Roboshuttles a fast-growing field of slow transit
PLANNERS across the United States are pushing slow-rolling roboshuttles as a way to dip their toes into greater automation.
The stubby, bread-box-looking vehicles go about 10 miles per hour, and boosters say they’re a relatively easy and potentially transformative tool for moving people, even as autonomous cars, trucks and minivans continue their development and rollout. Others counsel caution, raising concerns about safety, oversight and economic viability, and fears about adding congestion to roadways and eliminating jobs.
A business group in Washington, D.C., wants one of the self- driving shuttles to connect the Smithsonian, with its millions of visitors, to the city’s resurgent waterfront less than half a mile away.
In Jacksonville, Florida, officials are preparing to overhaul the existing Skyway monorail system with automated shuttles instead.
But the fast- changing field of slow-moving people movers is also fraught with challenges, experts said. It’s unclear where they will make sense economically and how companies and governments might work through the nittygritty of seeing them widely deployed.
There have already been miscues.
A subsidiary of French transportation giant Transdev had part of its automated shuttle operation in Florida shut down by safety officials last month. The company didn’t have federal permission to operate as a school bus, but it added yellow-and-black markings to an EZ10 Generation II driverless shuttle and did so anyway, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
“NHTSA believes your testing puts the safety of children and other users at risk,” the agency’s chief counsel wrote last month, adding that the company risked civil penalties and having its vehicle expelled from the US if it did not immediately halt its “autonomous school shuttle” at the Babcock Ranch subdivision near Fort Myers.
The company said it “voluntarily” shut the school pilot - which ran Fridays along a three-block route - one week early “in deference” to NHTSA.
“We did not put children at risk,” Transdev said in a statement. “This was a very small pilot, with strict standards for safety, in a highly- controlled environment.”
In fact, Transdev executives say they “mistakenly believed” they had been adhering to the terms of their approval. They are still taking adults and kids along the same route on weekends, something they’ve been doing since 2017, the company said. Federal officials have taken a largely laissez-faire approach to autonomous cars, and there are no national safety standards for self- driving technologies. Even after a driverless Uber SUV struck and killed a pedestrian in March, federal officials emphasised the need to give companies the space to innovate.
The “autonomous school shuttle” was different, in part because Transdev needed federal permission to import a vehicle for the Florida project, giving Washington a say in how they would be used. Had NHTSA known Transdev would be doing “school transportation,” the agency said, it would have evaluated “whether the vehicle complied with applicable school bus and bus regulations.”
A recent federal study described potential difficulties facing communities hungry to deploy the shuttles.
Federal “Buy America” rules requiring domestic “content and assembly” could thwart some purchasers, because some top producers are overseas, including in Europe where the vehicles have a longer history, according the September report from the US Department of Transportation.
More broadly, there can be “misaligned expectations” about the vehicles’ performance, the authors found.
“Project sponsors are excited by the possibility of cost- effectively addressing transportation challenges,” but current shuttles have “significant limits,” they wrote. The need to frequently charge the electric vehicles can take them out of service for significant stretches, shrinking operating hours and adding costs, they wrote. And requirements that humans be on board as backups undercut the business advantages of going driverless.