A leading business commentator and sociologist is accusing the city council of being locked in the 1970s with its transport thinking - and proposed a radical solution.

Prof Richard Scase says that instead of spending millions on a multi-storey car park, it should be looking to the future with technology like driverless passenger pods to ferry people in and out of the city - cutting traffic and pollution.

And he believes planned huge new developments on the edge of the city would be the ideal opportunity to investigate such modes of transport to reduce car journeys.

The highly-respected academic, who is Emeritus Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the University of Kent, accuses developers of talking up sustainable transport "as a sop" to the council with offers of features like cycle tracks.

"On the many days we have where the weather is not good, families are just not going to cycle into Canterbury - it just won't happen," he said.

Instead he points to towns like Milton Keynes and Swindon which are already about to pilot the futuristic pods, which he says will be much more flexible than traditional bus services.

"These and other towns are experimenting with computer-operated, driverless passenger pods operating on dedicated tracks," he said.

"They take up little more space and width than cycle tracks and are cheap to operate. A small heritage city like Canterbury offers a perfect opportunity for this option to be explored.

"Surely a collaborative study between the council, a tech company and a local developer to assess the feasibility of such a scheme would be an exciting project.

"Such initiatives are being explored in cities across the whole of Europe and we could having the pods coming into Canterbury from these developments."

He also predicted that car ownership could plummet as new driverless forms of transport are developed in the future and air pollution "would sort itself".

"I cannot believe the city council cannot commit to some research on it with our universities, but to stick to the old-fashioned model of building another car park takes us back to 1970s thinking."

But city council leader Simon Cook says Canterbury is a very different place to Milton Keynes to try and introduce such transport technology.

"What you have is a modern purpose-built town built for the motor car compared to a medieval city." he said.

"I don't blame anyone for crystal ball gazing but fundamentally, the core of Canterbury hasn't changed for a 1,000 years.

"It's an intriguing concept but I don't think Canterbury is the right place for it. As a city council we have plenty on our plate and I am not sure our residents would thank us for spending their money on something quite so speculative.

"It's hard to see how you would integrate those sort of things, although if someone comes forward with an idea and funding, we will always look at it."