The taxi app company Uber and the autonomous technology developer Wayve have been granted the first minicab licences in London, allowing them to offer self-driving taxi rides to paying customers – but with a human safety driver in place, for now.

The companies said they would start trips in the UK “later this summer” before the full public launch.

The San Francisco-headquartered Uber and London-based Wayve are racing against the Google-owned Waymo and its Chinese equivalent Baidu’s Apollo Go to launch self-driving taxi services in London. Their progress is being watched closely because the British capital will be one of the first cities in the world to have American and Chinese tech firms operating on the same roads.

Uber and Wayve said more than 100,000 Londoners were on their waiting list for the self-driving taxis.

Transport for London (TfL), the capital’s licensing authority, granted 15 private hire vehicle licences to Ford Mustang Mach-E vehicles equipped with Wayve’s artificial intelligence driving software, as well as surround cameras and radar. The companies said TfL had confirmed they reached the required safety standards.

A TfL-licensed private hire driver will sit in the driver’s seat during trips to intervene if necessary, although the software is expected to control the car.

The next step, of operating the taxis without a driver, will require Uber and Wayve to seek approval via a new process, known as an automated passenger services permit, with the government’s Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency.

TfL said it would monitor the use of the vehicles, and was ready to intervene if passenger safety was compromised.

A TfL spokesperson said: “Safety is our top priority. Any new vehicle licensed to carry passengers on London’s roads must align with our Vision Zero goal of eliminating all deaths and serious injuries from collisions on London’s streets by 2041.”

Wayve, which was co-founded by the New Zealand-born Alex Kendall, has been testing its tech in London since 2018 with safety drivers. In previous demonstrations to the Guardian the car has navigated most of the obstacles of north London’s busy roads, although the safety driver was forced to intervene at one point.

Sarah Gates, Wayve’s vice-president for global affairs and assurance, said: “This licence is an important step towards giving Londoners the chance to experience autonomous driving technology.

“The responsible deployment of these vehicles will bring us safer, cleaner and quieter streets, and we’re proud to continue working alongside regulators, communities and the public as we take the next steps towards making autonomous rides a reality in the capital.”

Driverless taxi services are already operating in several cities around the world, although mainly in the US and China, where most of the software developers are based. However, US companies are essentially blocked from China, and vice versa, meaning they have not had to compete directly.

Uber abandoned its own efforts to develop self-driving technology in 2020, but it is working with several partners around the world who are in turn using different systems. That includes the Chinese company WeRide, which is operating driverless taxis in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Wayve is also working with the Japanese manufacturer Nissan on integrating its tech in private cars.

Uber’s global head of autonomous mobility operations, Annie Duvnjak, said: “This licence is a key milestone in bringing autonomous rides to London on Uber.

“Our interest list has seen an incredible response from Londoners who are excited to experience Wayve’s British-built autonomous driving technology.”

The news came as Uber reported better than expected second-quarter gross bookings of $58.02bn (£43bn), but said earnings for the next quarter would fall below Wall Street forecasts.

Uber said earnings per share would come in between ​84 cents and 88 cents, compared with analysts’ expectations of 89 cents, with foreign exchange costs trimming booking growth.

The company also outlined ‌plans to spend more than $10bn on autonomous vehicles over the coming years, although it did not provide a specific ‌timeline.

Gatwick airport is to start development of its second runway after campaigners lost a legal challenge to the plans.

The court of appeal on Tuesday dismissed a bid by local campaign groups to challenge an earlier high court ruling that the scheme could proceed.

The £2.2bn project, approved by the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, in September, will allow about 100,000 more flights a year to use Britain’s second busiest airport.

Pierre-Hugues Schmit, the Gatwick chief executive, said the airport was “very pleased that this ruling brings to an end an eight-year planning and legal process which has carefully tested and scrutinised every aspect of our expansion plans on multiple occasions”.

The plans will involve the West Sussex airport slightly repositioning its emergency runway and using it routinely for short-haul passenger aircraft. It is now among the busiest single-runway airports in the world, but hopes to have the second runway in operation as early as 2030.

The government declared the court ruling a “major milestone for Gatwick and for local communities”.

Alexander said: “Around 13 million more passengers and 100,000 more flights will give holidaymakers greater choice and strengthen global links to help make the UK one of the most attractive places in the world to invest.

“We’ll back expansion that supports growth and our climate goals. To drive forward sustainable change, we’re also investing more than £219m for green fuel production to cut emissions from flying and secure the future of aviation.”

Campaigners had sought a judicial review of the Department for Transport’s decision to approve the plans, arguing that the government did not properly assess the scheme’s climate impact.

One of the applicants, Peter Barclay, the chair of Gatwick Area Conservation Campaign, said he was disappointed with the ruling but added: “It is time for governments to wake up and realise that saying yes to the expansion of any and every airport will not kickstart the economy … It will further lock in aviation’s climate, noise and air pollution impacts, increase congestion on roads and public transport and blight local communities.”

Meanwhile, Luton Rising, the council-owned company behind Luton airport, announced that all legal challenges to its expansion plans had now been cleared. The supreme court has dismissed any final possibility of appealing a high court ruling last November upholding Alexander’s signoff on plans to increase the airport’s annual capacity from 19 million to 32 million passengers by the mid-2040s.

The airport owner said it would create up to 11,000 new jobs and generate up to an additional £1.5bn in annual economic activity, and pledged strict controls on noise and carbon emissions, air quality and surface access to the airport.

The 5.46pm train from London Euston to Crewe is the low point of Nikhil Patel’s week. “I’ve never gotten a seat. I always stand up even when I get here early,” says the 22-year-old, struggling to keep his balance while the gangway underneath sways from side to side.

Painfully for Patel, who is commuting back and forth to the capital for a computer science internship, it’s the first leg of a three-hour journey home to Walsall. He grabs the back of a chair to remain steady but says he’s just thankful that the train has left on time – and that it’s even on the move at all.

“There’s been a couple of times where everyone’s boarded and then the train’s been cancelled and we all had to get off,” he says. On another occasion, his journey home took five hours because this service was delayed, meaning he missed a connecting train.

This rush-hour service, operated by London Northwestern Railway (LNR), is the busiest commuter-only journey in England and Wales, according to figures by the Department for Transport.

Overall, it’s the second busiest commute, the No 1 being a morning Thameslink service from Bedford to Three Bridges – which passes through three international hubs: St Pancras International, and Luton and Gatwick airports.

We decided to join commuters getting the packed, two-hour-plus service on Thursday evening. According to the DfT, the service had a load factor – how many people are on a train compared with its maximum capacity – of 170% when the analysis was carried out last autumn. LNR says the number of seats on the service has increased from 460 to 812 since the data was gathered.

There is the familiar scrum moving towards the train after the platform is announced, an infamous tradition at Euston station. At first it seems as if this crop of commuters has lucked out, as it isn’t overly busy. But as the clock approaches 5.46pm, the carriages begin to heave with people.

Some fan themselves to keep the summer heat at bay. When the train is finally on the move, most gangways are cluttered with unlucky commuters unable to snag a seat. Some stand but others sit, bearing the rough and tumble of the shifting metal surface underneath.

Among them is Daniel Garrill, 23, who regularly gets this service. “I know I’m going to be sitting in some dodgy spot,” the data analyst says, having never got a seat during the week.

He travels between London and Manchester at least twice a week, meaning he has to bring a suitcase – which is tricky because there’s “nowhere to put your bag either”. He has to keep fiddling with his luggage to ensure it doesn’t escape down the carriage.

On the other side of the gangway is Akshay Vaghela, 31, who is commuting to Rugby. He says he is forced to stand half the time, and more often than not is “resigned to finding a seat on the floor”. This train is particularly busy because it is cheaper than the shorter Avanti service also heading to Crewe.

“I’ve gotten used to it because I know what booking this service means. It’s a free-for-all for the seats, otherwise you’re standing,” he says. Despite the train being kitted out with air conditioning, Vaghela says it’s still “stuffy, hot and sweaty” because there are so many people on it. “Unless you’ve got water, you’re struggling until you get home,” he says.

There is a chance things might not stay this way. Andy Burnham, newly installed as prime minister, has had rail operators in his sights for a while, making headlines for calling out poor performers while mayor of Greater Manchester.

He has previously said nationalising railways is a “no brainer” and launched the Bee Network as mayor, which brought privatised bus and tram networks into the local government’s control and capped fares at £2. Rail services across Greater Manchester will start to join the network by the end of the year.

He faced a rude reminder of the state of our railways last month. After his election as MP for Makerfield, he took a 10.54am Avanti West Coast train from Manchester to Euston. The service was delayed by 21 minutes, making him eligible to claim compensation.

The transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, has also faced a bumpy train journey, saying she sat on the floor of a packed service from London Paddington to her constituency in Swindon.

Burnham hinted in May that there could be a swifter move towards rail renationalisation – a number of operators were brought under state control while Keir Starmer was prime minister – saying it would “reduce train fares and make them affordable to people again”.

Vaghela is optimistic that Burnham will enforce some change. He says “priority routes like this one which connect main parts of the country should be looked at”, especially because “everyone’s paying the same price and some people get seats and others don’t, there’s a disparity there”.

As we advance further down the carriages, we squeeze past commuters packed together by the platform doors, sidestep buggies and grab on to windows, poles or even fellow passengers to avoid tumbling to the floor.

Standing among a group of commuters in a packed gangway is retiree Andy Simms, 65. He has a lucky escape, only having to bear the service for half an hour. He’s getting off at the first stop: Milton Keynes Central.

Simms isn’t too bothered about the packed train. “It’s fine but busy,” he says, though he admits: “If you’re doing this every day it must be very annoying, especially if you’re paying for a season ticket.”

Overall, he thinks trains are better than he remembers. “Things used to be a lot worse on trains back in my youth. It was scruffy, dirty and violent,” he says.

On the prospect of Burnham making changes to the rail system, he’d rather he keep his focus elsewhere. “I think social care is more important than train journeys. I’d rather he fix that than this,” he says, while holding on to a pole behind for balance.

An LNR spokesperson said: “Our services to and from Euston are extremely popular, which is why we have made a major £1bn investment in new trains to provide extra space for our customers.

“Since this data was gathered we have added hundreds of extra seats to this particular service, increasing its capacity by 77% and significantly reducing its load factor to provide more comfortable journeys for passengers.”