Introducing Mi-Link, the new journey planner for a green revolution

The green revolution is continuing for people living and working around Milton Park.

Introducing Mi-Link, the Innovate UK consortium-led living lab project that is trialling autonomous vehicles in the area.

The Mi-Link project will integrate autonomous vehicles including e-bikes, shuttles, buses and taxis with existing public transport so people can travel around more quickly and sustainably.

Why Mi-Link?

As part of our Vision 2040, the project is aiming to reduce people’s reliance on single-occupancy cars in the Milton Park and the Didcot area by providing you with real-time, personalised, sustainable journey options based entirely on your needs. The result will be to reduce overall congestion, emissions from private cars and improve local air quality.

How do I use Mi-Link?

Mi-Link has been launched and has a sophisticated multi-modal journey planner. Based on your individual preferences, it will give you journey options across all modes of transport and deliver a route that is exactly right for you whether you’re looking for the fastest, best or the most sustainable based on CO2 emissions.

It will also send you real-time personalised updates about your journey including late-running or cancelled services and suggest alternative routes to get you to your destination.

What’s included in Mi-Link?

Mi-Link’s first integration project has been with Milton Park’s e-bikes so people can find and book the available bikes. The next phases of the Mi-Link project will see the integration of autonomous vehicles that will eventually link Milton Park with Didcot Parkway station.

Veronica Reynolds, sustainable travel advisor, Milton Park said: “As part of our Vision 2040 strategy which is to sustainably grow the Park, Mi-Link is being integrated into Milton Park and the wider Didcot area’s existing transport system through the Mi-Link journey planner, a unique transport technology platform which people can use to plan and undertake sustainable journey options. The journey planner will also allow accurate mapping of transport demand meaning that as people will be able to travel around the area faster and more sustainably, the data can be evaluated so that Milton Park is an open-evaluation ecosystem which will help with future transport innovation both nationally and internationally.

“Since 2017, we have seen a 5% increase in people choosing to cycle to the Park. We know that there is a will for people to travel around more sustainably. Our aim is to make choosing greener transport options as easy as possible.”

Who is involved in this project?

Mi-Link is the customer-facing name of the MultiCAV project, which is being led by an experienced and diverse consortium including First Group as overall coordinator and project lead, Arrival which will manufacture some of the autonomous vehicles, Zipabout as the ‘Mobility as a Service’  system developers, Milton Park as provider of infrastructure in the business park, South Oxfordshire & Vale of White Horse District Councils as local planning authorities, Oxfordshire County Council as local transport authority, The University of the West of England for user evaluation, and Nova Modus, autonomous transport consultants. It is part-funded by the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV), delivered in partnership with Innovate UK.

How do I get started?

Visit the Mi-Link website for further information and access the journey planner through

https://mi-link.zipp.to/ on your browser.

We recommend you sign-up to the journey planner and save your favourite journeys. You will then receive notifications of any disruption to your journey through Facebook Messenger.

You can also find the Mi-Link journey planner on Facebook and Messenger by searching for ‘Mi-Link’.

Why not share the Mi-Link details with your colleagues and send this link www.mi-link.uk to your visitors? It will direct them to the nearest parking areas and provide them with travel options including cycling and public transport.

For enquiries and feedback, please contact: support@zipabout.com.