Self-driving taxis are being touted by some as the panacea for easy urban transport, with one South African billionaire a particular proponent. But shifting passengers from mass transit to individual vehicles is unlikely to solve city congestion. It’s probably going to make it worse. At DRIFTx, Abu Dhabi’s “flagship exhibition for smart and sustainable mobility”, the Emirate’s Investment Office, ADIO, has announced a partnership with an innovative alternative solution, Glydways to explore another route. I talked to founder and CEO of Glydways, Mark Seeger, about how his company’s transport tech is different.
Glydways: Mass Transit, Only This Time It’s Personal
“The problem we’re solving is how to move huge volumes of people without congesting the roads,” says Seeger. “We also try to provide a better passenger experience at a lower cost than you can get from a taxi.” The Glydways technology is still based on individual vehicles for each passenger journey, like a taxi, which is available on demand, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It also goes non-stop, autonomously, from passenger pickup to destination. This sounds like a RoboTaxi, but the capacity levels are much higher.
“We can move 10,000 people per hour in a two-meter-wide lane, which is rail levels of capacity in a fraction of the space,” says Seeger. He also makes bold claims about the costs of a Glydways service. “We can do it with a CAPEX that is 90 to 95% lower than a train system, which is the only other way to do this, but the OPEX is also a fraction of the cost of rail, meaning we can sell a private chauffeured vehicle experience at the cost of a bus or a train fare, and that’s never been done before without subsidy.”
This is a particularly attractive proposition for a country like the United Arab Emirates, which has huge cities with extremely dense traffic congestion. “Putting more autonomous vehicles on the road is going to make the problem worse,” argues Seeger. He also explains that putting in an urban rail service would be prohibitively expensive, with a large footprint, whereas Glydways can fit alongside existing roads and offer similar ticket prices to a bus. “We’re only two meters wide, the size of a bike lane, and we can be on the ground, above ground, or below ground. When you then start talking to cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, that solves their need, whether connecting an existing train system into the suburbs or providing mass transit networks where I can’t put in a train for economic or physical reasons.”
Seeger says Glydways is a profitable commercial service that doesn’t require public funding. “We bring in private capital to fund the CAPEX,” he says, citing investment partners including Macquarie Group, Sintra, Star America, Planning Group, and ACS Group. “We provide profitable, high-capacity mobility infrastructure, which the world hasn’t seen since World War One.”
Why Glydways Favors Abu Dhabi
As with many innovative transportation infrastructure providers, such as Archer Aviation, Glydways sees Abu Dhabi as a unique partner. The Emirate takes an unusually progressive approach to developing regulations for these new approaches, particularly those involving autonomous systems and AI. The DRIFTx event showcased a range of autonomous taxi and drone technologies, but the Glydways approach is subtly different.
“Any robot taxi company is slave to the congestion that already exists on the road,” says Seeger. “Just putting an autonomous vehicle on the public roads does absolutely nothing for anybody except the passenger in the vehicle, because they get to take a nap. In fact, you’re making congestion worse, which has been proven in San Francisco, where Waymo operates.”
The secret sauce of Glydways’s technology is that its vehicles use a dedicated roadway, rather than the public routes employed by private vehicles. “You have roadways, railways, and Glydways – it’s the same concept,” says Seeger. “You must build an infrastructure that is as smart as the vehicle, with distributed intelligence between the vehicle and the infrastructure that moderates and manages the flow to achieve high throughput and low economics. The two go hand in hand. The higher the flow rate, the lower the cost. A robot taxi does the opposite. It provides low capacity at a really high cost.”
“The last 150 years of moving large volumes of people is based on an intellectual paradigm called aggregation,” explains Seeger. “You build a huge vehicle, like a bus or a train, and you share it with lots of people. Then you take this big vehicle, and you move it down the street or the train tracks. That’s mass transit. What we have technologically discovered is that when you disaggregate mass transit, packetize it down to the individual passenger, magical things happen. Number one, the vehicle size shrinks. You go from a 300-person vehicle to a four-person vehicle. If my vehicle size shrinks, my infrastructure shrinks, so my CAPEX comes way down. But the real magic here is that on my operational unit economics basis, I never lose money because I only deploy a vehicle when someone’s paying for a ride. No shared vehicle can do that, not a bus, nor a tram, nor a train. You go from a small fleet of huge vehicles, to a very large fleet of very small vehicles that allow all the economics to unlock without ever sacrificing the volume of people that you serve.”
Glydways Is Not A RoboTaxi
The user experience Glydways is proposing is a bit like a ride hailing service, where you use an app to request a journey. However, you then go to the nearest stop on the Glydways route to be picked up. “We have stations,” says Seeger. “We call them Access Points.” However, these aren’t like bus stops. The Glydways vehicles don’t halt at every single one. The passenger’s requested vehicle goes to their chosen Access Point like a taxi, and then straight to the destination Access Point. Having lots of these stops therefore doesn’t slow down throughput, as it would with a bus or train that halts at each one. “We have offline embarkation where there’s no penalty to adding more stations. I can have a station every 200 meters.” Users can also go to a nearby Access Point and use a built-in device to request a journey, rather than their own smartphone.
The delineated roadway is also a key difference to a self-driving car service. “Unlike a RoboTaxi, which is an autonomous vehicle that you put on public roads, we use autonomous vehicles on our own lanes, like a train,” says Seeger. “This removes all the bottlenecks to capacity so you can move lots and lots of people.” The delineated roadway doesn’t provide tracks or power, but it is smart enabled to facilitate throughput and safety. “We can combine each vehicle’s own autonomous perception with infrastructure perception such that we observe 100% of the infrastructure, 100% of the time. When there is an incursion – a dog, a cat, or a basketball – we know about it when it happens, not when a vehicle perceives it. It has 800 milliseconds to respond. So our safety is high, and we can reroute vehicles around the problem if we need to.”
This is a realization of the smart city concept, where urban infrastructure interacts directly with personal mobility. “We put up a light pole every 100 meters that observes the track in the front and back,” says Seeger. “That’s communicating to vehicles using the triple ISM (industrial, scientific and medical) radio band. We’re a public transit system, so we must have multiple layers of redundancy to guarantee just one hazardous event every 10,000 years of operation. RoboTaxis have a much lower safety standard.”
Seeger deemphasizes the innovation in the Glydways vehicle itself, although it is an autonomous system with cutting edge technology. “The vehicles are beautiful, but they’re nothing special,” he says. “They’re bidirectional. Suzuki manufactures them. It’s just a four-person electric autonomous vehicle. Top speed is 100 kilometers an hour, but because it’s continuous flow, our average speed is 50 kph, which is multiple times faster than a bus or a train or a car in a city. So we don’t need to go so fast and still get you there quicker than anything else.”
Although Abu Dhabi will be a key flagship location for Glydways, it’s not the first. “We’ve deployed in cities around the world, including Singapore,” says Seeger. “In 2026 we’re launching in New York City and Atlanta, Georgia. We’re breaking ground on three other systems, one in Japan, one in Manila, the Philippines, and one that I can’t talk about yet. Then we have 17 projects currently under design and negotiation. However, although we’re exploring projects all over the world, we’ve established an office in the UAE because we’re very committed to this region. I would be very disappointed if you did not see a Glydway system up and running within two years in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.”
“Putting autonomous vehicles on roads, it’s an interesting science experiment,” concludes Seeger. “It’s great for me as the passenger, but it adds negative value to society, because very few people can afford it, and I’m making congestion worse. That’s not what we’re about. We’re about solving city problems. I want to get you to your job or affordable housing or your education better, for as little cost as possible.” It’s a bold dream, and Abu Dhabi will be one of the first places where we will find out how well Glydways can become a reality.