Transport for London (TfL) is the local government body regulating London's transport network, including bus, rail, taxi and private-hire vehicle licensing.
London assembly's transport committee wants TfL to hold full power to permit or suspend robotaxis, the Guardian reported. Uber has more than 100,000 people on its London waitlist, but for fully driverless cabs the Department for Transport issues permits and TfL can only consent.
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Uber and Pony.ai will start testing Pony.ai's Gen-7 robotaxis in London within weeks as part of a push to put 2,000 robotaxis on European roads. TechCrunch reported that the partners have not yet said who will own and operate the London fleet, and that decides who pays for the cars.
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Lime has given nine London boroughs £886,857 to create or expand 586 e-bike parking bays and is offering councils a further £1m. The market leader pays this voluntarily while the government prepares a London-wide licensing system under TfL.
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Peckham Rye's £45m step-free scheme requires demolishing an art gallery and hand-cutting listed brickwork, planning records reviewed by City AM show. Critics call it proof that rules inflate British infrastructure costs, though the records support that charge only in part.
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Office of Rail and Road figures show nearly 2,500 physical assaults on rail workers in 2025-26, inside a record total of almost 25,000 reported incidents. For operators, the question now is how much of the response has to come out of their own staffing and security budgets.
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British Transport Police is extending a £320,786 facial recognition trial that scanned over 500,000 faces and produced one false alert and no arrests. Its public defence leans on arrests officers made during deployments that its own performance data leaves out.
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Fares match a standard UberX and there is no tip prompt, so the economics of this launch phase are not about cost per mile. Uber's own survey found more than 100,000 interested Londoners, against 15 licensed cars.
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Pony.ai and Verne have taken the safety driver out of a 22km route in Zagreb and left the bookings inside Uber. The partners want more than 2,000 cars on European roads, and the union-wide small series path allows 1,500 a year.
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Britain's permit route for cars with nobody in the driver's seat opened on 15 May, and nobody in London has cleared its first stage. So the fastest way to paying passengers was the licence that mandates a human.
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The first autonomous rides in the UK arrive with a licensed driver in every seat and a fare no higher than a normal Uber, and the $8.6 billion valuation is really a bet on the regulatory approval still to come.
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Fewer than 20 Mach-Es at ordinary Uber fares, each with a Transport for London licensed operator aboard, which makes this a strong test of rider demand and dispatch integration and no test at all of driverless cost.
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Fifteen supervised cars joined the Uber app in London on Thursday under a licence that keeps a human in the driving seat until a separate agency, which few expect to move this year, says otherwise.
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