Driverless buses are coming to UK roads, with Milton Keynes and Sunderland leading the charge.
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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!
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.
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
Oh god, not another removeding pod.
This article reads like a paid advertisement. The whole website looks like it’s just shilling techbro bullremoved.
Remember kids, always reject corporatization of public services.
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.
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.
surely it doesnt make economic sense to buy a smartbus over a dumbbus and paying a driver. this seems like a weird move
no i don’t want driverless anything unless they’re on private roads; enough is enough.
The one in the picture seems to be going on a rampage through a shopping centre.
Disasters in waiting More expensive to maintain, less flexibility
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.
Self driving cars are bad enough. How is a self driving bus going to navigate crowded city streets?
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.
