Companies and cities, sometimes countries, are announcing that AVs, whether shuttles or conventional passenger cars, are coming and they will arrive by a date certain. Those dates differ, but still, such certainty makes one wonder whether the technology is essentially ready or whether engineers are being encouraged to improve the technology fast enough to lend credence to the hype.
Tough, but sweet, outdoor cat taking a break from mouse patrol.
A snarky person like me could wonder whether these bold declarations might encourage companies to suppress, a la Lion Air and Uber (with Herzberg killing), any safety concerns. Perhaps an AV "drivers test" and/or continuous performance monitoring might be in order. After all, auto companies will be combining the driver with the vehicle, and recalls show that those vehicles have sometimes been far from perfectly safe.
Edinburgh, Scotland - AV full-size transit buses will be piloted on a 14-mile route between a commuter parking lot in Fife and a commuter train station . The buses will use the "the dedicated public transportation corridor across the Forth Road Bridge that also allows buses and taxis."
Across a landmass and over water
Japan - Though Japanese automaker Toyota has been relatively quiet about its AV activities, the plan declared a few years ago, and which continues to be repeated, is that AV service will be available for the 2020 Olympics. So where are we?
Plans are also moving ahead for AV robotaxis to ferry visitors around in Tokyo during the Olympics. Reports from the summer stated that AV vans were being tested as a step toward service during the Olympics. Partners are a Japanese taxi company and a Japanese AV tech company. Toyota is also an investor.
In contrast to bravado or openness?
Miami, Florida - Ford has invited journalists to ride along on trips in its AVs in the traffic mess of Miami (though what US city is not a traffic mess?). These rides are taking place on actual busy streets with bikers and pedestrians and other drivers, all who arbitrarily violate the law and otherwise act in unexpected ways on a regular basis. Ford is basically using the city traffic as a test bed, though with careful backup drivers. The carmaker has a clear goal - AV ridehailing service on the street in Miami and Dade County in 2021.
Two articles that popped up on my Google alerts this week point to a possible - though still unlikely - scenario of transcendent transit systems and a waning auto dealership distribution model - both due to fully automated vehiches (AVs) and the ways they will be available, particularly in cities and traditional suburbs (not exurbs).
Auto dealers have not said much or done much in response to AV developments thus far. Even as every prediction says that most AV passenger transportation will be fleet based and publicly available, whether through transit or private companies or public-private partnerships, auto dealers have remained silent. After all, it is still a profitable business in most places in the US to sell cars, even in most cities.
Change drastically or get out
Now an executive at a firm that does financial advising for car dealers, and which itself invests in dealerships, is ringing the alarm for dealerships and holding up the scary prospects of Kodak and Blockbuster as examples of companies that had their heads in the sand as technological developments began bubbling up around them.
The opinion piece insists that in the next 20 years, dealerships will either go out of business (so better to sell out soon) or undergo massive consolidation, down to a few huge dealership companies.
Singapore planning for drastic change
Singapore is possibly the city (okay city/state) most prepared for AVs. It has been investing in AVs and allowing testing for years. Now Singapore is turning to the AV shuttle with an EasyMile AV that will serve a university. This will be a pilot that begins in March 2019.
With its good weather, Singapore is well placed to take early advantage of AVs.
Waymo to launch real no-driver service and expand to more cities
Yes, it's all over the news, almost old news, from last week that Waymo will slowly begin and then incrementally expand its AV service, but without backup drivers in every vehicle. I'm about to head to the airport, so I am excusing myself from providing one of any 50 easy-to-find sources for this news.
Still no word from Waymo on working with transit or providing accessible vehicles. Since I like the company, that is quite disappointing.
So the title question - will AVs bring transit popularity?
The answer may be publicly available transportation will become popular, but transit itself becoming popular in the places where it barely hits the edge of the spectrum on mode share is doubtful. Transit quality means investment, which means funding in the form of public dollars, which has grown, but, in the US, still remains the exception rather than the rule.
Prelude: Thus far, and for the near future, this blog exists in some respect as my personal filing cabinet of topics I follow about autonomous vehicle (AV) business development, models of future service and arrangements, and legal and regulatory issues. At the moment I do not have the time and resources to cover and catalogue these issues as thoroughly and in ways I would like to. Not sure when that will change, but I do feel torn because I want to follow through on my ideas for better resources than currently exist.
That's my reason for why the following is a list and not an analysis or complete coverage of what follows. PLUS - This is not up-to-the-moment. 😦
Read below while considering the "cities-first" approach of an AV planning partnership from the Bloomberg Philanthropies AV Cities project and the National League of Cities. In an American governance framework where cities are often preempted from regulating their street use due to federal or state laws and regulations, it will be interesting to see the planning coming out of the project. So far, these two organizations say there has been a 30 percent jump in cities incorporating AV transportation into their planning.
There's more than a yellow rose in Texas
Texas is growing as far as AV pilot programs. There is Arlington, where the Dallas Cowboys and the Texas Rangers play, which has an AV shuttle operating on game days and around other events. But now:
Houston - An AV shuttle will be operating on campus at Texas Southern University (TSU) shuttle. "The small shuttles, called “university circulators,” will be limited to a mile-long campus pathway and will run at average speeds ranging from 8 to 12 miles per hour."
Frisco, a suburb of Dallas - According to a Dallas News article, Drive.ai will be testing and doing a six-month pilot of an AV ridehailing service that is planned to commence in July. "The service is made possible through a unique public-private partnership among California-based Drive.ai, the city of Frisco, the Denton County Transportation Authority and the private developments for Hall Park, The Star and Frisco Station. They are all part of the newly formed Frisco Transportation Management Association."
The Frisco AV shuttle will serve the general public at an office park near where the Arlington, TX, AV shuttle operates.
Commercial interruption
Florida
Two states with strong conservative tendencies have attracted plenty of AV testing, Arizona and now Florida. Florida, which is a little far from California and does not have that dry heat, has also rolled out the red carpet of no regulation for AV testing, pilots, and operations.
Gainseville, below the Florida Panhandle, but not at all on the water, is getting a cute AV shuttle route for a transit pilot. EasyMile will be supplying four shuttle AVs. Service is expected to begin for regular riders by the fall.
Tampa already has a shuttle and Babcock Ranch, a real estate development creation of a town, has a pilot that is expected to turn public. The town, Babcock Ranch, announced in 2016 as an eco-friendly soon-to-be-developed town the size of Manhattan, is being true to the word of the developers and an AV shuttle is on its streets being tested since January. Some houses are already built.
Viva Las Vegas
Coming this summer to the streets of Vegas to join the cute AV shuttle there will be Lyft AV ridehailing - BUT to run on fixed routes. This partnership of Lyft and Aptiv will build on the January pilot that provided rides during the CES conference in January 2018. Aptiv's Chief Technology Officer says, "Aptiv will work closely with the city to design future mobility solutions, which benefit public transportation and help with urban congestion challenges. The findings in the Las Vegas test run will be deployed in other cities across the world."
While in the Midwest:
FINALLY the University of Michigan MCity AV shuttle makes its debut, after over a year in the works. Ferrying students on North Campus is a cute shuttle vehicle from Navya. Students, staff, and eligible guests are invited to ride for free. Hours are limited to daytime and the shuttle ceases service at 3 pm.
Watch the cool video from Ford about enabling people with visual disabilities to "see" or at least to experience the visual landscape.
The long-running AV shuttle operating in Sion, Switzerland is being taught to cross busy streets and communicate with traffic signals. There will also be testing for making its route more complex with roundabouts as well.
Elaine Chao, the US Secretary of Transportation, is saying exactly what other DOT staff and the private sector are saying, that people with disabilities and older adults are going to be big winners with autonomous vehicles (AVs) because it won't matter if they are unable to drive. Hooray for these good intentions, but until now, no one was talking about accessibility and the work to get there. I'm including Ford's big announcement yesterday in this post because shared use, transit, and accessibility go hand in hand to provide independence for those with transportation challenges. Transportation equity advances
The new Olli autonomous shuttle is as much an achievement as the process that led to the universal design of this AV and its interfaces - designed with and for people with disabilities as much as for the general public. Not only were people with disabilities invited in, listened to, and asked questions, but even more amazing is that the Olli team designed for accessibility for a range of different types of disabilities. Yes! People who use wheelchairs were included, but so were people with visual disabilities and more.
Kudos to Local Motors, the company that manufactures the Olli, for taking the time to find out what people need and want and feels comfortable and actively engaging with people with disabilities, who, for the most part, continue to suffer from terrible transportation challenges even with our best transit systems. (I may be involved with this field professionally, but it was a lesson when I needed to use the DC Metro elevators recently. Not easy to experience a normal trip even when elevators are working, but that is impossible most of the time due to constant elevator breakdowns and maintenance work. It's like SafeTrack all the time for anyone who is unable to use the escalators.)
Ford finds cities to be wonderful towns - where people don't want to drive
It's as if the executives of the Ford Motor Company watched this classic movie snippet, which is very multimodal, by the way, and got religion - the religion of transit, shared use, and mobility as a service (MaaS), and decided to go right for it. They've hung up the 1950s ethos of Detroit and gotten the 2018 bug of Brooklyn, Portland, and San Francisco.
In an amazing display of Ford's commitment to its new philosophy, the company announced yesterday that it is (1) buying - acquiring - TransLoc, a microtransit platform and transit routing software company, which builds upon the acquisition and expansion of Chariot into more cities; (2) acquiring Autonomic (which sounds like a cross between auto technology and off-the-shelf medicine), which can simply be described as a cloud-based MaaS platform; and (3) getting heavily into shared-use modes, MaaS, and non-emergency medical transportation. It's as if Ford is saying it will get into and replace all transit and shared-use modes except for the urban rail systems.
There's more: Because this is corporate America, a reorganization goes along with the news. Seems like Ford's Smart Mobility program is greatly expanding to include a mobility business group, and to integrate the almost-within-reach dream of AVs.
Now that's a big day for AVs. Maybe Ford will acquire Local Motors, the Olli company. Ford seems to be on a buying spree.
Ever since New Year's there's been a deluge of autonomous vehicle (AV) news. Between the broken arm (was a bummer, but not too bad) and the ton of news, it's taken me a while to read through everything and I have yet to sift through the legislative and other developments at the state level.
See my post about the details of the requests for comments from FTA, FHWA, and NHTSA. Submit early and often. You have until early March to share your thoughts with these agencies and to contribute to the public record.
AV ridehailing shifting to actual AVs and to more cities
Yes, Uber, Lyft, and Waymo have been testing and piloting AVs for a long time. Now announcements are fast and furious that the driver - also known as the AV engineer or attendant - will be ditched altogether for some ridehailing trips in particular locations.
There's also lots of news about geographic expansions to Atlanta, Boston and unnamed cities.
Waymo is heading to Atlanta to supply rides in a car-oriented, congested city with good weather. No word on ditching the drivers - yet. According to the TechCrunch post, Atlanta is thrilled and touting its bona fides as a city with lots of smart people to work for hi-tech firms. Waymo is already in the Phoenix area - the first car-oriented, congested city with good weather to see AVs.
In December, Boston saw more activity with the Lyft-nuTonomy announcement of AV ridehailing, though with a driver in the car. AV rides will only be available in the South Street Seaport area for now. This month Lyft also pushed forward with a partnership with Aptiv to bring AV ridehailing to the CES conference in Las Vegas, the experiment being continued beyond the conference. This partnership is flirting with us by way of a statement about expanding to another city, as yet unnamed. What? When?
Boston will soon add another AV operation: Optimus Ride has received approval to transport passengers in AVs and will soon do so in the Marine Park area. Optimus Ride is a local startup out of MIT. Date unspecified and actual type of operation unspecified as well.
“There are places people definitely need to go, and there’s definitely a first- and last-mile problem,” said Ryan Chin, chief executive officer of Optimus Ride. “The Silver Line isn’t really cutting it at many times of the day. I think there’s an opportunity to rethink that.”
Waymo, however, is already testing - sans driver - in the Phoenix area. Apparently Waymo has been operating without a human in some AVs since October. At an as yet unspecified date, the company will invite normal people to ride.
