A new option on German public transport: Driverless cars

If you were to guess the first place in Germany where commuters could use a self-driving car as part of the public transport system, you might suggest Berlin, the Bavarian capital Munich, or the high-tech stronghold of Stuttgart. 

You might suggest a lot of places before you get as far as Langen, a town of fewer than 40,000 souls based 15 kilometers south of Frankfurt. But you'd be missing out. 

This week, the first public test users were invited to try KIRA – a project designed to integrate autonomous vehicles into public transit. It won't happen overnight, though. 

Knut Ringat, the managing director of the Rhine-Main metropolitan area's transport association RVN, said that he hopes to have KIRA operating as a viable option by 2030 – and here's the rub: especially in rural areas.

While we might think of self-driving private-hire taxis as operating in the big city, be it San Francisco, Singapore or Shanghai, Ringat is targeting his public-transit robocars at rural areas. He notes that the bus services, already inadequate, will likely get worse in years to come due to an increasing shortage of drivers.

"Today, more than 40 percent of our drivers are over 55, which means that in the next 10 years, we will lose half of our drivers, so we need an alternative," Ringat said.

"We have a great responsibility for the rural areas in the region, in the development of equal living spaces and the connection of rural areas to the urban centers."

As with apps like Uber, users tell the app their pick-up and drop-off points and wait for a car to arrive – except this time there's no driver to rate, five-star or otherwise. 

Although KIRA is only available in Langen for now, the plan is to roll it out to commuters in nearby Darmstadt later in the year.

And if you're worried about the possibility of collisions, let it be known that Langen might be the perfect testing base for another reason: it's the national headquarters of Deutsche Flugsicherung… Germany's air traffic control.