UK’s first public autonomous taxi trial to begin soon

By Matt Reynolds

STEP into a taxi in south London later this year and you might not have to think about paying a tip. The UK’s first fully public trial of autonomous vehicles will soon be under way.

For four weeks, a fleet of driverless shuttles will each ferry up to five passengers and a “safety warden” along a 2-kilometre route in Greenwich. Previous trials there and in the town of Milton Keynes required participants to register in advance. This time the vehicles will pick up anyone wanting a ride.

The four-stop route will connect a hotel close to the O2 Arena concert venue with the Millennium Village housing development. En route, the shuttles will also call at a river-bus stop and a cable car terminal.

Similar shuttles are already in use at London’s Heathrow airport, but are confined to a purpose-built area off limits to other traffic. In Greenwich, pedestrians and cyclists will be able to access the test route.


The vehicles will lack conventional controls, although the wardens will be able to slow them to a crawl or shut down the autonomous system. There’s little danger of a high-speed collision: the shuttles will be limited to travelling at 15 kilometres per hour.

The taxis could carry hundreds of passengers daily during the trial, according to Simon Tong at TRL, a transport consultancy involved in the work. The trial, funded by the UK government, is part of the wider Gateway project to use Greenwich as a test bed for driverless vehicles.

“Autonomous cars can bring public transport to places not usually served by buses or trains”
Zia Wadud at the University of Leeds, UK, thinks that public transport is the ideal application for driverless vehicles. Autonomous cars can reach places not usually served by buses or trains, he says.

Driverless taxis are coming into service elsewhere, too. Last September, Uber began using them in Pittsburgh, and its rival, Lyft, will test its own autonomous cars in Boston later this year.