Heathrow Airport will soon get the world’s first driverless personal rapid transport (PRD) system. Sounds cool.
They’ll be on-demand, with no no timetables, no emissions and no rails. They can technically be programmed to go to any destination, with touch-screens inside each pod to choose the destination. 18 of these pods will ferry you at up to 25mph to & from the business car park to the new terminal 5 building currently being built. It’s already under construction and should be completed in less than two years, at a cost of £25M.
According to the people implementing this, ATS from Bristol, the maximum wait time is only 12 seconds. Whats more, vehicles will have their own dedicated paths, with no congestion and no traffic lights, so they’re promising a non-stop journey. Sounds awesome.
Airport, ATS, Heathrow, Heathrow Airport, PRT, transport
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Jonathan Fren - who has written 32 posts on Ministry of Genius //*MoG*\.
Jonathan is the founder of 31CW, a creative and web development firm catering to larger clients around the world including fortune 100's and several government agencies. He also co-founded and is the CTO of Profile Builder, launched at the August Capital Techcrunch party in 2007.
More recently, he's been working with a lot of people on very innovative ventures, including UK government agencies and corporations on groundbreaking web and technology projects through his UK-based creative and technology firm Lucky Upstairs. He's also the CTO of txttrans, a groundbreaking UK-based mobile payments provider and enterprise mobile platform. He is currently associated with over 30 companies.
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December 19th, 2007 at 10:57 am
It looks great but I wonder if 18 is going to be enough. I imagine they are going to get full pretty quickly especially if you have a lot of luggage to drag around.
Jas.
http://www.jasonslater.co.uk