Photo from Pocket-Lint.co.uk

My vision of a connected mobile environment is edging somewhat closer to reality with the arrival of London Heathrow Airport’s ULTra Personal Rapid Transit System.

Stuart Miles, top chap at Pocket Lint, took a ride on the system and really enjoyed it. He’s got the full details on his post — but to summarise, the system consists of 21 driverless pods that continually drive back and forward from the Terminal 5 business car park, ensuring that the journey time will never be longer than 5 minutes. Previously, when a human was driving the buses, the journey time was 10 minutes. You also had to wait 10 minutes for the bus.

I’ve had worse experiences. I’m sure you have too. Now, with these automated pods, you’ll never wait longer than 34 seconds.

Love. It.

What interests me is how this can be connected into a mobile service. Since you’ve got predictability, you can, I imagine, now consider integrating these units into some kind of broadcast service that my device(s) could pick-up and utilise.

For example, it would be nice to arrive, park the car, then walk to one of these pod ‘stops’ whilst glancing at my British Airways app. I’d like the BA app to have registered that I am in the airport vicinity and to update the company as to my location. I’d also like the app to tell me that there’s a pod coming along in 20 seconds and that my anticipated arrival time at T5 is 5 minutes 22 seconds.

Perhaps that’s overkill.

Speaking of overkill, do check out Stuart’s post — particularly the photo that reads: ‘Danger Automatic Vehicles Can Kill’.

It won’t be long before Skynet is running everything, eh?

The Near Field Communications (NFC) which O2 had been trialling with Nokia has had some optimistic results. Apparently nine out of ten (90%) of the five hundred trialists said they were happy using the technology.

The Oyster Card is a hassle, and personally I hate the thing. Along with having to remember it, place it somewhere safe, but accessible is highly inconvenient.
Ewan said back in January “Integrating it into a mobile handset makes sense to me” and I have to say, I agree.

The results of this trial don’t come as much of a surprise really, when similar uses of technology have been implemented in Japan for example. I hope that this won’t be the end of the line for NFC technology; it’s taken long enough to get here, and from the results of this small, but useful trial scream that there is a strong desire, and liking towards it.

Eighty-nine percent of the trialists said they were interested in having their Oyster Card integrated into their mobile phone.

I want to know, do we ever expect a release date for this technology to be rolled out completely within London’s transport systems?

At the moment, the information is only for some 40 cities in North America but I really hope we’re going to see it coming to the London transport network some time in the very near future. And here’s why: the updated Google Mobile Maps has a feature which can tell you when the last bus or train of the day goes.

So, imagine you’re at an unfamiliar pub somewhere and you really fancy staying for just one more but you don’t know if you’ll miss the last bus home if you do. All you’ve got to do is open up Google Maps and voila: you’ll know in a couple of clicks if you can squeeze in a cheeky half and make the last bus or not.

The version with US transit info is available here.