Automatic travel
Imagine a city transport system 20 years into the future and congestion, air quality and energy efficiency may come to mind, but a driverless bus probably won’t. Yet bus design experts, Capoco Design Ltd, are proposing just this - an automated bus transport system that is economical, frequent and green.

Responsible for about 65 per cent of UK city buses over the past 15 years, with buses in North America, Singapore and China, Capoco are familiar with the demands of running urban transport systems. In 2002 Capoco commissioned a research project with the Royal College of Art resulting in the mobilicity project, a research venture exploring urban travel in the future.

Cheap and green
Alan Ponsford, Capoco’s Design Director says, ‘The surprising thing about a city bus is that about 60 per cent of the running cost is spent on the driver. There's a drive to automate buses and therefore to halve the operating costs.’

The pods that make up Capoco’s driverless bus are designed to run on electricity but can be adapted to use biofuel, or hydrogen in a fuel cell, and can be updated to run on the cleanest fuel available.

The vehicle navigation technology combines satellite positioning and a calibration system using magnets positioned in the road every few metres. The bus navigates using the onboard route map and calibrates every ten metres to ensure that the onboard system knows exactly where the bus is on the route.

Traffic awareness
Ponsford envisages that the system ‘would start with exclusive lanes using the sensors to remain in the lane but in the longer term the aim is to run the vehicles with traffic around them. There are already a lot of AGV (automatic guided vehicles) running inside factories alongside people and forklift trucks on the same basis.’

The next step is to build a trial system with two vehicles to prove the basic functionality of the vehicles. Next year, a pilot system of up to 12 vehicles could be introduced in a closed environment like a campus or an airport to test the installation further.

Ponsford explains, ‘With no driver costs, you can run vehicles as small as five metres long and carrying 24 people, and you can run them more frequently and on more routes.’ As he suggests, transport in the future could be as easy as hopping on a horizontal lift. For the nervous, the lift is probably a more reassuring vision than a driverless bus but, if the mobilicity system is tested successfully, driverless buses could become an everyday sight in the cities of the future!