Eco friendly pods to carry people to Heathrow's Terminal 5
Eco friendly pods to carry people to Heathrow's Terminal 5
Battery powered pods for transporting passengers are to be trialled at Heathrow. The pods will carry travellers from their cars to Terminal 5 and are being described as a huge improvement on the existing shuttle bus service.
The trials of the
Ultra A system will begin at Heathrow within weeks, reports The Telegraph. Each pod can carry up to four adults and two children as well as their luggage.
Passengers using Terminal 5 at the
London airport will have to wait under a minute for a pod to pick them up from the car park. The journey should take three minutes with the pods travelling at 25mph.
Travellers will be carried the 2.4 miles to the terminal via a concrete track - at present the shuttle buses navigate the airport using conventional roads. It is expected that up to half a million passengers per year will make use of the new system.
As well as speeding up the transit of passengers, the pods also have
eco friendly credentials. The pods' batteries will recharge when the vehicles are still and will use up to 70 per cent less energy than a car making the same journey. Furthermore, no CO2 will be emitted.
Heathrow's operator, BAA, hopes that the system can be extended to other parts of the airport. Wider use of the pods would help the airport to keep within the air quality targets that the government has set as a condition for the construction of a
third runway at Heathrow. If expanded to the whole airport, up to 500 pods could be required.
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