Big Apple Behind Switzerland - Not Just Cheese and Chocolate

New York, my home town, is a navel-gazing city, and this is amply demonstrated with GM's announcement that autonomous Chevy Bolt's will soon be cruising the streets of Manhattan as part of Cruise Automation testing, Cruise being the GM subsidiary startup famously purchased for $1 billion. This story is everywhere. Yes, this is news, but autonomous vehicles (AVs) have been driving around other US cities for a long time now. It's not that big a deal.

In fact, New York, both the state and the city, are lagging far behind other places. Just one example: Switzerland.

Clean, great chocolate, and AV transit

Image from PostBus press release.

What's not to like about Switzerland? Well, for a native New Yorker, plenty. It's too clean and orderly - even with the great chocolate - but anyone can ride on an AV transit bus, a shuttle pod, really. And many people have ridden one 1.5 kilometer route, to the tune of 60,000.

Sion, a city in Switzerland that has had AV shuttle service for almost two years (since Dec. 2015), is expanding its AV service to extend from the Old Town to the train station. There is a concierge, but not a driver, on each shuttle vehicle.

"The organisers now want to test the shuttles in heavier traffic and using traffic lights. The buses will be operational in the morning and afternoon several days a week, the partners said in a statement on Tuesday."

Can't even take an AV shuttle from the Heights into the City, but in chocolate, pretty mountain land ...

Wait, there's not even AV service in New York and the test is limited to Manhattan; it doesn't go into Brooklyn, let alone Queens or the Bronx, and Switzerland is quietly expanding AV transit, and not just in lovely Scion. According to a PostBus press release:

The self-driving shuttles are the fruit of a collaboration between the Sion and Valais authorities, PostBus and Swiss start-up BestMile, founded in 2014 by graduates from Lausanne’s Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). 

Brooklyn's Wonder Wheel and Cyclone from the beach. Image from CBS News.

Several other autonomous bus services are being tested in Switzerland. Since September 2017, two autonomous shuttle buses have linked the Marly Innovation Center (MIC) to the Fribourg Public Transport (TPF) network over a 1.3-km route.

The capital of Switzerland, Bern, is also experimenting with a pilot in a closed area.

You can still get better pizza, lox, bagels, and even some litter in the City (NYC, of course), but you will only get to look at an AV Chevy Bolt, not ride in one - yet. Go to Switzerland for an AV transit experience and for the chocolate, some cheese, pretty views ...

Can't Resist Cute

This Best Mile video does a nice job of explaining the convenience and behind-the-scenes rationales of driverless public transport. You will find yourself in a world where publicly-available transit is best. And the video is cute, which kept me watching.

Olli and Watson: a beautiful friendship and restaurant recommendations

ZDNet came out with a wonderful article about the role of Watson in Local Motors' Olli shuttle vehicle. Watson is a now-mature creation of IBM (International Business Machines) that started life with a win over humans on the game show Jeopardy. It went on to ace the MCATs (medical equivalent of the SATs in the US) and have a flourishing career in industry. Learned and up to date, Watson is helping out Olli, its autonomous vehicle pal from Local Motors, to humanize the machine/person interactions in driverless shuttles.

So Watson will greet passengers, answer questions about restaurants in the area, and help with directions. Watson has also been trained to understand a diversity of accents and to calm down cranky passengers. It will call an off-site supervisor if anger management is necessary. 

Add sensors and voila ...

Plus, all this self-driving stuff is super easy because college students are taking average cars and turning them into driverless ones. This is at an Arizona program, but soon it could be someone's garage. Perhaps a slight exaggeration.