Oxfordshire's Milton Park home to UK’s first electric self-driving bus service
At 10am on Thursday, 2 March, residents of Milton Park near Didcot took the UK’s first ever fully electric autonomous bus service, the latest development in a series of green travel schemes for the community.
Operated by First Bus, the wheelchair- and pushchair-accessible minibus runs every 15 minutes to shuttle passengers between stops like the Bee House workspace and Milton Feast street market, with others including Didcot Parkway train station planned for later this year.
The scheme is accompanied by Zipabout’s Mi-Link journey planner, customised for Milton Park to provide real-time service updates on regular apps like WhatsApp—another first for the UK. Mi-Link is also integrated with the community’s bike and e-bike share scheme, with bikes located at stops around Milton Park.
This comes after a successful demonstration day at the Bee House on 23 January, attended by local business and political leaders, Buses Minister Richard Holden MP and the project’s consortium partners.
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Daniel Chick, CTO of Zipabout, said: “We’re very excited to see the launch of this innovative fully electric autonomous bus service, which integrates with Zipabout’s technology to provide passengers with the customised Mi-Link journey planner.
“As part of the service, passengers now have hassle-free access to a variety of tools helping them travel around Milton Park seamlessly. Using the data and insight from the Zipabout Platform, local authorities and operators can now better understand transport demand in the area, paving the way to helping people get to and around Milton Park more sustainably.”
Councillor Duncan Enright, Cabinet Member for Travel and Development Strategy, added: “Oxfordshire is at the forefront of the developments in autonomous vehicles and we, as a council, are proud to be a partner. Innovation like this has an important role to play in helping us achieve our goal of creating a net-zero transport network by 2040.”
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