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Robocabs Coming to Europe
Roland Piquepaille writes "Almost all of us can recall both good and poor memories of taxi rides when we arrived in a city we didn't know. This is why a short article from Spiegel Online, 'Bringing Robot Transportation to Europe,' caught my eye this morning. It briefly describes the European 'CityMobil' project which involves 28 partners in 10 countries at a cost of €40 million. This project plans to eliminate city drivers and three trial sites have already been selected. For example, in 2008, Terminal 5 in London's Heathrow airport will be connected to the car park by driverless electric cars along a 4-kilometer track. Read more for additional pictures and references about this project to make the roads in Europe's cities more efficient."
I found a more insightful article that explains the advantage of this system over existing airport shuttle systems:
The difference for passengers will be not so much the journey time - which will be about four minutes - but how long they have to wait. Instead of huddling under a shelter for as long as 20 minutes as they currently do waiting for a bus, the pod will be at most a minute away.