In 1975, West Virginia University opened a driverless transit system built as an experiment; 50 years later, its 67 cars have carried over 100 million trips

More than half a century ago, a concept that still seems like science fiction today was tried out in a small university town in West Virginia: driverless cars, taking people wherever they wanted to go. Researchers Steve Raney and Stanley Young reported in a paper presented at the Transportation Research Board's 2005 meeting that this small campus experiment has grown into one of the longest continuously running automated transit systems in the world. It's called the Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system, and it's still in operation at West Virginia University (WVU) today.

A traffic problem requiring a bold solution

West Virginia University's own account of the project's history notes that the PRT began as an experimental project. The university's campuses were scattered throughout a hilly town, and buses couldn't get students to class on time. The school needed something different, and needed it fast.


The project's concept was shaped with help from WVU industrial engineering professor Dr. Samy Elias, and federal funding was secured. It was funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation and designed and built by Boeing. Phase I between Walnut Street and the Evansdale campus was dedicated on October 24, 1972, and opened for regular passenger service in October 1975. Phase II was completed in July 1979, extending the tracks further to the Health Sciences Center. According to WVU's own transit records, the daughter of President Richard Nixon, Patricia Nixon Cox, took one of the first demonstration rides.

50 years, 5 stations, 100 million rides

According to WVU's own 50th-anniversary account of the system, the PRT today connects five stations across WVU's Morgantown campus and the city's downtown: Walnut, Beechurst, Engineering, Towers, and Health Sciences. The system runs on 8.7 miles of dedicated guideway using 67 electric, rubber-tired vehicles, and it has carried over 100 million passenger trips since 1975, with about 12,000 riders boarding on a typical school day. It's a system that has kept operating year after year while other automated transit projects have struggled or disappeared elsewhere.

How the "pods" actually work

Each vehicle is based on a Dodge truck chassis and seats eight, with room for up to 15 including standees, according to WVU's own specifications. They can go up to 33 miles per hour, and a trip across the full line takes roughly ten to twelve minutes, depending on the route. There's no driver, no steering wheel. The computer routes each car based on riders' destinations.

It’s not just a gimmick: Researchers have been observing it for decades

This setup is part of why transportation researchers have kept studying it. In a study published in the Journal of Advanced Transportation, William Sproule and Edward Neumann noted that Morgantown's vehicles hold more passengers than a traditional single-rider PRT pod, so the system is somewhere between a personal transit system and a small automated train. The study's main conclusion was that more than 15 years after opening, the system was still running reliably. Recent figures support this too: WVU reported that during the 2023-2024 school year, the PRT was available 98.7 percent of the time it was scheduled to run.

Cutting cars, not just carbon

Early research also investigated the extent to which the PRT actually changed travel behavior. A federal impact study for the U.S. Department of Transportation, conducted by Samy Elias and Robert Ward in the years after the system opened, found that residents living near the PRT used their cars less often once it was running than before it was there. The study also found that PRT made up a larger share of local trips than the bus service it replaced.

That pattern appears to have continued. According to WVU's transit office, the all-electric system now cuts campus carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 2,200 tons a year. The same source says it would require at least 34 more buses on a typical day, or as many as 40 buses every two and a half minutes during large events, such as football games, to replace it. WVU frames that as the equivalent of taking 460 cars off the road each year, or powering 265 homes.

What's next for this 50-year-old system

PRT is still in operation, even though it dates to the 1970s. Between 2016 and 2017, WVU replaced the original station lighting with LED fixtures that cut energy use in half and increased the brightness of platforms by 25 percent. In June 2024, the university got $6.4 million from the federal government to renovate stations, platforms, elevators and parts of the guideway, with work expected to continue through 2030.

Today, cities around the world are experimenting with autonomous shuttles and robotaxis. Morgantown’s PRT is a reminder that someone tried this idea five decades ago, and it worked well enough to still be moving thousands of students to class every single day in West Virginia.