UK airport trials public autonomous transit

For those of us in the UK who'd like to read an article about a UK airport written by a UK media organisation...

http://web.archive.org/web/20140912134733/http://www.bbc.com...

"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes."

I'm sure there are excellent legal reasons why UK residents can't access BBC Worldwide content but it is really, really annoying

The irony(?) for me is that I'm a UK ex-pat (who has paid the UK license fee in the UK this year) living in Singapore. But my Singaporean ISP "helpfully" provides VPN connections so that I'm a local in foreign countries (so that I can use Pandora, for instance 'in New York'). So... I'm overseas, but I share all the problems of the UK residents, who are, understandably, also miffed.

PS: Having looked at the video (via the wayback machine) - is it the Sleeper that I'm reminded of? I'm getting deja vu with some 70s SciFi spoof...

PRT has a checkered image. Transit planners dislike PRT and its advocates for a number of reasons. The big one is that in principle, modality isn't key to providing mobility - you can get it from a car, a bus, or a rail system as long as each of those things reach destinations you're interested in with appropriate frequency and capacity; the sustainability of the system is a measure of how the system is planned, as much as it is the modalities it encompasses. If your city is such that everyone commutes in big morning and evening rush hours to known "downtown" destinations, you can already plan the capacity and routes around that with adjustments to bus and train schedules. In turn this intersects with other urban planning goals around how to develop the city as a whole - transit guides zoning and zoning guides transit, and those things aren't easily separated.

So when PRT boosters come in and proclaim a silver bullet by switching modality, skepticism is natural. I think the technology is worthy myself(and I was more strongly for it once upon a time) but it has to be a fit for the overall policy, and this explains why its foothold has been in airports, where a very easy case can be made for 24/7 on-demand capacity. A PRT-centric policy at the city level would imply that everyone wants to go to arbitrary destinations at any time of day, which is purely a win for any individual rider, and probably is ideal for cities in general, but rings false for a planner dealing with the here-and-now.

This is one of these things where instead of an article with a bunch of pictures, someone should have just turned on his smartphone camera and done a video of using one.

You know, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7OxvLuK83g

(The voice is eerily Half-Life..)

If the efficiency claims are true, it's pretty awesome.

There is a lot of public transportation that fails to be more efficient than cars because it is high-latency, failure prone, and doesn't handle peak and off-peak demand well.

Imagine replacing Boston's Green Line with a system like this. Always a pod to take you to whichever branch you want to go, now.

The article does not mention that similar setups are already in operation in Schipol airport and Abu Dhabi. http://www.2getthere.eu/

If they don't change course it seems unlikely it would have been less efficient to have a small tram like operation. Or am I missing something?

Is there any public information on how these navigate around?