2019/2020 New Mobility Trends — Part 1/2 — Autonomous Shuttles
Dear Mobility Professionals and welcome to this first episode of a series of 3 articles that I wrote recently about some trends in public transportation that encountered in my long journeys on the field.
First, let’s have a look into the current autonomous shuttle market, its promises but also current challenges, and which topics should be addressed soon to enable autonomous public transportation.
Autonomous shuttles began to storm the market about 3 years ago. Navya released its first version of the AUTONOM SHUTTLE (formerly ARMA) and Easymile launched its EZ10 Gen1 in 2015. Since then the customers of these two brand new companies have deployed about 200 vehicles worldwide in mostly urban traffic configurations to pilot and operate fixed-line station-based services. Many lessons have been learned often the hard way and these operators would agree that there is still a long way to go before regular lines can be deployed in volume.
To get to the next stage these driverless shuttles will have to mature up in 4 respective areas:
- No more safety driver
For the time being and to comply with the existing laws and regulations these vehicles must be supervised by a safety driver located inside the shuttle. This person is also in charge of welcoming travellers and is usually a good communicator to advertise the service and answer the many questions that people rightly ask with regards to “how it works”.
Unfortunately having a safety driver onboard keeps the whole mobility industry and its consumers away from one of the many promises of autonomous driving in public transport: providing affordable 24/7 mobility as-a service. In developed countries the cost of employing a professional driver behind the wheel accounts for about 60 to 70% of the total operating cost of running the actual service. And with the restrictive labor regulations in place to protect the drivers (for good reasons!) the operators are not able to offer innovative services outside the usual profitable service timeframes.
We are getting closer though. During the last leg of 2018 a couple of pilot sites in Europe (eg Waterloo site in Belgium) had their shuttles running with the safety driver watching closely from outside the vehicle. Obviously the main manufacturers are working hard to improve these machines to reach Level 4/5 automation, an important next step in order to also guarantee a viable long term business model for the autonomous shuttle market.
- No more virtual rail
Without getting too deep into the technical details the main concept used by autonomous driving kits to guide these shuttles is based on a real-time alignment of the vehicle over a virtual rail defined by a 3D graph generated using its LIDAR before the deployment.
This approach sounds quite clever and indeed it had helped get these shuttles out the door and on the road for more than 3 years ago already! But it also introduces quite a limitation when it comes to serve door-to-door areas which can’t be graphed without some massive mapping efforts. Handling safely obstacle avoidance is challenging also since the shuttles are not supposed to leave the path defined in their stored maps.
To address these challenges, new developments are underway to use a concept of virtual “corridor” to make the vehicle more agile especially in crowed urban environments (e.g. to go around obstacles).
- More vehicles and more fleets
If we look only into the current driverless market there are simply not enough competitors and not enough vehicles to buy. We need more players with new reliable vehicles of different shapes and forms. PTOs are still missing a larger driverless mini-buses to offer an option in between the shuttle and the traditional 12-meter bus. Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lines are ideal candidates for automation to ease the burden of driving these high-frequency services and eventually to be ran fully autonomously.
- More on-demand but also scheduled-based services
Autonomous shuttles are not designed to coordinate themselves regardless of the services they are used in, be they on-demand or schedule-based. Very much like airplanes they can handle near-by collision detection and react accordingly but they must be connected to an automated control tower to dispatch them according to timetables or passenger bookings and of course in real-time.
In fact most fleets are now getting connected to mobility orchestration platforms to enable first/last mile station-based services and door2door ride-hailing. Mobility providers don’t deploy anymore the basic one-loop or straight line back-n-forth configurations.
- More integration with existing public transit systems
Last but not least these fleets must be properly integrated with existing public transport systems. A so-called “first and last mile” service is only meaningful if and only if the vehicles involved are on time when for example the train arrives at the station, not 10 minutes after (or before!). The ability to align with static time tables or even better to follow real-time schedules to adapt to delays or lines’ reshuffling is mandatory to match the demanding traveler’s expectations of tomorrow.
Behind the scenes, the respective IT backend systems should be able to communicate seamlessly using standard protocols such as GTFS, VDV, SIRI or any XML-based data streams.
- More speed!
Last but (definitely) not least these shuttles should move faster. According to the public statistics of various existing services mainly based in Europe the average speed is below 10kms per hour. Technical-speaking the speed is limited by the ability for the autonomous driving kit (sensors + intelligence) to react fast enough to changes in its surroundings, namely objects and human-beings, but also the weather conditions. Pedestrians coming sideways are quite confusing for instance. And since they are configured for maximum safety (crashing into a stroller would be disastrous news for this fresh industry) they tend to slow down or come to a halt quite often. So in the end they are many reasonable reasons for this limitation as of today but the travellers don’t care and won’t fully embrace the benefits of this revolution unless the situation improves soon.
To recap, the autonomous shuttle market has thus far been limited by the state of the vehicles’ autonomous technology (perception and intelligence), design (size and capacity), and ability to integrate with other modes of mass transit transportation (bus and train schedules). 2019 can be the year when vehicle makers, technology providers, and fleet orchestration platform developers will enable more flexible solutions that offer on-demand services that will meet traveler and operator expectations for efficiency, convenience, safety, and reliability. Let’s make it happen — together!
That’s all for now. Thank you for reading and see you next time to discuss the future of the micro-transit market.
Luc
Disclaimer: All views expressed on this post are my own and do not represent the opinions of any entity whatsoever with which I have been, am now or will be affiliated.
