As far as I know, the self-driving software they use is provided by Mobileye.
But I have not yet seen any stats about miles driven, number of engagements etc. So I have no idea how far along they are.
gryfft · 11h ago
If we create dedicated tracks for these buses we could make them go even faster, and automating them would be so much simpler: you wouldn't even need steering! Someone should look into this.
tonmoy · 11h ago
And we can make them environmentally friendly by having them run on electricity that is constantly supplied by overhead power lines, alleviating the need for heavy batteries. I think we are onto something here
Voultapher · 4h ago
Seeing this thread pains me. I recall reading the Foreigner series by C. J. Cherryh and in it they had an alien politician mention cars in passing, stating that it would be stupid to give their citizens this selfish way of transportation and rather invested in train infrastructure. And boy does it seem stupid looking back. Something like 30% by area of US cities are taken up by parking space and it get's so much worse once think about what a city would look like if built for people and not cars.
tzs · 9h ago
In urban areas isn’t the speed limit determined by the need to deal with pedestrians and other traffic?
If your hypothetical tracked buses are going to go faster than regular buses and cars there will need to be some sort of isolation of them, such as elevated tracks or underground tracks. That raises the cost significantly.
You probably will only be able to afford this on a few routes that are heavily travelled and that are expected to remain heavily travelled for decades.
That will probable leave a lot of your city far enough from a tracked buses stop that many won’t be within reasonable walking distance so you are still going to need some form of public transit, such as regular buses.
dvdkon · 11h ago
Sure, I'd settle for self-driving trams, but it doesn't seem like we're even close to self-driving trains, and they encounter far fewer pedestrians. Self-driving metro trains are here, though, but those are way more expensive to build.
Fricken · 10h ago
The Vancouver Skytrain has been fully autonomous since it opened in 1986.
rsynnott · 10h ago
That's fully-segregated, though, right? That's a far easier problem than a tram, which typically has to interact with pedestrians and traffic. That's about the easiest type of transport to automate.
BobaFloutist · 7h ago
Fine, fine, you've sold me. We'll grade-separate them too.
Gud · 6h ago
Actually that kind of sucks.
Much nicer when it’s easy to step on/step off.
Oarch · 11h ago
So much easier to break the system. One inconsiderate parker later and the whole tram - nay! The entire line must halt operations.
rsynnott · 10h ago
In practice, it's fairly rare that this actually happens.
reaperducer · 2h ago
In practice, it's fairly rare that this actually happens.
Put a trendy restaurant next to the tracks, and watch the trains back up as multiple Uber Eats drivers park on the tracks to pick up food.
Happens every day where I live. The city won't do anything about it because most of the local politicians hate the trains.
paulryanrogers · 10h ago
Just put a cow catcher on the front and keep moving
RealStickman_ · 7h ago
Remove parking spaces next to tram tracks and increase fines
yread · 10h ago
Trams here in Amsterdam are already the deadliest vehicle for pedestrians and cyclists no need to make it worse
btreecat · 10h ago
> Trams here in Amsterdam are already the deadliest vehicle for pedestrians and cyclists no need to make it worse
Where are you seeing this supporting data?
gryfft · 8h ago
The data I can find doesn't support the assertion.
> In the period between 2019 and 2022, 1,199 cyclists were killed in traffic accidents, with 42 percent of these accidents being caused by collisions with a passenger car or van.
Here is says that indeed cbs doesn't track it and that there were 21 deaths per year caused by trams, buses and trains, with 57% of those pedestrian or cyclist
this ad-article "Jaarlijks worden er om en nabij 150 personen behandeld in een ziekenhuis na een aanrijding met een tram en komen er zelfs 40 personen te overlijden na een tramongeval." - I think what they mean is 40 people in a decade?
The answer is, whenever there's enough money to be made there to support a self driving company's expenses to develop and operate it. These programs cost billions to develop, and public transit is likely not a profitable market niche at the moment.
Also keep in mind that the driver also is responsible for handling fare evasion and ensuring the passengers stay at least somewhat ruly, which a self driving vehicle might not be able to do.
danaris · 10h ago
Public transit is a public service. It should not be expected to turn a profit in order to justify its existence. The value it generates is the removal of friction all throughout the system as people—especially people with low or no income—are enabled to get from place to place to better their lives.
xyzzy123 · 9h ago
What if you could have 2x or Nx the services for the same public expenditure if you didn't have to pay drivers? How important is PT really? Should we cut pensions or cancer care to enable more PT? How hard-core are you about this? What I am getting at is that the economics of "good things" still matters and entails tradeoffs and value judgements.
What is your weighting of the value of PT as a jobs program vs a way to help people get around? Do we have the perfect amount of PT now, or should we have more, or less?
Personally I think "safety issues" will prove to be the sticking point with autonomy of PT but maybe it scales.
I am pro automation but skeptical about social issues.
AlecSchueler · 10h ago
I totally agree with you that the services shouldn't be expected to turn a profit but the money for developing autonomous buses still needs to come from somewhere.
Vilian · 11h ago
To rob a self driving bus you put a cone on front of it, try that with a bus driver
AlecSchueler · 10h ago
Here in Northern Ireland bus hijackings are relatively common. If you want to block a road during a riot then a great way to do it is to park a bus sideways and set it on fire. I've never heard of a driver putting up a fight against someone who was determined to take the bus.
While it's true that they were more common in those days I think it's still fair to say they're common RELATIVE to other regions. There were at least 3 buses hijacked during the Brexit related riots of 2021, for example, while a quick search suggests there hasn't been a single incident in The Netherlands in almost 50 years.
xyzzy123 · 11h ago
Yes. The difficult problem is "antisocial behaviour". Also, to be fair, we might call them people who happen to be experiencing mental health incidents.
What are you going to rob? There's no money.
Most PT systems recover hardly anything from fares, the fares are a proxy for "are you a functional person". Would you return a shopping cart?
You can't make the bus or tram (at scale) fully autonomous for safety reasons. Societal trust isn't high enough. When you have a situation where there is a vulnerable lone woman or child victimised the situation will be politically unacceptable. Maybe AI surveillance and targeted enforcement can paper over this.
If you need guard labour though I suppose they can be more effective if they don't have to drive.
BiteCode_dev · 10h ago
Subways is partially autonomous in many parts of the world, including Paris where people are particularly unruly.
xyzzy123 · 10h ago
Fair. Pay attention though to the safety systems in place and the cost of those versus drivers. I suppose in the end these are hypotheses about human behaviour in specific situations and we will find out who is right in due course.
People are pretty great and I will be happy to be proven wrong.
zardo · 10h ago
Gaining access to a bus is pretty easy
ceejayoz · 11h ago
I’ve seen buses have to threaten to cause an accident to force someone to make space for them to merge. That’s gonna be a risky bit of code.
growlNark · 11h ago
Dedicated bus lanes make this much easier.
Not that I ever expect such a car-centric place as America to allow such a thing to generally happen.
jajko · 11h ago
Yes the corner cases for automated bus driving are pretty unique, and require some mix of situational awareness, empathy and aggressiveness. No way we can see this fully automated in next 20 years in regulated markets like most of Europe. Buses are some of the most aggressive traffic participants in order to get folks where needed without frequent massive delays.
What can work is to have some HQ team of 5 people managing say 50 buses, stepping in in complex situations. And seeing this team being used less and less over time without affecting incident rate negatively. But internet connection would have to be absolutely perfect, I mean 100%, can't have a bus full of folks stuck in some signal-less tunnel.
As I said, 2 decades minimum.
dathinab · 11h ago
> It seems like a much easier thing to do. They drive on fixed routes and do not have to handle complicated parking situations.
- transporting people has higher legal requirements
- "complicated parking situations" is IMHO not really the problem, most parking situations are relatively straight forward. The problem is complicated driving situations. The fixed routes make it less likely to have, but the bigger size makes it more likely. Bus drivers needing to spontaneously adopt there route is rare but a thing, but having a hugely long car which isn't allowed to drive backward is making that more likely
- people, Bus drivers aren't just driving the bus but also tend to handle the passengers in various ways. The simplest cases are ticket payment (not always) and people asking questions (common especially with older people). More subtle ways include things like giving people the feeling they are not alone in the bus even if they are the only passenger (i.e. subtly reducing bad behavior) telling a passenger that they can't take a bicycle, motorcycle or for the supper crazy kind on fire grill into the bus. Or stuff like calling the police if they notice a passenger getting threatened or assaulted. etc. This category kind applies to any "at same time shared autonomous vehicle" is one of the more "open questions" of autonomous public transport. Depending on country, culture and are I think the difference can be anything from irrelevant to wupsi we have a huge problem.
- Insurance, a lot of autonomous care providers try to doge responsibility, i.e. they drive but you are responsibility for how they drive in most situations. That isn't exactly inviting for bus companies sure there probably is some insurer which is willing to handle it, but then the moment you hit the legal gray area between care maker or insurer has to pay things will likely get messy and that gray area is AFIK currently still too big.
so IMHO less of a pure technical and more of a legal/people issue
“The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed.“
rsynnott · 10h ago
That's not a driverless bus, it's a glorified tech demo.
lossolo · 9h ago
I was in China, they’re not just glorified tech demos, they’re actually usable now for getting around. It’s not in every city yet, it's still an early rollout but they’re far from being just demos. There are autonomous robots in China delivering items to hotel rooms, they even take the elevator on their own. You’ll also see autonomous robots transporting cargo around high-speed rail stations. These aren’t just tech demos.
afavour · 11h ago
Deployment might be easier but the opportunity would also be a lot smaller. Taxis have somewhere close to a 1:1 relationship between driver and number of passengers. The financial impact could be huge. Buses are probably somewhere in the 30:1 ratio (obviously this varies widely), the cost of the driver relative to number of passengers carried is much less.
rsynnott · 10h ago
The trouble with buses is that they're very big and dangerous; the worst case scenario is very, very bad, and bus drivers are better trained and more regulated (in particular around age, sight, health conditions etc) than normal drivers; the standard expected is higher.
Here's what can happen when things go wrong: https://www.dublinlive.ie/news/dublin-news/wellington-quay-b... (a bus mounted the pavement behind a parked bus and hit a group of people, killing five). In a similar accident with a car, at bus-like speeds, you _probably_ wouldn't expect deaths.
l33tman · 11h ago
Why would you do that, a bus driver costs $10/h and the bus costs several $100k even if it's NOT self driving. The cost of the driver must be miniscule in comparision, not to mention if the self-driving bus and associated insurances will cost many more factors of $100k...
rsynnott · 10h ago
> a bus driver costs $10/h
For an urban transport system bus driver (vs say someone driving a private minibus)? Not sure where that is, but it's closer to 1000eur/week here. 39 hour week, 4 weeks holidays, so >25eur/hour, plus benefits, employer tax, and so on and so forth.
I doubt self-driving city buses will be a thing anytime for a while, but it's not because the drivers are cheap, it's because the job's actually quite difficult.
mft_ · 11h ago
It doesn't neccessarily invalidate your overall point, but a bus driver would cost significantly more than $10/h. In Germany, the hourly rate is closer to double that, plus additional costs the employer must pay, such as taxes and a contribution towards healthcare. Plus the overhead of recruitment, training, HR, uniforms, sickness cover, etc...
vidarh · 10h ago
And when you've bought the bus, a self-driving bus can operate 24/7, but to get 24/7 coverage with drivers you need at least 3 drivers per bus, probably more like 4 when accounting for illness and time off. You can cut that a bit and cut operating hours without major effect on service, but it's still going to be more than 1 at least.
saalweachter · 11h ago
A bus driver costs $10/h (or whatever; an NYC bus driver averages $28/h) per hour of operation.
A transit bus lasts an average of 12 years, and even if you don't run it nights or weekends, that's still around 50,000 hours of driving.
That's $500k at $10/h, and if you run a bus 24/7 in NYC you could spend $3M over the course of the bus's life.
BobaFloutist · 7h ago
Per hour per hour? Ok, let's see...second-order integral (these always confuse me because rates are stepping up a dimension but derivatives are stepping down a dimension, but that's neither here nor there), assuming no constants, so they start at 0$/h and there's no sign up bonus...
Got it. After one day, they've made $3423.33
A week gets them over two million dollars, putting a solid, but not insurmountable, dent in the transportation budget.
A month over five-hundred million, easily bankrupting most midsized towns.
After a year they've made almost half the entirety of the US GDP.
Maybe I should become a bus driver.
hoherd · 10h ago
Having ridden on busses countless times in SF, autonomous busses seem way off. The situations that busses have to navigate can be incredibly difficult, and the vehicle is not as nimble as a medium sized automobile. Still, improvements could be made for the autonomous busses, like giving it a dedicated lane like they did on Van Ness. At that point though, why not have a light rail? Autonomous train systems have existed for over three decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste...
sschueller · 10h ago
I talked to one of the higher ups at the VBZ which is the transport company of the city of Zürich Switzerland.
They do not see it happening anytime soon not even for light rails (trams). The primary issue is during busy hours the driver has to take calculated risks or they would not get anywhere. People will just block you. You cannot get an AI to do that or convince the public that they may be run over by an AI. How aggressive so you set the AI? Where do you draw the line?
What they do see is having AIs assist drivers where it will do emergency breaking or hint at dangerous/inattentive people some of which they already have in the new trams but they can switch it off of they need too.
ben_w · 11h ago
> It seems like a much easier thing to do. They drive on fixed routes and do not have to handle complicated parking situations.
Route-finding is the easy part of self-driving, it was solved basically as soon as we had GPS maps.
The hard part is avoiding hitting anyone, and anything, on the road while do you that.
I'm not at all sure either way about parking. We have parking sensors, but if parking is a "solved" problem or not, I do not know.
xattt · 11h ago
Is that not also route finding? The route happens to be dynamic due to all those pesky obstacles.
/s
ben_w · 10h ago
When you know where everything is and will be, sure; the hard parts are (1) actually spotting the obstacles, and (2) predicting how they will move far enough in advance to avoid collisions.
Fixed routes make the easy part easier, you need a really good gps for autonomous driving. However having driven VW autonomous vehicles, the hard part is that driving means interacting with other drivers. For starters, just standing there and switching on hazard lights is usually a not disastrous idea.
Disclaimer: I work for Moia though no longer with AVs.
Yoric · 11h ago
In my previous city (near Paris), we've had one experimental autonomous bus (exactly one, as far as I know) online for years. I have no idea whether it was considered a success or a failure, but it seemed stuck a bit in limbo: it worked, but I guess not well enough that the city planned to expand its use.
xnx · 8h ago
> I wonder when buses in public transport will become autonomous.
Once you don't have to pay a human driver salary, it won't make sense to use such large and expensive vehicles as buses.
mg · 8h ago
I would expect the price per seat to be lower in a larger vehicle than in a smaller one.
Also the amount of space per passanger the vehicle takes up on the street is smaller for a larger vehicle.
xnx · 7h ago
Only if the vehicle is mostly full most of the time.
mg · 6h ago
I don't think so.
The price of a bus is roughly 10x the price of a car.
The average number of passengers in a car is about 1.5.
So the average number of passengers in the bus has to be over 15 to be more cost-effective than a car. 15 passengers is far from full. And it is on average, not most of the time.
For the space the passengers take up on the road, it is even more extreme. Take a look at how far apart cars drive on the road. About one or two cars take up the same space as a bus that can carry dozens of passengers.
sundaeofshock · 8h ago
The primary value of a bus is that it significantly reduces congestion. For example, an articulated bus can carry 50 - 120 passengers. That’s 120 private vehicles from the road.
Removing the driver does not change the efficiency of mass transit. In fact, I’d think you could run even more buses on the same route by removing the driver.
Vilian · 11h ago
It's much easier, secure and cheaper to pay a bus driver, it's a political issue not a technical one
rsynnott · 10h ago
Eh. If this were possible, transport system operators would jump on it. Availability of bus drivers is the main operational constraint on many systems.
However, it's really very far from being a practical reality; driving a bus is much more difficult than driving a car, and the consequences if you screw up can be far, far worse. Buses are very big and dangerous.
growlNark · 11h ago
I'd be pretty surprised if China wasn't already figuring this out.
jansan · 11h ago
There aren't even many autonomous trains, although you would think this is the easiest to do. In Tokyo the Yurikamome started operating about 30 years ago (it is fun to ride at night on the front seats when Odaiba is almost empty), and in Germany there are two autonomous subway lines in Nürnberg. I wonder why transition is taking so long, considering that the shortage of train drivers will become much worse very soon.
joakleaf · 11h ago
Copenhagen's metro started with 2 lines in 2002 (now 4 lines).
There are plans for more autonomy on the city's commuter trains (non-metro) in 2030-2037, starting with the first line in 2030/2031.
soco · 8h ago
Switzerland had for 5 years between 2016 and 2021 a few autonomous regional buses in test drives, with only one incident (a broken glass). At some point the test was stopped and the results buried, without any explanation or followup.
johnisgood · 11h ago
In comparison, my girlfriend in LA has been using Waymo without issues. It is cheaper than Uber, too.
slfnflctd · 11h ago
I think it's rather likely that Waymo has not recouped its initial investment, and even if you completely ignored that I'd be surprised if it doesn't currently still operate at a net loss.
The whole situation is artificial and propped up by external funding right now. Making this a viable industry is going to take a lot more time, if it's possible at all.
maxerickson · 7h ago
They are barely operating. 250,000 rides a week.
That translates into hundreds of millions of annual revenues, obviously not enough to pay back the billions invested.
johnisgood · 11h ago
I don't disagree, it is just interesting to me that Waymo has actually "made it" and it does seem to work, more or less.
akmarinov · 10h ago
Well, that's because they're not launching in weeks.
Elon's whole thing is overpromise and underdeliver - see FSD, Cybertruck
jgalt212 · 6h ago
The stock is up 50% from its April lows. They have no real incentive to execute.
Doesn't Musk believe it's better to see what things don't work in production and then fix those rather than doing a lot of testing beforehand?
bambax · 11h ago
"Move fast and kill people."
_def · 11h ago
Tomb Driven Development
amelius · 11h ago
It is only natural that capitalists want to play it like that. Put the burden of safety on society, etc.
This is why we should have laws that say that even a small software update requires testing by an independent organization for at least several months.
unsupp0rted · 11h ago
This is why we can’t have nice things.
If this had been the policy, we’d still be technologically in the 18th century.
bilekas · 11h ago
I'd argue the opposite.. For example in this case of they roll it out without tearing and something catastrophic happens. The faith in the tech will not be restored for generations, regardless of how much testing is done. Better to have these things working out the door straight away Instead of risking literal lives.
unsupp0rted · 11h ago
We just need some major wars or implacable ideological enemies to force us to test in prod. The biggest tech leaps happen there, because there’s no alternative.
amelius · 9h ago
Yes, putting everything in service of the fastest possible technological advancement is a pretty dumb idea.
unsupp0rted · 8h ago
Why?
Would you rather be the world’s richest person in 1825 or lower middle class today?
I like antibiotics, MRI, anesthetics during surgeries, unlimited information and entertainment, and the ability to travel places in less than 8 weeks and without getting tuberculosis along the way.
Tech advancement has given the most people the most happiness, safety and prosperity.
And it’s still barely a drop in the bucket compared to what is plainly visible already as the next level up.
amelius · 8h ago
You are presenting a false dichotomy. Better testing procedures will not put us back in 1825.
unsupp0rted · 7h ago
We didn't have better testing procedures and we got here.
With better testing procedures, would we have gotten here sooner, in the same amount of time, or slower?
My contention is slower. And this seems obvious, because in any Cold War sabotage handbook for slowing down a project, the first rule is to insist on more documentation, more consensus, more verification and validation: i.e. more "testing" and less "push to prod".
maxerickson · 6h ago
Of course we tested our way here. Billions of dollars spent on research and development.
You are also sort of begging the question. Better testing wouldn't be better if it was worse.
adrr · 6h ago
Air travel is heavily regulated. They don’t do over the air updates on a weekly or biweekly cadence. Safest form of travel.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> Air travel is heavily regulated
It wasn’t while we were figuring it out. And we still have active greenfield development in military and experimental aircraft. It would make sense to freeze development once we figure out what works. But in the meantime we need an open field for the technology to develop, lest we become another Europe to China.
rwmj · 11h ago
It's how software in commercial planes works, and those seem to be doing fine.
_def · 11h ago
My impression there is different, it seems to get worse.
amelius · 10h ago
Maybe the move-fast-and-break-things mentality is catching on, now also in aviation?
amelius · 10h ago
Wait, you want nice things that break all the time and kill people?
jajko · 11h ago
Not at all, few years, at most a decade behind. Don't you feel a decade ago we had a bit better life? Many people think so. What did we gain? Certainly not mature usable self-driving tech.
Anyway giving a choice of bleeding tech or being slightly more conservative tech is something that is taken away by people like Musk. Maybe you prefer being such a choice-less 'slave' to the system and uber rich just to have some shiny new toy a bit earlier, most people don't and many systems consider it outright illegal.
I don't get how tesla is not already sued in Europe for massive frauds they did and do on their customers. I'll happily buy electric car in future but hell will freeze sooner than my family sponsoring those nazi cars, competition is pretty good these days.
growlNark · 11h ago
> This is why we should have laws
If you can figure out a way to make congress to do anything but waste space and time, let us all know. Maybe states (e.g. California, not the normal sense of the term) can regulate some sanity into Tesla.
johnisgood · 11h ago
"small software update"? That would slow things down so much more. Maybe only if it is mission critical?
amelius · 10h ago
Bugs can be weird and cause all kinds of unexpected behavior. Maybe read this story about a recent update that took down systems around the world:
> CrowdStrike wrote in a blog post that the root cause of the crash had been a single configuration file pushed as an update to Falcon.
ragebol · 11h ago
If you can prove it's small and won't affect anything safety critical, then fine...
starquake · 11h ago
I would assume the mission would be something like "travel safely". Keyword being "safely" here.
No comments yet
api · 11h ago
If your suggestion about software were taken we would still be running MS-DOS.
We humans don’t do moderation well. The two alternatives seem to be move fast and break things vs don’t move at all. Run or sit still. Free for all or stilted hyperconservative society.
No comments yet
bearjaws · 11h ago
Your idea is... something..
"Small software update" - good luck qualifying what this is
"independent organization" - ever been audited? auditors love repeat business...
amelius · 10h ago
> "Small software update" - good luck qualifying what this is
I said "__even__ a small software update", so in fact, every software update, no matter how small.
It seems like a much easier thing to do. They drive on fixed routes and do not have to handle complicated parking situations.
Here in Germany, Volkswagen is working on autonomous buses with its Moia subsidiary:
https://www.youtube.com/@moia6222/videos
As far as I know, the self-driving software they use is provided by Mobileye.
But I have not yet seen any stats about miles driven, number of engagements etc. So I have no idea how far along they are.
If your hypothetical tracked buses are going to go faster than regular buses and cars there will need to be some sort of isolation of them, such as elevated tracks or underground tracks. That raises the cost significantly.
You probably will only be able to afford this on a few routes that are heavily travelled and that are expected to remain heavily travelled for decades.
That will probable leave a lot of your city far enough from a tracked buses stop that many won’t be within reasonable walking distance so you are still going to need some form of public transit, such as regular buses.
Much nicer when it’s easy to step on/step off.
Put a trendy restaurant next to the tracks, and watch the trains back up as multiple Uber Eats drivers park on the tracks to pick up food.
Happens every day where I live. The city won't do anything about it because most of the local politicians hate the trains.
Where are you seeing this supporting data?
> In the period between 2019 and 2022, 1,199 cyclists were killed in traffic accidents, with 42 percent of these accidents being caused by collisions with a passenger car or van.
https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2024/15/684-road-traffic-death...
This article states there were 5 deaths caused by tram in 2022 (out of 15 total)
https://openresearch.amsterdam/nl/media/inline/2024/2/12/rap...
Here is says that indeed cbs doesn't track it and that there were 21 deaths per year caused by trams, buses and trains, with 57% of those pedestrian or cyclist
https://swov.nl/nl/fact/openbaar-vervoer-hoeveel-slachtoffer...
this ad-article "Jaarlijks worden er om en nabij 150 personen behandeld in een ziekenhuis na een aanrijding met een tram en komen er zelfs 40 personen te overlijden na een tramongeval." - I think what they mean is 40 people in a decade?
https://letselschadekompas.nl/tram-ongeluk-amsterdam/
and here are some news:
https://www.at5.nl/nieuws/227944/toerist-19-overleden-na-aan...
https://www.dewestkrant.nl/dodelijk-slachtoffer-tramongeval-...
https://www.nu.nl/binnenland/2265358/fietser-overleden-na-aa...
https://www.at5.nl/artikelen/165946/voetganger-overleden-na-...
https://www.bd.nl/binnenland/slachtoffer-overleden-na-aanrij...
Also keep in mind that the driver also is responsible for handling fare evasion and ensuring the passengers stay at least somewhat ruly, which a self driving vehicle might not be able to do.
What is your weighting of the value of PT as a jobs program vs a way to help people get around? Do we have the perfect amount of PT now, or should we have more, or less?
Personally I think "safety issues" will prove to be the sticking point with autonomy of PT but maybe it scales.
I am pro automation but skeptical about social issues.
What are you going to rob? There's no money.
Most PT systems recover hardly anything from fares, the fares are a proxy for "are you a functional person". Would you return a shopping cart?
You can't make the bus or tram (at scale) fully autonomous for safety reasons. Societal trust isn't high enough. When you have a situation where there is a vulnerable lone woman or child victimised the situation will be politically unacceptable. Maybe AI surveillance and targeted enforcement can paper over this.
If you need guard labour though I suppose they can be more effective if they don't have to drive.
People are pretty great and I will be happy to be proven wrong.
Not that I ever expect such a car-centric place as America to allow such a thing to generally happen.
What can work is to have some HQ team of 5 people managing say 50 buses, stepping in in complex situations. And seeing this team being used less and less over time without affecting incident rate negatively. But internet connection would have to be absolutely perfect, I mean 100%, can't have a bus full of folks stuck in some signal-less tunnel.
As I said, 2 decades minimum.
- transporting people has higher legal requirements
- "complicated parking situations" is IMHO not really the problem, most parking situations are relatively straight forward. The problem is complicated driving situations. The fixed routes make it less likely to have, but the bigger size makes it more likely. Bus drivers needing to spontaneously adopt there route is rare but a thing, but having a hugely long car which isn't allowed to drive backward is making that more likely
- people, Bus drivers aren't just driving the bus but also tend to handle the passengers in various ways. The simplest cases are ticket payment (not always) and people asking questions (common especially with older people). More subtle ways include things like giving people the feeling they are not alone in the bus even if they are the only passenger (i.e. subtly reducing bad behavior) telling a passenger that they can't take a bicycle, motorcycle or for the supper crazy kind on fire grill into the bus. Or stuff like calling the police if they notice a passenger getting threatened or assaulted. etc. This category kind applies to any "at same time shared autonomous vehicle" is one of the more "open questions" of autonomous public transport. Depending on country, culture and are I think the difference can be anything from irrelevant to wupsi we have a huge problem.
- Insurance, a lot of autonomous care providers try to doge responsibility, i.e. they drive but you are responsibility for how they drive in most situations. That isn't exactly inviting for bus companies sure there probably is some insurer which is willing to handle it, but then the moment you hit the legal gray area between care maker or insurer has to pay things will likely get messy and that gray area is AFIK currently still too big.
so IMHO less of a pure technical and more of a legal/people issue
https://youtu.be/89djfMaQWZw
“The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed.“
Here's what can happen when things go wrong: https://www.dublinlive.ie/news/dublin-news/wellington-quay-b... (a bus mounted the pavement behind a parked bus and hit a group of people, killing five). In a similar accident with a car, at bus-like speeds, you _probably_ wouldn't expect deaths.
For an urban transport system bus driver (vs say someone driving a private minibus)? Not sure where that is, but it's closer to 1000eur/week here. 39 hour week, 4 weeks holidays, so >25eur/hour, plus benefits, employer tax, and so on and so forth.
I doubt self-driving city buses will be a thing anytime for a while, but it's not because the drivers are cheap, it's because the job's actually quite difficult.
A transit bus lasts an average of 12 years, and even if you don't run it nights or weekends, that's still around 50,000 hours of driving.
That's $500k at $10/h, and if you run a bus 24/7 in NYC you could spend $3M over the course of the bus's life.
Got it. After one day, they've made $3423.33 A week gets them over two million dollars, putting a solid, but not insurmountable, dent in the transportation budget. A month over five-hundred million, easily bankrupting most midsized towns. After a year they've made almost half the entirety of the US GDP.
Maybe I should become a bus driver.
They do not see it happening anytime soon not even for light rails (trams). The primary issue is during busy hours the driver has to take calculated risks or they would not get anywhere. People will just block you. You cannot get an AI to do that or convince the public that they may be run over by an AI. How aggressive so you set the AI? Where do you draw the line?
What they do see is having AIs assist drivers where it will do emergency breaking or hint at dangerous/inattentive people some of which they already have in the new trams but they can switch it off of they need too.
Route-finding is the easy part of self-driving, it was solved basically as soon as we had GPS maps.
The hard part is avoiding hitting anyone, and anything, on the road while do you that.
I'm not at all sure either way about parking. We have parking sensors, but if parking is a "solved" problem or not, I do not know.
/s
(1) is why Mark Rober's recent viral video had the funny ending (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/U1MigIJXJx8) and also why there's so many less funny endings in news stories (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tesla-elon...)
(2) is why the Uber car hit the pedestrian pushing her bike: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg
Test projects, but anyway:
https://www.letsholo.com/oslo
https://www.toi.no/transport-and-behaviour/autonomous-buses-...
Disclaimer: I work for Moia though no longer with AVs.
Once you don't have to pay a human driver salary, it won't make sense to use such large and expensive vehicles as buses.
Also the amount of space per passanger the vehicle takes up on the street is smaller for a larger vehicle.
The price of a bus is roughly 10x the price of a car.
The average number of passengers in a car is about 1.5.
So the average number of passengers in the bus has to be over 15 to be more cost-effective than a car. 15 passengers is far from full. And it is on average, not most of the time.
For the space the passengers take up on the road, it is even more extreme. Take a look at how far apart cars drive on the road. About one or two cars take up the same space as a bus that can carry dozens of passengers.
Removing the driver does not change the efficiency of mass transit. In fact, I’d think you could run even more buses on the same route by removing the driver.
However, it's really very far from being a practical reality; driving a bus is much more difficult than driving a car, and the consequences if you screw up can be far, far worse. Buses are very big and dangerous.
There are plans for more autonomy on the city's commuter trains (non-metro) in 2030-2037, starting with the first line in 2030/2031.
The whole situation is artificial and propped up by external funding right now. Making this a viable industry is going to take a lot more time, if it's possible at all.
That translates into hundreds of millions of annual revenues, obviously not enough to pay back the billions invested.
Elon's whole thing is overpromise and underdeliver - see FSD, Cybertruck
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/
This is why we should have laws that say that even a small software update requires testing by an independent organization for at least several months.
If this had been the policy, we’d still be technologically in the 18th century.
Would you rather be the world’s richest person in 1825 or lower middle class today?
I like antibiotics, MRI, anesthetics during surgeries, unlimited information and entertainment, and the ability to travel places in less than 8 weeks and without getting tuberculosis along the way.
Tech advancement has given the most people the most happiness, safety and prosperity.
And it’s still barely a drop in the bucket compared to what is plainly visible already as the next level up.
With better testing procedures, would we have gotten here sooner, in the same amount of time, or slower?
My contention is slower. And this seems obvious, because in any Cold War sabotage handbook for slowing down a project, the first rule is to insist on more documentation, more consensus, more verification and validation: i.e. more "testing" and less "push to prod".
You are also sort of begging the question. Better testing wouldn't be better if it was worse.
It wasn’t while we were figuring it out. And we still have active greenfield development in military and experimental aircraft. It would make sense to freeze development once we figure out what works. But in the meantime we need an open field for the technology to develop, lest we become another Europe to China.
Anyway giving a choice of bleeding tech or being slightly more conservative tech is something that is taken away by people like Musk. Maybe you prefer being such a choice-less 'slave' to the system and uber rich just to have some shiny new toy a bit earlier, most people don't and many systems consider it outright illegal.
I don't get how tesla is not already sued in Europe for massive frauds they did and do on their customers. I'll happily buy electric car in future but hell will freeze sooner than my family sponsoring those nazi cars, competition is pretty good these days.
If you can figure out a way to make congress to do anything but waste space and time, let us all know. Maybe states (e.g. California, not the normal sense of the term) can regulate some sanity into Tesla.
https://www.wired.com/story/crowdstrike-outage-update-window...
> CrowdStrike wrote in a blog post that the root cause of the crash had been a single configuration file pushed as an update to Falcon.
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We humans don’t do moderation well. The two alternatives seem to be move fast and break things vs don’t move at all. Run or sit still. Free for all or stilted hyperconservative society.
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"Small software update" - good luck qualifying what this is
"independent organization" - ever been audited? auditors love repeat business...
I said "__even__ a small software update", so in fact, every software update, no matter how small.