A Red-Letter Day

Personal Rapid Trash.

Would you ride in a car that you know breaks down on a daily basis? How about a bus? A train? A plane? One that doesn't run when you need it the most (Saturday evenings and Sunday, *cough cough*) No, of course not. Being the busy people we are, we depend on the reliability and availability of our established modes of transportation to get us where we need (or want) to be, in a reasonable amount of time.

That's thrown right out the window here in Morgantown, West Virginia. At least 15,000 students rely on the PRT's little yellow cars to get them where they need to go every day. To class, to the Rec Center, to the store. It will take you just about anywhere, when its working. First of all, it closes at 5 on Saturdays and isn't open at all on Sundays. Yeah, if you live downtown and want to work out during one of the few times you don't have class, too bad. Live up on Evansdale and want to do anything but work out? Oh well. Wanna go to church on Sunday? I hope your Methodist, or like hiking, cause those are really your only options.

OK, so maybe you just sit around on the weekends. The screwy hours really don't matter then. But wait. What's that you say? You have engineering classes? Oh, you poor baby. I hope your professor is OK with you being late at least once a week when you're stuck in a 10x4x7 box for a good 30 minutes, in the middle of nowhere, with a loudspeaker asking you to stay calm and not bash out the windows. Good time to catch up on homework, eh?

How is this acceptable, especially the breaking down? Seriously, if this was a car, there wouldn't be a soul who'd buy it. Really, though, it needs to be fixed. I almost want to make that some sort of senior project. A handful of engineers and computer programmers could fix that thing up in a heartbeat; it's not (At least it shouldn't be) a very complex system: You press a button, a car pulls up, and takes you where you want to go, like a horizontal elevator. Vertical elevators never break down, so what's wrong with the PRT? It must be stupid. I mean, really, it, or the people working it, must be stupid. It's the only logical explanation.

In conclusion, the PRT sucks.

Thank you for your attention.