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I wonder when buses in public transport will become autonomous. It seems like a much easier thing to do. They drive on fixed routes and do not have to handle c

• ceejayoz 1y 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.
  • jajko 1y 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.
  • growlNark 1y 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.
• jfim 1y ago
  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.
  • Vilian 1y ago
    To rob a self driving bus you put a cone on front of it, try that with a bus driver
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • xyzzy123 1y 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 1y ago
        Subways is partially autonomous in many parts of the world, including Paris where people are particularly unruly.
        • xyzzy123 1y 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.
      • panick21_ 1y ago
        > Most PT systems recover hardly anything from fares That is just factually wrong. For example, Zürich operating bus, trams and fares costs about 1.3 billion $. And it takes in 65.3 % in fares. I checked a few others and around 60% seems to be quite normal. I wouldn't call that 'hardly anything'. And if all it takes a cone falling over and rolling over to stop a tram with 200 people in it, we are in a really dumb situation.
• gryfft 1y 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.
  • allan_s 1y ago
    like trolleys/tramways ?
    • shmeeed 1y ago
      I suppose the /s was implicit
  • dvdkon 1y 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 1y ago
      The Vancouver Skytrain has been fully autonomous since it opened in 1986.
      • rsynnott 1y 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 1y ago
          Fine, fine, you've sold me. We'll grade-separate them too.
          • 1y ago
• Vilian 1y ago
  It's much easier, secure and cheaper to pay a bus driver, it's a political issue not a technical one
  • rsynnott 1y 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.
• jansan 1y 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 1y 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.
• l33tman 1y 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...
  • mft_ 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 $3M over the course of the bus's life.
    • BobaFloutist 1y ago
      Per hour per hour? Ok, let's see...second-order integral (these always confuse me because rates are stepping up a dimension but derivatives are stepping down a dimension, but that's neither here nor there), assuming no constants, so they start at 0$/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.
• afavour 1y 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.
• Yoric 1y 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.
• growlNark 1y ago
  I'd be pretty surprised if China wasn't already figuring this out.
• dathinab 1y 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
• vidarh 1y ago
  > I wonder when buses in public transport will become autonomous. Test projects, but anyway: https://www.letsholo.com/oslo https://www.letsholo.com/oslo https://www.toi.no/transport-and-behaviour/autonomous-buses-tested-in-real-traffic-in-oslo https://www.toi.no/transport-and-behaviour/autonomous-buses-...
• ben_w 1y 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 1y ago
    Is that not also route finding? The route happens to be dynamic due to all those pesky obstacles. /s
    • ben_w 1y 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. (1) is why Mark Rober's recent viral video had the funny ending (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/U1MigIJXJx8 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-musk-full-self-driving-lawsuit-b2738921.html 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg
• discordance 1y ago
  China has had driverless buses for some time: https://youtu.be/89djfMaQWZw https://youtu.be/89djfMaQWZw “The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed.“
  • rsynnott 1y ago
    That's not a driverless bus, it's a glorified tech demo.
    • lossolo 1y 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.
    • discordance 1y ago
      There’s no driver for the bus, it transports real passengers and it’s in more than one city.
• sschueller 1y 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.
• rsynnott 1y 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-bus-crash-killed-31070172 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.
• hoherd 1y 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_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste...
• yk 1y ago
  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.
• soco 1y 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.
• xnx 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
      Only if the vehicle is mostly full most of the time.
      • mg 1y 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 1y 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.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]