Cambridge Autonomous Metro
About
I worked with Dr David Cleevely and Professor John Miles from the Technical Advisory Committee to the Cambridge Autonomous Metro to develop a counter-proposal for a region-wide autonomous transit system as part of my Master's degree at the Cambridge University Engineering Department. The approach taken focused on developing an innovative autonomous transit system using smaller vehicles to reduce cost whilst offering higher quality transport.
Our work was submitted to the Mayor of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority who called it a "game-changer". The report which I contributed to can be found on the link below.
CAM
The previous work carried out for the Cambridge Autonomous Metro focused primarily on the use of high passenger capacity (>150 pax) autonomous trams and large bore tunnels underneath the City of Cambridge.
There were two key issues identified with this:
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High cost - the system was likely to be unaffordable previously proposed
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Inflexible to technological development
My work focused on developing conceptual designs (concept vehicles, underground station designs, and concept of operations) using low capacity vehicles (~20 pax). This reduced the proposed cost from £4.5 billion to less than £2 billion whilst allowing a highly attractive, fast, and frequent service to be delivered, addressing both of these issues.
See the slides below.
CamCross Mobility Limited
I founded CamCross Mobility Limited in order to bid for £200,000 funding from the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority's One CAM Concept Design competition and develop my ideas further. I created a fantastic consortium of SMEs to provide expertise spanning Urban Design, Transport Planning, Autonomous Vehicles, Modelling of cities, and Electric Vehicle Engineering. Whilst we fell slightly short of qualifying for the contract, the experience that I gained from this was invaluable and I wish the CPCA luck with the CAM project going forwards.