Personal rapid transit (PRT), also referred to as podcars or guided/railed taxis, is a public transport mode featuring a network of specially built guideways on which ride small automated vehicles that carry few passengers per vehicle. PRT is a type of automated guideway transit (AGT), a class of system which also includes larger vehicles all the way to small subway systems. In terms of routing, it tends towards personal public transport systems.
A people mover or automated people mover (APM) is a type of small scale automated guideway transit system. The term is generally used only to describe systems serving relatively small areas such as airports, downtown districts or theme parks.
The Tren Urbano is a 10.7-mile (17.2 km) automated rapid transit system that serves the municipalities of San Juan, Guaynabo, and Bayamón, in Puerto Rico. The Tren Urbano consists of 16 stations operating on 10.7 miles (17.2 km) of track along a single line. In 2023, the system had a ridership of 2,738,100, or about 16,200 per weekday as of the second quarter of 2024.
An automated guideway transit (AGT) or automated fixed-guideway transit or automatic guideway transit system is a type of fixed guideway transit infrastructure with a riding or suspension track that supports and physically guides one or more driverless vehicles along its length. The vehicles are often rubber tired or steel wheeled, but other traction systems including air cushion, suspended monorail and maglev have been implemented. The guideway provides both physical support, like a road, as well as the guidance. An automated line can be cheaper to run than a conventional line, due to the shorter trains and stations.
Innovia Metro is an automated rapid transit system manufactured by Alstom. Innovia Metro systems run on conventional metal rails and pull power from a third rail but are powered by a linear induction motor that provides traction by using magnetic force to pull on a "fourth rail" placed between the running rails. However, newer versions of the technology are available with standard electric rotary propulsion.
Cabinentaxi, sometimes Cabintaxi in English, was a German people mover development project undertaken by Demag and Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm with funding and support from the Bundesministerium für Forschung und Technologie. Cabinentaxi was designed to offer low-cost mass transit services where conventional systems, like a metro, would be too expensive to deploy due to low ridership or high capital costs.
Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit is a personal rapid transit (PRT) system in Morgantown, West Virginia, United States. The system connects the three Morgantown campuses of West Virginia University (WVU) and the city's downtown area.
Aramis is one of the title characters in the novel The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, père.
Ultra is a personal rapid transit podcar system developed by the British engineering company Ultra Global PRT.
Headway is the distance or duration between vehicles in a transit system measured in space or time. The minimum headway is the shortest such distance or time achievable by a system without a reduction in the speed of vehicles. The precise definition varies depending on the application, but it is most commonly measured as the distance from the tip of one vehicle to the tip of the next one behind it. It can be expressed as the distance between vehicles, or as time it will take for the trailing vehicle to cover that distance. A "shorter" headway signifies closer spacing between the vehicles. Airplanes operate with headways measured in hours or days, freight trains and commuter rail systems might have headways measured in parts of an hour, metro and light rail systems operate with headways on the order of 90 seconds to 20 minutes, and vehicles on a freeway can have as little as 2 seconds headway between them.
The Wenhu or Brown line is a metro line in Taipei operated by Taipei Metro, named after the districts it connects: Wenshan and Neihu. It is an automated medium-capacity rubber-tyred metro line and is 25.1 kilometres (15.6 mi) long, serving a total of 24 stations located in 7 districts in Taipei, of which 22 are elevated and 2 underground. As of April 2022, the line transports an average of approximately 140,000 passengers daily.
The Alden staRRcar, short for "Self-Transport Road and Rail Car", was a personal rapid transit (PRT) system designed by William Alden in the 1960s. It originally envisioned small electrically powered cars suitable for short distance trips at low speed within urban areas, which could optionally merge onto tracks that would provide power and guidance for high-speed travel over longer inter-city distances. It was one of the earliest dual-mode vehicles to be proposed, and one of the earliest to be actually built.
ROMAG was a personal rapid transit (PRT) system produced by the American company Rohr, Inc. It featured a linear induction motor that was arranged to provide both traction and suspension in a magnetic levitation system.
The HUD Reports were a series of studies in mass transit systems, funded by the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA) department of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The HUD reports were extremely influential in the development of the personal rapid transit (PRT) concept, small pod-like vehicles that automatically travel from point-to-point in extended networks. Their publication in early 1968 sparked off PRT development projects at dozens of companies around the world. In spite of intense interest in the early 1970s, political winds shifted and today there is only one HUD-inspired PRT system in commercial operation, the Morgantown PRT in West Virginia.
The Computer-controlled Vehicle System, almost universally referred to as CVS, was a personal rapid transit (PRT) system developed by a Japanese industrial consortium during the 1970s. Like most PRT systems under design at the same time, CVS was based around a small four-person electric vehicle similar to a small minivan that could be requested on demand and drive directly to the user's destination. Unlike other PRT systems, however, CVS also offered cargo vehicles, included "dual-use" designs that could be manually driven off the PRT network, and included the ability to stop at intersections in a conventional road-like network.
Krauss-Maffei's Transurban was a 12-passenger automated guideway transit (AGT) mass transit system based on a maglev guideway. Development started in 1970 as one of the many AGT and PRT projects that followed in the wake of the HUD reports of 1968. Its selection as the basis of the GO-Urban system in Toronto in 1973 made it well known in the industry; it would have been the basis of the first large-area AGT mass transit network in the world. Technical problems cropped up during the construction of the test track, and the sudden removal of funding by the West German government led to the project's cancellation in late 1974. The Ontario government completed development and installation of a non-maglev version, today known as the Bombardier Advanced Rapid Transit.
The délégation interministérielle à l'aménagement du territoire et à l'attractivité régionale or DATAR was a French administration working for the Minister of Territorial Development. It applied decisions taken by the Interministerial Committee of Land Planning and Development (CIADT).
Minitram was an automated guideway transit system studied by the Transport and Road Research Laboratory (TRRL), part of the UK Department of the Environment's Ministry of Transport. The system was based on small, completely automated tram-like vehicles of about 25 passengers that could be connected together into three-car trains to increase capacity. Proposed designs were submitted by Hawker Siddeley Dynamics (HSD) and EASAMS. HSD's system used rubber wheels and EASAMS' steerable steel ones, but the projects were otherwise similar and notably shared a linear motor for propulsion and most braking. A series of failed sales efforts in the UK and to the GO-Urban system in Toronto, combined with decreased government spending in the 1970s, led to the concept being abandoned.
In the 1990s, the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) planned to fund the construction of a personal rapid transit (PRT) system in Rosemont, Illinois. Raytheon had been contracted to build the system. The project was cancelled in October 1999. Rosemont had been selected in 1993 by the RTA be home to a demonstration PRT system. Five other municipalities in the suburban Chicago metropolitan area had submitted unsuccessful bids to be host to the PRT project. The system would have been the first-of-its-kind, utilizing smaller vehicles than the existing Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit. The project marked the first serious activity related to PRT construction since Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit.
