You have to admit that some of the most untold ideas ever have come out of France: Henri Leconte, Minitel, Daft Punk and, best of all, Aramis. So, imagine my delight when I travelled to Morgantown, West Virginia in July and discovered one of the world’s only extant personal rapid transit systems, still in operation!
The Morgantown PRT is a pretty dinky little system, really, but just as described in Bruno Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology, you’re able to choose which station you go to, and your own personal pod will bypass any intermediate stations in order to get there!
My personal highlight, apart from taking a ride in one of these canary yellow future pods (check out the pics in the gallery below!), was spending an evening sitting on the balcony of the Morgantown Brew Pub and watching them glide by in the darkness, a sight I was pretty unsuccessful in capturing with my camera, as you can see in the banner image above.
Anyway, as someone who’s tried to write a PRT into a still-unfinished novel, the whole experience gave me some much-needed inspiration.
