UK Town To Get Driverless 'Pods' Mixing With Pedestrians

Bruce66423 writes "Milton Keynes is the most successful new town in the U.K., being built on a green field site from the '60s onward. Initially famous for concrete cows, it is the home of the Open University, which offers college-level courses at home. Now, the U.K. Business Secretary has announced plans to have small driverless cars shuttle people around parts of the town starting in 2015. There will be about 20 of the pod-like vehicles to start, each capable of holding two people. They will have their own pathways and move at about 12mph. The plan is to continue developing and testing the vehicles, and by 2017, 100 of them will share walkways with pedestrians."

Re:Really?

[Manic Miner]

While that's a fair comment - it is the butt of jokes. However it is usually from people who've never actually lived there, and those who are such bad drivers they can't cope with a roundabout ;) It's build on a grid system, so would be familiar to US readers, only instead of traffic light intersections it has roundabouts. What this means in practice is that using the major roads it's possible to get everywhere quickly and easily, even in rush hour you don't get caught for too long. Because these grid roads are also isolated from the housing areas, usually by banks or trees the road noise is not too bad either, and it has lots of parks open space and water. Yes it's a bit soulless but practically it's very well thought out.

Re:Just be done with it.

[Tx]

According to the chart on this page [wikipedia.org] (direct link to chart [wikipedia.org]), we (UK) are in third place behind the USA and Mexico. It is a big jump up to US levels though, but we're working on it.

Re:2 passengers? Should be 3.

[Anonymous Coward]

Woosh indeed.

7 MOD 3 assumes you are going to pack each pod to capacity and then shove the remainder in the extra car.

What GP is suggesting is that since 7 / 3 requires 3 cars anyway, people will arrange into a 3/2/2 configuration instead of 3/3/1.