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Milton Keynes

Name: Milton Keynes
Address: United Kingdom

Country: United Kingdom
Population: 264K
Projects: 2
First project: 2014
Track record: 1 scaled back
Best evidence: Official
Last verified: 6 August 2026
In the atlas since: 6 August 2026

🤖 AI-generated city profile, summarising the source-checked entries below — how this works

Milton Keynes has been Starship Technologies' longest-running deployment of pavement delivery robots: they have operated here since April 2018, and by 2021 the company said the local fleet of around 200 was its largest anywhere in the world. It is also where the argument caught up with the technology — in 2026 a national pedestrian charity began campaigning against pavement robots, while the UK still had no specific law governing them.

The atlas documents 2 projects in Milton Keynes, the earliest dating to 2014: 1 scaled back, 1 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is official (2 entries) — and links its sources.

All 2 projects in Milton Keynes

✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.

📡 MK:Smart Data Hub Scaled back🏛️ Official 2014–2017 · Completed → 🚲 Starship Autonomous Pavement Delivery Robots 🏛️ Official since 2018 · Live →

Outcome: 1 ongoing · 1 scaled back — Evidence: 2 official

Deeper reads

Where Milton Keynes appears in the atlas's own analysis.

🧯 1 entry in the failure atlas

Compare with other cities

🇫🇮 Helsinki Sohjoa / Sohjoa Baltic Autonomous Minibus Pilots Contrast: an autonomous pilot that ended, against a robot service that became lasting commercial delivery. 🇺🇸 Columbus Smart Columbus Operating System (Open Data Platform) Both grant-built data platforms outlived their funding on paper only — Columbus's went offline, MK's froze with catalogue pages erroring. 🇸🇪 Stockholm Autopiloten: Nobina's Driverless Bus Pilot, Kista to Barkarbystaden Contrast on longevity: ran five years as a real transit line, then was withdrawn for weak demand. 🇰🇷 Busan Osiria Autonomous Bus and the Night BRT Line Parallel: the rare pilot-to-priced-service conversion, the same transition Starship made commercially.

Show 2 more comparisonsShow fewer

🇬🇧 Bristol: Bristol Is Open — Programmable City Network Testbed Two survivors of the same cohort that only look alive: a dormant company in Bristol, a frozen catalogue in Milton Keynes.
🇬🇧 Manchester: CityVerve IoT Smart City Demonstrator Same UK funded cohort, different decay: CityVerve's domain was sold on, MK's portal still answers but has had no new dataset since 2022.

Official strategy and sources

↗ Milton Keynes City CouncilThe organization driving the city's smart-city work.

📎 Cite this city

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Milton Keynes, United Kingdom.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/milton-keynes/ (last verified 2026-08-06). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

🔔 Follow changes to Milton Keynes’s entries (RSS)