Author Archive | Jarrett

David Moss is a Detroit-based freelance transportation writer. When he is not writing about vehicle technology, he spends his time hiking. You can reach him at @davidcmoss

Buses driving autonomously might seem like something from science fiction but the technology is developing fast, and is actually in practice, or at least in a trial phase, in a number of cities all across Asia, Europe and North America.

The most important finding is that while European and American driverless trials are for very small buses – too small to be transformative to the larger public bus market – larger buses are now also under development, in China and also in a recent announcement by Mercedes.  If perfected, these large buses would have the potential to dramatically increase the quantity of transit service that agencies could afford to offer.

China

While there has been a heated debate in the United States over driverless vehicles, China took the initiative by developing a self-driving bus that completed a 20 mile trip through the city of Zhengzhou in August of 2015. Using a variety of sensors, cameras and an integrated navigation system, this bus was able to roll through the streets of Zhengzhou at a top speed of about 42 miles per hour.

This remarkable achievement was the end product of a three-year trial conducted in the city by Yutong—a Chinese bus company and the creator of the bus. This company, along with the Chinese Academy of Engineering, has shown that it is possible to put a driverless bus on the road and do it safely. However, while this test was impressive, it’s still going to take additional testing before a full-scale rollout can begin nationwide. Fortunately, that is currently in the works as the Chinese tech firm Baidu has recently unveiled a five-year plan to introduce a variety of autonomous vehicles at the streets of Wuhu.

While Google believes that the first truly autonomous vehicles to be used full time on the road will be taxi cabs, Baidu believes that the future of this technology is in driverless buses and/or shuttles. Although it should be said that their five year plan not only focuses on autonomous buses and vans, but on cars as well.

Singapore

A few years ago, Singapore launched the Singapore Autonomous Vehicle Initiative (SAVI)—a joint partnership with the Land Transit Authority and A*STAR – whose primary goal is to research and develop autonomous vehicle technology.

SAVI has currently partnered with MIT on improving public transportation systems in urban areas by using autonomous vehicle technology. Several trials will take place this year, and the test route has already been planned to test the efficacy of driverless technology solutions. This study, which is expected to take about two years to complete, will end in 2018—at which time the public is expected to have full use of driverless transportation technology.

Greece and Switzerland

Greece also tested a small driverless bus in the town of Trikala—a rural community nestled in Northern Greece. Their trial lasted from October 2015 until February 2016, and featured a ten-passenger bus that could navigate the streets at a speed of about 12.4 miles per hour. In Switzerland, two driverless “SmartShuttles” are currently being tested in the Old Town of Scion. They are currently carrying passengers for free. The trials will continue over the next two years.

The United Kingdom

London unveiled plans to introduce autonomous bus-like vehicles this year. This plan—part of the Greenwich Automated Transport Environment Project (GATEway)—will utilize driverless shuttles that will be first tested on the streets of Greenwich—around the O2 Arena, several residential areas and the North Greenwich tube station. Currently, the Heathrow Airport shuttle operates between the business car park and terminal five. Seven of these shuttles will be modified for use in these trials, which are slated to begin later this year. If the trials prove to be successful, then people can expect to see completely autonomous shuttles used for everything from transportation to automated deliveries.

Belgium and Sweden

Belgium is also working on its own autonomous transit system that is due to be launched in 2018. This project—which is a joint partnership between the Belgium public transport operator De Lijn and the Brussels Airport Company—will feature driverless buses that are expected to transport passengers and airport staff around the airport.

In April of 2016, Sweden also conducted a trial on driverless bus technology, completed by Ericsson, a Swedish IT company that operated minibuses using 5G technology. However, their plan is not only to have autonomous electric vehicles transporting passengers, but also to develop a whole system of vehicles working together in a highly efficient transportation hub.

United States

The Bay Area is ground zero for autonomous buses in the United States.  San Francisco has developed a detailed plan for driverless vehicles on its roads, a system that will use both buses and shuttles. And a Bishop Ranch business park in San Ramon, California is initiating a pilot program in the summer of 2016 that will use two EZ10 pods to relieve traffic congestion in the area.

The Future of Driverless Bus Technology: Benefits and Concerns

Driverless technology may well be the wave of the future. And there are several reasons why that is the case. The vehicles in question are good for the environment because they are all electric and in full use they will dramatically reduce a city’s oil consumption. They are also safer than human driven vehicles. Some studies have also shown that driverless vehicles are more efficient and will increase the flow of traffic—particularly in congested areas.  But most importantly, they would allow transit agencies to make bus service dramatically more abundant, by severing the link between operating costs and labor costs that constrains all bus operations today.

It is also clear that many people have concerns about driverless technology. There are still many that believe that driverless buses are unsafe.

Certainly, there will be labor resisitance to automation, though history shows that automation usually prevails in the end. While the jobs of some drivers will indeed be lost due to the adoption of this technology, that will be offset by an increased need for other specialized workers. More mechanics, programmers and technicians will be needed to maintain driverless buses and keep them operating correctly.

However, so far, autonomous vehicles have proven to be safer than manned vehicles. That’s because they eliminate the “human error” factor common in many accidents. And while some people are still concerned about these vehicles’ reaction time, sensor arrays and vehicle safety technologies are improving continuously.

There are still, among other things, liability issues to be ironed out and there are too many public fears to be pacified. However, we can expect that eventually, driverless buses—like driverless cars—will be a common sight on our highways and roads.

I’m heading for Austin Sunday for two days of meetings about the relationship between transit, microtransit, and ridesourcing (Bridj, Split, Uber, Lyft, etc etc).  (Yesterday’s post may be a preview of my angle on this topic.)

The event open to the public is a Capital Metro Board Workshop Monday. July 25, Noon-2 pm, at the Cap Metro headquarters 2910 E 5th.  Note that this is a Board meeting and there may be some other business.

Look forward to meeting lots of cool people in Austin!

Like many fashionable tech folks, Elon Musk wants to replace city buses with little vehicles that protect you from having to share space with strangers.

With the advent of autonomy, it will probably make sense to shrink the size of buses and transition the role of bus driver to that of fleet manager. …  [This technology] would also take people all the way to their destination. …  (Emphasis added)

Musk assumes that transit is an engineering problem, about vehicle design and technology.   In fact, providing cost-effective and liberating transportation in cities requires solving a geometry problem.  This confusion is very common in transport technology circles.

In dense cities, where big transit vehicles (including buses) are carrying significant ridership, any “small vehicles replacing big vehicles” solution increases the total number of vehicles on the road at any time.  The technical measure of this is Vehicle Miles (or Km) Travelled (VMT).

Today, increasing VMT would mean increased emissions and increased road carnage, but let’s say technology has solved those problems, with electric vehicles and automation.  Those are engineering problems.  Inventors can work on those.

But there is still, and aways, the problem of space.  Increasing VMT means that you are taking more space to move the same number of people.  This may be fine in low-density and rural areas, where there’s lots of space per person.  But a city, by definition, has little space per person, so the efficient use of space is the core problem of urban transportation.

When we are talking about space, we are talking about geometry, not engineering, and technology never changes geometry.  You must solve a problem spatially before you have really solved it.

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The reigning fantasy of Musk’s argument is that we must always “take people all the way to their destination.”   To do this we must abolish the need to ever change vehicles — from a train to a bus, from a car to a train, from a bus to a bike — and of course we also abolish walking.  This implies a vision in which buses are shrunk into something like taxis, because a vehicle going directly from your exact origin to your exact destination at your chosen time won’t be useful to many people other than you.

So a bus with 4o people on it today is blown apart into, what, little driverless vans with an average of two each, a 20-fold increase in the number of vehicles?   It doesn’t matter if they’re electric or driverless.  Where will they all fit in the urban street?  And when they take over, what room will be left for wider sidewalks, bike lanes, pocket parks, or indeed anything but a vast river of vehicles?

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There are audiences for which Musk’s vision makes perfect sense, people for whom useful high-ridership transit isn’t an option anyway.  There are two big categories of these people:

• People who live in outer-suburban and rural areas, where space is abundant and high-ridership transit isn’t viable.
• The wealthiest 20% or so of urban residents, who can afford to use relatively expensive services that would never scale to the entire population of the city.

If you are in one of these categories, your most urgent task is to remember that most people aren’t like you, and that cities are impossible if everyone lives according to your personal tastes.  As Edward Glaser said, “one’s own tastes are rarely a sound basis for public policy.”

That issue, right there, is the great disconnect between tech marketing and genuine urban problem-solving.

Tech marketing is all about appealing to elite personal tastes.  It runs on the assumption that whatever we sell to the wealthy today we can sell to the masses tomorrow.  But some things stop working when everybody buys them.  Cars in dense cities, for example, are not a problem when only the top 20% are using them; it’s mass adoption of cars that makes them ruinous to a dense city and to the liberty of its citizens.  Ask anyone in a fast-growing developing world city about that.

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Here is the harm that this all this elite chatter about abolishing the bus is doing:  It’s introducing fatal confusion into the discussion of urban development.

Dense cities that want to live in the real world of space and time, and that do not want to become dystopias that are functional only for the rich, need to use urban space efficiently.  There is some simple and well-proven math about how to do this, which is also the math of how transit systems achieve high ridership.

These cities need to organize themselves around frequent transit corridors, where big-vehicle frequent transit, bus or rail, can prosper, allowing the city to grow dense without growing vehicle trips.

Someday some of these corridors will be rail or Bus Rapid Transit.  But the only way to grow enough corridors quickly, so that you cover much of the city with frequent service that can succeed in ridership terms, is to take frequent fixed-route bus service seriously.  If you don’t do that in your land use planning, you’re going to end up building a city where fixed transit is geometrically impossible, and then you’ll have no alternatives when congestion begins to strangle growth.

Smart cities aren’t just the ones that chase the latest technology fads.  They’re the ones that think carefully about the spatial, geometric problem that a dense city is.   Because if it doesn’t work geometrically, it doesn’t work.

It closes July 20, so act fast.  Greater Vancouver (Canada)’s transit agency TransLink seeks a Manager of Access Planning, where “access” refers to people with disabilities.  The listing is here.

MRCagney, the leading public transport/transit planning firm in Australia and New Zealand, is hiring senior planners in Auckland and Brisbane — both really cool places to live!  Details here.

I worked for MRCagney directly during my five years in Australia, and we retain a close bond with them, teaming often on projects in their part of the world.  Get this job, and you’ll probably end up working with me at some point …

In just about every North American regional transit debate I’ve ever been involved in, someone has said:  “Why is all this money being spent on transit downtown!  Downtown already has lots of transit, while out here in ___, we have nothing!”

If this is a debate within a city — often between city councilors who represent districts — then they’ll say this about downtown, and sometimes about dense inner neighborhoods around it.  But exactly the same debate happens at another scale: among municipal governments in a huge urban region; in that case, they’ll complain about the entire dense, old, transit-oriented city at the region’s center.   In either case, I’ll use the term core to mean the older, denser, inner area in this debate, and edge to refer to the newer, less dense, more car-dependent area.

Either way, the debate sounds like this:

Edge:  “The core area has so much transit, and we have little or nothing, but we pay taxes too, so why does so much of the money go to the core?  Also, we’re trying to build denser development in more transit-oriented ways, to start moving beyond car-dependence, but how can we do that without good transit?  We’re desperate out here!”

Core:  “It’s great that you want to be denser, but we’re already very dense.  That means a much bigger share of our residents need or want transit, and our ability to grow and thrive depends on it.  Car-dependence just isn’t an option at our density, so if transit doesn’t work, our city doesn’t work.   We’re desperate in here!”

I sympathize with all sides, and do my best to warn all sides away from this kind of parochial polarization.  Nothing is sadder than coming into a city or region with inadequate transit, and finding that the locals are more interested in blaming and resenting each other than in working on a problem they all share.

Once more with feeling: Transit is a network, which means that its parts are interdependent.  You cannot think about it the way you think about libraries or fire stations, where putting one in a certain place mainly benefits the people there, because the whole network affects everyone’s ability to get everywhere.  So when folks argue that the another part of the network should be weaker so that theirs can be stronger, they’re actually undermining their own transit service.

In North America, the edge tends to have the votes to win edge-core debates, so it’s not surprising that many North American transit networks are weak at the core.   When you look at North American rapid transit systems, you often notice pieces missing in the middle.  Metro Vancouver is one of the most dramatic cases.  Look at what happens at the west end of the yellow line:

It never ever makes sense for a major rapid transit line to end just short of where it would connect with another major line, as the yellow line does here.  This gap creates all kinds of overloading problems, as three suburban branches from the east all feed into a single line into downtown (the northward peninsula).  It obstructs many cross-regional trips, most obviously from the eastern suburbs to the airport (on the island in the lower left).   Finally, the bus line that crosses this gap is one of the busiest in North America, the best signal of all that you need a rail line.  Yet if you listened to the regional transit debate, you’d think that plugging this gap in the whole region’s network is a project “for Vancouver” just because the gap itself happens to be in Vancouver.

Once you learn to recognize it, you’ll see this theme in city after city.  Missing links like Vancouver’s are an extreme example.  More common is a persistent disinvestment in the core parts of a network even though people from the whole region rely on those parts.  Many big city transit networks end up massively overcrowded and failing at the center even as the political pressure is all about extending further toward the edge.

Fortunately, a few North American regions are showing real leadership and progress on this:

• Toronto is under political pressure to extend its subway lines further into the suburbs, adding even more riders, even as the inner segments of the network are severely overloaded.  Where would all those passengers fit?  The only solution is another subway through downtown, but as soon as you mention downtown, a majority of the City Council has had trouble seeing why they should care.  Major progress has been made on advancing this crucial “core-strengthening” project in the last year.
• Los Angeles Metro is building its Regional Connector project, a new subway under downtown whose purpose is to hook together rail lines that now terminate on opposite sides of downtown, never touching each other.  For long trips across the region — from Pasadena to South LA, say, or from Santa Monica to East LA, the connector replaces two-transfer trips with zero-transfer trips (which means it also replaces three-transfer trips with one-transfer trips), so it dramatically increases the ease with which you can get across the larger city.  LA Metro produced a very smart map with wide two-way arrows showing these improved regional flows. The agency did a great job of helping people see that while the project is in downtown, it’s for the whole city and region. 
• Last month, there was major breakthrough in the Seattle area.  The Sound Transit 3 regional rapid transit proposal, which will go to the voters in the fall, requires a new subway tunnel under downtown, parallel to the existing one two blocks away.  Until last month, the entire cost of this tunnel was considered a Seattle expenditure, so it completed for funds with other city projects.  But of course, Seattle doesn’t need another subway tunnel two blocks from the existing one.  It’s the whole region that needs it, to fit all of the region’s rail lines through Seattle.  So the final plan, correctly, treats this is a cost to be shared across the region.

Finally, why have I said “North American” throughout this post?  Because most other wealthy countries I’ve worked in or studied don’t have this issue to the same degree.  Mostly this is because those countries have located regional transit planning at a level of government that has the power to see and act on a citywide vision, and account for all of its consequences.  Typically, this power is integrated with the other great powers that act on that scale, such as land use planning, infrastructure, and so on, so that the implications of each action can be accounted for.

Good planning can still happen in a more fragmented political context, though, so long as someone has the power and skill to make the argument for a complete network vision.  Fortunately, this is happening more and more.