Personal rapid transit
traffic concept
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 (generally less than 6) 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.
PRT vehicles are sized for individual or small group travel, typically carrying no more than three to six passengers per vehicle. Guideways are arranged in a network topology, with all stations located on sidings, and with frequent merge/diverge points. This allows for nonstop, point-to-point travel, bypassing all intermediate stations. The point-to-point service has been compared to a taxi or a horizontal lift (elevator).
Numerous PRT systems have been proposed but most have not been implemented. As of November 2016, only a handful of PRT systems are operational: Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit (the oldest and most extensive), in Morgantown, West Virginia, has been in continuous operation since 1975. Since 2010 a 10-vehicle 2getthere system has operated at Masdar City, UAE, and since 2011 a 21-vehicle Ultra PRT system has run at London Heathrow Airport.
The public source identifies “Personal rapid transit” as traffic concept. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Personal, rapid and transit.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q912996. The Library of Congress control number is sh85100109. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2016, 1975, 2010 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Personal rapid transit” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.