Richard Gilbert is a Toronto-based consultant who focuses on energy and transportation. His latest book is Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight without Oil, written with Anthony Perl.
The 1960s were abuzz with the promise of new ways of travelling within urban regions, particularly in the United States.
There, the post-war resumption of rapid growth in automobile ownership had been boosted by the development of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways (usually known as the Interstate Highway System). A prominent result was sprawling, increasingly car-dependent cities with decaying, economically dysfunctional cores and congested, polluted inner suburbs.
In 1962, President Kennedy began a move towards achieving “good urban transportation, with properly balanced use of private vehicles and modern mass transport to help shape as well as serve urban growth.” This led to the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964, amended in 1966 to mandate “a program of research, development, and demonstration of new systems of urban transportation that will carry people and goods within metropolitan areas speedily, safely, without polluting the air, and in a manner that will contribute to sound city planning.”
The amendment prompted the commissioning of 17 studies each costing $500,000 ($500,000 then is equivalent to $3.5 million now). Their results were summarized in a 1968 report that introduced the term personal rapid transit (PRT), defined as “Small vehicles, traveling over exclusive rights-of-way, automatically routed from origin to destination over a network guideway system, primarily to serve low- to medium-population density areas of a metropolis.” The report explained further:
Empty passenger vehicles or ‘capsules’ would be available at each station on the network. The riders would enter one, select and register their destination, then be transported there automatically, with no stopping. The average speed would be essentially equal to the vehicle speed. … Propulsion … would almost certainly be electric.
The 1968 report recommended PRT as one of three topics for further research and development. The authors of one of the 17 reports concluded that “Computer models of cities suggest that in certain circumstances installing novel ‘personal transit’ systems may already be more economic than building conventional systems such as subways.”
The U.S. government issued numerous development contracts for PRT, chiefly to aviation firms. Ford and General Motors started their own programs. A 1971 cover story of Popular Science urged, “For a fast, private, nonstop pushbutton ride, try PRT. It’s the brand-new way to get where you’re going. … Many experts think PRT is the only kind of public transportation attractive enough to persuade the city-bound motorist to leave his car at home.” President Nixon’s January 1972 budget included a further substantial allocation of funds for PRT development. Four companies were paid to set up demonstration systems at the U.S. International Transportation Exposition in Washington in May, 1972. PRT’s time seemed to have come. Urban transportation was about to be revolutionized.
But it wasn’t. No PRT system went into everyday operation. The only legacy of the 1960s’ flurry of activity is the Boeing-made group rapid transit (GRT) system at Morgantown, West Virginia, connecting three university campuses and the downtown along a 13-kilometre route with three intermediate stations. GRT differs from PRT chiefly in that the vehicles are larger -- Morgantown’s vehicles each carry up to 20 people -- requiring users to share vehicles with strangers.
GRT and PRT systems both have offline stations, visited on demand. Thus, GRT passengers can spend more time visiting stations than PRT passengers. GRT guideways need to be more substantial to support the larger vehicles and loads.
Morgantown’s system worked with reliability superior to regular transit systems for 34 years until 2009 when it was taken out of service for three months for system diagnosis and repair. Advanced control and communications systems are gradually being introduced, as well as new propulsion systems manufactured by Canada’s Bombardier Inc.
