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PRT pulls into the station
by Dan Olson, Minnesota Public Radio
January 20, 2003

PRT, personal rapid transit, has arrived in Minnesota - at least a small version. A 60 foot length of guideway and a PRT vehicle are being assembled in Fridley. Building the prototype marks 30 years of effort by retired University of Minnesota engineering professor Ed Anderson, one of PRT's best known boosters. Personal rapid transit is not new. A system is running in at least one American city. Other cities, including Minneapolis, are taking a wait and see approach.

Fridley, Minn. — Thirty five years ago, residents of Morgantown, West Virginia were choking on traffic. Bob Henderschott said the small West Virginia city of 25,000 was overrun with 22,000 West Virginia University students trying to get to classes at WVU's three campuses.

"We used to run a fleet of 20 to 25 buses continuously throughout the day to handle that student traffic demand," Henderschott said.

The congestion helped West Virginia University and Morgantown snare a federal grant to build a personal rapid transit system. Henderschott oversees it. The 71 rubber-tired, van-sized vehicles travel up to 30 miles per hour on a four-mile-long, fixed guideway among WVU's campuses.

"It's been running consistently with availability well over 98 per cent. We average carrying about 16,000 passengers a day," Henderschott said.

Ed Anderson's PRT demonstration project bears little resemblance to the West Virginia system. His prototype vehicle will hold just a few people.

"It'll hold 650 pounds of people," Anderson said. "It could be one or a bunch of kids, but normally the seat can hold three adults nicely."

The aluminum PRT vehicle Anderson will show to visitors in February will run on a 60 foot length of guideway in a Fridley warehouse. On a larger system, Anderson said, riders would get on and off at stations without disrupting the flow of other PRT vehicles.

"Every trip can be on demand. You only need to run vehicles when you need them which makes a huge difference in operating costs," Anderson said.

Anderson says PRT will work in densely populated downtowns or outlying suburbs.

Minneapolis Downtown Council president Sam Grabarski says Anderson made a pitch to the business owners who make up the Council's membership, and Grabarski was impressed.

Downtown Minneapolis is spread out. Miles of pedestrian skyways connect dozens of blocks for walkers. But people are moving in along the river and on downtown's fringe. Grabarski said there are nearly 30,000 downtown residents and the city would benefit from having an alternative to cars.

"That's more than downtown Denver, Dallas, Houston and Indianapolis combined," Grabarski said. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if all those people didn't have to drive their car around in downtown."

However, Grabarski said he wants to see the kinks and bugs worked out of PRT before Minneapolis gets serious about a system.

Then, there's the matter of money. There's no clear estimate of how much a personal rapid transit system will cost. A University of Washington estimate puts the cost of building and operating PRT at about $5 million a mile. That's cheap by some measures. A mile of freeway costs about $20 million. A mile of the Minneapolis Hiawatha light rail line goes for about $70 million. However, the comparisons are apples to oranges because while all those systems do the same thing - move people - they all do so at different capacities and features.

University of Minnesota Professor of Geography and Urban Planning Judith Martin said before buildling PRT the Twin Cities should focus on improving the transportation systems already available.

"We've got roads, we've got transit of various sorts, we've got bikes," Martin said. "What we need to do is fine tune the mix of those things rather than imagining there's some great new technological fix out there that's gonna take care of it."

More than a dozen American cities and several foreign countries are either examining or already building PRT systems. Ed Anderson won't disclose who, but he says his group is talking with a company interested in personal rapid transit for moving employees around its sprawling corporate campus.

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