About “Reinventing the Wheel”

By Karl Vilacoba

First, I’d like to thank Professor Jerry Schneider for his assistance with this story. His Innovative Transportation Technologies website is a great resource, and I would encourage anyone reading this blog to browse it when you have some free time.

Over 100 transportation systems are being tracked on Schneider’s website, and boiling them down to a list of only a dozen or so to profile was not easy. To be clear, this was not meant as one of those “10 Most Important” or “10 Technologies You Must Know About” kinds of features. My goal was simply to introduce a sample of these inventions to a broad audience who probably never heard of any of them.

I wanted to show a variety of systems – a little bit of everything, from PRTs to alternative cars to freight movers to pedestrian innovations. Each capsule was meant as a brief overview with links to sites where readers can learn more. I don’t endorse any of these systems, nor do I offer any predictions about whether they’ll succeed in the marketplace.

I started off by perusing all of the systems on the website’s matrix and choosing about a dozen that grabbed my attention. I asked Professor Schneider to recommend some systems I should consider, and to look over my list and advise me of any potential red flags. Our lists had some overlap, and I eliminated a few that were too similar to others. While the odds are that many of these innovations will never see the light of day, I sometimes gave a little extra weight to those that seemed feasible – far along in the development stages, financially well-backed or under serious consideration by legitimate clients (countries, cities, big corporations, etc.), for instance.

Finally, one or two never panned out because the companies’ contact people weren’t responsive (check your e-mails!), but those cases were the exception to the rule. When I reached out for more information, it wasn’t unusual to be called back by the CEO or the inventor themselves. Often they were one and the same.

I believe that’s a good indicator of how competitive this field is. These companies don’t get much media attention, so when an opportunity came, they put their top people in touch and were very accommodating (although some of these companies consist of staffs you can count on one hand). It was one of several factors that made this one of the most enjoyable stories I’ve worked on over the past few years.

Anyone have any favorites of the systems I profiled? Any thoughts on whether these systems could work in your city?

Putting Mountaineers in Gear

By Karl Vilacoba

Planetizen.com has posted a column which took me down Memory Lane – which in this case is an elevated, electrified roadway traversed by unmanned blue and gold vans.

In “Personal Rapid Transit: The Connective Tissue of Better Mobility,” University of Washington Professor Emeritus Jerry Schneider discusses two PRT systems and how they might serve as models for other cities. Schneider was enthusiastic about PRTs’ potential to provide relatively cheap, reliable and environmentally friendly public transportation. The two systems he focuses on chiefly – the ULTra PRT at London’s Heathrow Airport and the Vectus PRT in Sweden – are both under construction and considered cutting edge. A PRT I grew to know well was once, too, but those days are long gone.

In the early 1970s, Morgantown, W.Va.’s PRT was built to connect West Virginia University’s original downtown campus to a newer one springing up two miles away in the city’s Evansdale section. The system has five stops: Walnut Street, in the downtown shopping area; Beechurst Avenue, in the heart of the downtown campus buildings; Engineering, the stop for the Coliseum hoops arena, engineering school and other university buildings in Evansdale; the Towers dorms; and Medical, the drop-off point for Mountaineer Field, the medical school and local hospital. You can ride from one end of the line to the other in about 20 minutes; going by foot would mean crossing a mini-mountain that separates the two areas.

Before I put in my dorm request as an incoming freshman, I sought living advice from an upperclassman I knew. He laid it out like this: The Towers dorms are modern, cleaner, and have better cafeterias and amenities, but you have to ride the PRT to class every day. The downtown dorms are ancient, cold and crumbling, but are in the middle of it all. Ever the Jersey boy, I gravitated to the more urban downtown area.

Although I lived downtown, the PRT nonetheless became a major part of my college life. On football game mornings, when Morgantown becomes the largest city in West Virginia, ridership swelled as visitors and students like myself sardined ourselves in the (allegedly) 20-person capacity cars. You’d also be hard-pressed not to get stuck with at least a few courses out in Evansdale over your career, no matter how hard you tried to avoid it.

I can’t imagine how I would have gotten by without the PRT. It ran steadily from morning to the evening, and cars weren’t difficult to come by. Rides were free by swiping your student ID through the turnstile and 50 cents for anyone else; next to a newspaper or a postage stamp, can you think of a better value today than that? I lived in a house with a track running through my backyard, yet it was so quiet I rarely even noticed it.

There were also times I thought PRT could have stood for Pain in the Rear Tailbone. The university touts its 98 percent reliability, but I’m willing to bet that 2 percent failure came inordinately during the rough Morgantown winters, when you dreaded getting stranded the most. There were other times when it felt like the so-called “PRT Gods” –faceless operators who controlled the cars from a remote location, never making themselves known except to scald a misbehaving student on the platform over the loudspeaker – were playing tricks on me. You’d push the button for your destination, then watch a car pull up to you and just idle there, doors closed, for minutes on end.

Today, the PRT is an indispensable part of campus life and a selling point for prospective students. According to a recent New York Times piece, there’s a debate going on now over whether to expand the system by five more stops. If something were to happen that caused the PRT to vanish tomorrow, it would be a disaster. Morgantown is an old city of narrow, wildly sloped streets that were not planned to handle anything near its modern traffic. Anything that means getting cars off these streets is profoundly positive, especially when you’re talking about drivers 18-22 years old.