Driverless buses are coming to UK roads, with Milton Keynes and Sunderland leading the charge.
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I’m sort of okay with driverless trains — they are pretty much/ideally limited to the railway tracks. This has too many possibilities for error for my taste.
Perhaps the real question is, are we ready for a world without bus drivers? I think they’re a net positive in the daily commute.
Took the bus a lot as a kid/young adult. Some bus drivers were nice, but most were rude or basically had no impact on my commute. I’ve had a driver hit on me and then miss my stop multiple times after I declined. At least where I am, busses don’t stop at all stops unless there’s someone that needs to be picked up or dropped off and will regularly just skip stops if they’re running behind, regardless of how packed the bus or stop is. Have a bike, or need wheelchair access? The bus driver is going to give you attitude the whole time, if they stop for you at all. Some bus drivers were nice and would remember you and say hi, or help people who had questions, but it was a minority in my experience.
I’m not saying we’re ready to move to AI, but I can’t imagine what kind of positive they’re adding to your life that it is seen as a valid reason to keep them if they’re not actually needed. Like if they’re actually nice people, I would love to make sure they’re working jobs that need to be done and could use the injection of positivity you’re describing.
Ugh, sorry to hear about your experiences. Yeah, I’m not going to bat for all bus drivers. I’m speaking in favour of having a human onboard, because the passengers aren’t necessarily an ideal crowd either…
The role of being a proxy authority figure can definitely turn some asshole drivers further to the dark side… I don’t want to come off as defending those.
Totally understandable to want to have a kind of “responsible party” there. Public transit has a relatively high proportion of vulnerable populations, so you make a good point.
You didn’t come off as defending anyone. I think it was just one of the first times I’ve heard someone talking about having mostly positive experiences on public transit (in the US). For what it’s worth, it’s nice to know it happens lol. Hope they continue to be positive!
It really depends on the location I guess. I ride the bus a lot in my city. And the bus drivers here do a lot more than just drive the bus. Their most important secondary duty is helping users of wheelchairs and other mobility devices. The buses have wheelchair ramps that fold down, which the drivers manually operate. Then once on the bus, a front section of seats will fold up, and there is a system to strap a wheelchair down securely. It is the bus driver that does this.
Now, one area automated buses could really help would be expanding the pool of potential drivers. Our system has a hard time recruiting new drivers, as a CDL (commercial drivers license) is required. And people with such a license can usually make better money driving trucks for for-profit businesses. So it’s really hard to get, train, and retain bus drivers, as few people are actually qualified to drive a bus.
So in our city, we would still need an employee onboard to help with these secondary duties. However, with an automated bus, they could be done by anyone. Instead of a driver with a CDL, we could hire some college kids to ride around the city in the auto buses. They could offer assistance when needed, but spend the majority of their time just working on their studies. As such, they could be hired at a very affordable cost to the city.
Yea, public transit differs wildly depending on area. Like I mentioned above, most drivers I saw actively resented this part of their job. To my recollection, the ramp was automated, but other than that the drivers would basically require you to ask for assistance and then huff and puff the whole time. Not all drivers, but a disproportionately large percentage. Would love to see that part of the job occupied by someone with more compassion, but you’re correct that with the current system someone would need to be there for that. I was figuring that if the vehicle was automated they’d have ADA compliant automated safety features as well.
This is a very good point. It makes me a bit uneasy, even though it is still better than driverless cars. Aside from this, I also have mixed feelings about the fact that every pound being put into development and purchasing of these busses could have been put into the expansion of existing routes…
And it’s not even something that would drastically improve my experience if it was fully successful. Busses are already one of the safest modes, being safer than trains in several countries. Maybe I’ve missed something and someone can correct me, but this feels like throwing money at technology for technology’s sake.Yeah, the reasoning seems to have been “Think how much we’ll save on driver salaries! Plus, the computer will never unionise or cause a fuss about hours.” That’s the only arguments I can think of.
At the same time, I can think of several times I’ve been glad to have a human driver on the bus, mostly to do with obnoxious fellow travelers…
Are We Ready For Driverless Buses?
If they’re on a set of parallel metal beams on the ground, absolutely!
The advantage of busways is that they’re a lot cheaper to build than trains. You just need some paint on pavement to build a dedicated bus lane. All you have to really build are some nice bus stops. The big problem with trains is vertical and horizontal alignment. You can’t just lay train tracks on top of an existing road system. Cars and buses can handle much greater slopes and perform much steeper turns than trains can.
For example, you can make a busway over an existing road bridge, without any need to rebuild the bridge itself. But you can’t just slap some train tracks on an existing road bridge, as the train would be unable to make it up the slopes designed for car traffic.
My conclusion is not that we need to replace all the buses with trains, it’s that I’m not okay with replacing manned buses with unmanned ones. Unmanned trains, I’d be fine with, but just keep the manned buses.
Oh god, not another fucking pod.
This article reads like a paid advertisement. The whole website looks like it’s just shilling techbro bullshit.
Remember kids, always reject corporatization of public services.
if you want to have a reliable driverless system, you’re going to have to invent trains… again
Isnt train+bus just a streetcar?
Normally yes, but Japan also came up with an alternative and rather literal combination of the two, because of course they did:
I can’t check because I’m at work, but is that the Tom Scott video?
At least, I think I remember him doing a video on that thing, maybe it was just someone kind of like him.
Correct!
surely it doesnt make economic sense to buy a smartbus over a dumbbus and paying a driver. this seems like a weird move
The one in the picture seems to be going on a rampage through a shopping centre.
I’m actually going to disagree a bit here and say, I think it somewhat makes sense.
Buses have specific routes, and can be trained to perfect those. Not all routes will be suitable, but some will.
Hope they make a public database for these routes, and are able to use the self driving data to learn from it.
Agreed - in my area busses drive on dedicated bus routes with no other vehicles. Realistically, they should be trollies. There’s no reason that it couldn’t be automated.
This could be ok on dedicated bus lanes in cities that are well designed… I’m not sure if any place in the UK fits that criteria
no i don’t want driverless anything unless they’re on private roads; enough is enough.
Disasters in waiting More expensive to maintain, less flexibility
For how janky driverless cars can be, I am not optimistic that we’re close. I wouldn’t want a huge bus full of people getting confused on the road. If driverless cars didn’t require so much human intervention to function normally, I would have a different feeling.
Self driving cars are bad enough. How is a self driving bus going to navigate crowded city streets?
The moment I read “roads” I realized this is not about USB or busses of that sort. I was curious what driverless might improve here
Well, considering that they’re canceling the one which was running in Fife (?) because it required two drivers, I don’t think so.
I think that driverless busses are probably much less of a dramatic change than driverless cars.
If you have one person in a car driving to work and the car is fully-self-driving, then you free up one person’s time. You potentially change where parking is practical. You may permit people who cannot drive a car to use one, like young or elderly.
With a bus, the passengers are already free to do what they want. You’re saving labor costs on a bus driver, maybe getting a safer vehicle. But I’d call that an evolutionary change.
https://proxy.parisjc.edu:8293/statistics/300887/number-of-buses-in-use-by-region-uk/
In 2020/21, the number of buses amounted to 37800 in Great Britain.
Those probably get heavier use than cars. But you want scale, since driverless vehicle costs are mostly fixed, and driver labor costs variable. You’re talking about not having maybe 38k people driving. You need to cover all of your costs out of that. That’s not nothing, but…okay, how many tractor-trailers are out there?
https://www.statista.com/topics/5280/heavy-goods-vehicles-in-the-uk/
Heavy goods vehicle registrations bounced back above their pre-pandemic levels in 2021, reaching 504,600 vehicles in circulation.
If you have driverless trucks, that’s an order-of-magnitude difference in vehicle count from busses in the UK.
I’m not saying that there aren’t wins possible with self-driving busses. But it doesn’t seem to me to be the vehicle type with the greatest potential improvement from being self-driving.
