Daventry ambition for transport system gets personal

 
Daventry in Northamptonshire plans to be the first UK council to install an urban ‘personal rapid transport’ (PRT) system – by 2014.


Driverless electric passenger-carrying ULTra ‘cabs’, running automatically along guided routes, could penetrate the town’s ‘Radburn’-style mazes of residential cul-de-sacs, which are impenetrable to buses.


The effect could lift public transport use from its present 4% to some 33% – critical to achieving modal shift as the town’s population doubles under the Government’s Sustainable Communities Plan.


Daventry District Council is currently in discussions with Northamptonshire County Council as the local transport authority.


Other possible locations include Corby, Kettering and historic towns, such as Bath. Bus operators are interested in PRT networks as potential feeder services for their routes – and, because being driverless, they are cheap to run.


Longer term, Nathan Koren, of ULTra manufacturer ATS, sees PRT systems running foyer-to-foyer across high-rise business park and residential schemes and linking them to conventional public transport.

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