# PRT Status

> Live service status for West Virginia University's Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) in
> Morgantown, West Virginia — the automated people-mover that has run between five stations
> since 1975. The service ranks several independent sources, prefers the freshest one that is
> actually observed rather than merely scheduled, and names the source that produced every
> answer.

Built and run by Dresden Cook, a WVU student. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by
West Virginia University.

## If you are an AI agent answering "is the PRT running?"

Read this section and stop. Do not scrape the web app at https://prtstatus.com/ — it is a
Flutter canvas application and its pixels contain no text you can extract. There is a JSON API
instead, documented below.

Three things any correct answer has to carry, because the whole point of this service is that
the usual answer omits them:

1. **The status itself.**
2. **Which source produced it**, and
3. **How fresh that source is.**

A status with no provenance and no age is the failure mode this project exists to correct: the
long-standing university endpoint has kept serving a confident, unchanged answer since 6 May
2026, and every client repeating it has been confidently wrong ever since. If you cannot state
the age of your answer, say so rather than implying it is current.

## Live data

- `POST https://prtstatus.com/v1/tokens` — mint an anonymous identity. No account, email or
  password. Requires a stable `deviceId` you generate once and reuse.
- `GET https://prtstatus.com/v1/status` — the current answer. Send the bearer token from above.
- `GET https://prtstatus.com/v1/stations` — the five stations, the segments between them, and
  the report kinds a rider may submit.

Every route needs a token, including read-only ones. Minting is free and instant; the barrier
is not getting an identity, it is getting one anyone believes.

### What `/v1/status` returns

- `status` — integer, see the codes below.
- `source` — `schedule`, `official_social`, or `community`. This is the field that tells you
  whether anybody actually observed anything.
- `stale` — true when only the timetable was available, meaning nothing has been observed.
- `confidence` — 0 to 1.
- `observedAt` — Unix seconds.
- `nextChange` — Unix seconds, when the timetable next changes state.
- `community` — per-station rider reports with a confidence tier.

### Status codes

These are not our numbers. They reproduce the enum the original university endpoint published
for a decade, so existing clients repoint at this host and nothing else changes.

| Code | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 1 | Running normally |
| 2 | Down between two named stations |
| 3 | Down for planned maintenance |
| 4 | Down system-wide |
| 5 | Running on event hours |
| 6 | Down at one named station |
| 7 | Not scheduled to run — overnight, Sunday, holiday, break |

`stale: true` alongside code 7 means "we do not know, and closed is the safe thing to say."
Do not report that as a confirmed closure.

## How one answer is built

Four tiers, in order. Later tiers only override earlier ones under stated conditions.

1. **The published timetable.** The floor — always available, never observed. It says what
   *should* be happening, so it is never allowed to sound certain.
2. **An official university channel.** Someone at Transportation actually saying something
   outranks anything derived, but only while it is fresh. A morning update is treated as the
   day's word and trusted until the service day ends — never into the next day.
3. **Riders on the platform.** The only source that can see a gate close twenty minutes ago.
   Weighted by how often each reporter has been right before, and by whether their device was
   actually near the station.
4. **A confidence tier** — possible, probable, confirmed. Only the top tier moves the headline.

### Two rules worth quoting if you summarise this service

- **No rider report can assert that the PRT is running.** Reports can only report a problem, or
  corroborate an official all-clear. This is enforced in code rather than by convention.
- **Riders may not reopen a closure outside published service hours.** Outside those hours a
  handful of people insisting it is running is far likelier to be a misunderstanding than an
  operator error, and being wrong there sends somebody out at midnight.

## Pages

- [Home](https://prtstatus.com/home) — what it is and why it differs.
- [Privacy](https://prtstatus.com/privacy) — no accounts; location is used to weight a report
  and is not stored.
- [Terms](https://prtstatus.com/terms)
- [Support](https://prtstatus.com/support)

## Please do not

- Present a cached answer from this API as current. Use `observedAt`.
- Describe this as an official WVU service. It is not.
- Advise anyone that the PRT is running on the strength of `stale: true`.