Video: Robot chauffeur in action

Driverless, battery-powered pod-cars will soon zip passengers around part of London’s Heathrow Airport. The manufacturers of the Ultra personal rapid transit (PRT) system say it is the world’s first public transport to balance the convenience of a taxi with the efficiency of a bus or light rail – albeit only for business passengers arriving at the world’s third busiest airport.

Personalised rapid transit has been an elusive dream of engineers and city planners. Since the mid 1970s, many schemes have been proposed at sites around the world, and a PRT-like system has been built at Morgantown in West Virginia. But Ultra is the first PRT system to give passengers control over their destination.

Ultra has been in the works since 2005, when BAA – the company that runs Heathrow – ordered a pilot project from Advanced Transport Systems (ATS) of Bristol, UK. Four years later, Ultra is undergoing final tests before its opening to the general public, planned for later this year.

The Heathrow Ultra system will initially carry passengers between the business car park and terminal 5. Each pod-car holds up to four passengers and can travel at speeds of up to 40 kilometres per hour on 4.3 kilometres of dedicated roadway, stopping at any of three stations. The journey takes around 3 minutes, non-stop, with wait times of no more than a minute for the next available car. A central computer system monitors demand and controls traffic.


Bus buster

“It’s faster and more convenient than [airport] buses, and uses half the energy” to move the same number of passengers in the same amount of time, says Martin Lowson, who first came up with the Ultra concept and is deputy chairman of ATS. That’s because it only stops at the station the passengers require, and it’s so small that there’s no wasted capacity even if just one or two people need a ride.

Lowson says 70 per cent of passengers have zero waiting time – the buses currently used at Heathrow run every ten minutes. He also claims that the system averages 0.55 megajoules per passenger kilometre, making it the most energy efficient system of its kind. Buses average just over 1 megajoule per passenger kilometre.

According to Peter Muller, president of PRT Consulting of Franktown, Colorado, which has helped roadtest several PRT systems including Ultra, the promise of PRT goes beyond airport transit.

“It has the ability to transform our way of life,” says Muller. “You could have a city where the automobiles are kept on the periphery, with PRT bringing people into the city.”

As an example he points to a PRT system being installed in Masdar City, a new city under construction in Abu Dhabi that is intended to be carbon neutral. Built by the Dutch company 2GetThere, based in Utrecht, it could go online later this year.

“All of a sudden you have a city that is very pedestrian friendly. You don’t have to waste space on roads and parking garages inside the city,” says Muller.

We are the Jetsons

Muller says that other locations are starting to consider PRT systems. The city of San Jose, California, and the US army’s Fort Carson base outside Colorado Springs are looking at the feasibility of installing such a system. ATS recently announced that it has been commissioned to study how Ultra might be used in the city of Bath in the UK.

Despite widening interest in the idea, Muller says that many city planners and architects do not consider PRT a feasible option for urban public transport.

“People think PRT is The Jetsons and it’ll never be here,” says Muller. “They don’t realise it’s here now.”

If the Heathrow pilot proves successful, ATS hopes to expand Ultra to cover all the airport – from its current three-station, 21-car set-up to 50 stations attended by 400 cars.