
UK airport trials public autonomous transit - hakkasan
http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20140910-hands-off-with-heathrows-pods
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blutack
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...](http://web.archive.org/web/20140912134733/http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20140910-hands-
off-with-heathrows-pods)

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hackerboos
I'm pretty infuriated that I can't access this.

Wait until evading the license fee becomes a civil offense.

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calpaterson
"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

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johneth
It's because of the BBC's 'Fair Trading Guidelines' \-
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/howwework/poli...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/howwework/policiesandguidelines/fairtrading.html)

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mdda
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...

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chipsy
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.

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revelation
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7OxvLuK83g)

(The voice is eerily Half-Life..)

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Zigurd
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.

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scoot
What that statistic misses is the fact that the pods only cover the last mile
between medium-term parking and the terminal. Users still have fro drive all
the way to Heathrow to tai advantage of the cost savings (and drive past the
terminal for anther mile to park and get the pod back again). Meanwhile the
overpriced 'short stay' parking sits half empty.

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

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glomph
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?

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damian2000
Maybe the upfront cost of this is a lot lower?

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sjtrny
Is there any public information on how these navigate around?

