his own state,

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he managed to get Morgantown selected as the
testing site.

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The Boeing Company, and NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory,

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were involved with getting the system to work.

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The system, right now, can carry well over
4000 passengers an hour.

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Every vehicle, when it departs station, has
a route.

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Every time an assigned vehicle moves over
a presence detector,

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that location is monitored by the station
electronics

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which then conveys that message back to the
central control room,

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and then that message is depicted by the mimic
board in central control.

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And each one of those blinking lights represents
a presence detector,

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but it also represents
five seconds of travel time.

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In the train world, all the switching is done
on the track.

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So the track physically moves

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to orient a vehicle down a different pathway
on a different rail line.

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In our system, the vehicle switches on board.

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The result of all that 1970s engineering...

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well, it was massively over-budget and a little
rough around the edges to start,

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but that happens with prototypes.

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The important part was: it worked.

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And it worked well enough to be expanded and
kept updated into the 21st century.

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Well, one of the problems we are having today

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is with obsolescence of parts for the vehicle,

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as well for the electronics for the system.

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And back in the 70s, the Minuteman missile
system

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was the basis for the design of the electronics
for the system.

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And there’s a company called Thales,

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and they are here on site now upgrading the
electronics and the software for the system.

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The old system uses a little bit different
technology to run cars up and down the guideway.

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The cars do not know where they’re located
out on the guideway.

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In the new system, the Thales system, they
will know where they’re at.

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So that’s a big help when you’re trying
to ask a car where it’s at!

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The technical manual for the system is online
on WVU's web site,

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and it is 1970s engineering genius.

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Just like the pods at Heathrow decades later,

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this was going to be the future of travel.

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So why wasn’t it?

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Why aren't systems like this everywhere?

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Well, in most cases you can do almost everything
that this can with regular light rail

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with less upfront cost and less political
risk.

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Sure, the PRT is a bit faster and a bit more efficient,

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and it's a bit more pleasant to ride,

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because every journey is non-stop --

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but the rest of the world went with cheaper,

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simpler systems... just with much less charm.

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It’s the spine of our transportation network.

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It is also an icon for this institution.

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We do have some challenges,

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but we have an excellent crew, a dedicated,
passionate crew

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that just finds a way to make the system work
and keep going.

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It’s that little engine that could.

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Thank you to everyone at the Morgantown PRT
and West Virginia University.

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Pull down the description for more links about
them, and about the college!