“The autonomous shuttles will fit four people to a car, running on its own dedicated pathway, spanning 28 miles between Pittsburg, Antioch, Oakley and Brentwood.”
“The county hopes to roll out the driverless cars around the county in the next three to five years. If the demand is there, the company expects to see large number of the cars on the roadways.”
Okay, so it’s a shittier, lower-capacity BRT system, but we added AI so it’s all good.
“self-driving shuttles on a fixed route” Did they just make worse trains?
No, these run on roads…So they are smaller, worse busses.
Which by themselves are worse trains. /s (?)
And the circle is complete.
After years of being “almost there” 2023 seems the year self-driving robot vehicles have finally come of age. In several cities in the US & China, people can hail self-driving taxis within city limits. It surprises me that fixed route buses, like the model talked about here, aren’t taking off faster. In many ways they are simpler than self-driving taxis, needing only level 4 self-driving. They are also an incredibly obvious solution to help reduce fossil fuels. A self-driving bus network with buses stopping every 5 minutes that served a city’s busiest 100 locations would make many people ditch car journeys.
After years of being “almost there” 2023 seems the year self-driving robot vehicles have finally come of age.
Then you haven’t been paying attention to the reality:
- driverless cars disabled by placing traffic cones on their hoods
- driverless car blocks emergency vehicle
- driverless car fails to recognize construction area
These incidents demonstrate that driverless cars are incapable of recognizing and responding to unusual situations. Reality is chaotic and there will always be unusual situations, and unusual situations with vehicles put peoples’ lives at risk. The cost is too high, the benefit too low.
It surprises me that fixed route buses, like the model talked about here, aren’t taking off faster.
We already have those, they’re called buses. This thing reminds me of those projects that reinvent trains but shittier. Instead of investing in this kind of nonsense we should be improving public transit infrastructure. If we need to add more bus routes we should just do that.
And frankly, the current state of the technology has been massively overhyped.
Self driving buses on fixed routes sem like a good idea to me, self driving cars not ao much.
