Study looks at driverless bus safety

The thought of a city bus cruising down Orlando streets without a driver at the wheel and under the control of a computer doesn’t immediately strike some riders as wise.

“That’s scary,” said Malandra Wallace, citing a host of concerns as she rose from a bench for her Lynx ride at Central Station in Orlando. “What if a bus is full of people and goes out of control?”

That’s the sort of question that transportation author-

ities want to answer with a $300,000 evaluation of autonomous buses, which other cities, including Tampa and Gainesville, are rolling out in pilot programs.

Driverless buses also will hit the road at University of Central Florida, where three shuttles will begin service next fall.

“We need to ensure the vehicles are safe, they are efficient and they are reliable,” said Chris Castro, Orlando’s sustainability director.

With a competitive race under way among tech companies and automakers to put autonomous cars on the road, a less hyped push for driverless buses is gaining traction in metropolitan areas and among manufacturers.

Travelers at Orlando International Airport already get a feel for autonomous transportation when they step into shuttles for a lift to outlying gates. Those vehicles run along fixed tracks, while the kinds of buses envisioned for city streets would be free to roam a route under their own, wired abilities.

Construction worker Chad Morency, when asked for his thoughts about buses run by computers, responded: “Why, so they can be hacked?”

The study that will address that concern and others is being paid for by the city of Orlando, the Lynx bus system and MetroPlan Orlando, the region’s transportation-planning agency.

“There has to be redundancy if a wireless network went down,” said Billy Hattaway, city transportation director. “There has to be redundancy so that shuttle doesn’t keep on going when the light is red and it goes right through the

Driverless buses also will hit the road at University of Central Florida, where three shuttles will begin service next fall.

light and doesn’t know any better.”

Spanning from late next year into 2019, the study also will consider what Orlando would have to do to transform its downtown Lymmo loops and other express routes into autonomous transit.

So far, the city has no deadline for when that would happen.

A promise of the vehicles is that they will never operate under the influence of drugs, text while at the wheel or make other kinds of human errors behind most crashes.

But Wallace, a veteran of transit commuting, said there is more to safe bus trips than avoiding accidents.

“What if there is trouble?” said Wallace, who has seen drivers stop fights. “They are going to have to do their homework on that.”

That need for a human presence is shared by Edward Johnson, chief executive officer at Lynx, which serves Orange, Seminole, and Osceola counties.

“We are nowhere near going to a point where we go from having a driver on the bus today and not having a driver or some representative of the organization on the vehicle tomorrow,” Johnson said.

“We look at our vehicle operators not just as someone driving the bus but as ambassadors to our community,” Johnson said. “We have a huge number of people here in our community for short visits, and they need a lot of information.”

Even so, Tampa and Gainesville are poised to begin service on short routes with autonomous shuttles with room for more than a dozen passengers.

The Gainesville system will connect downtown and university housing, while Tampa’s will run downtown, ferrying workers to parking areas.

UCF shuttles will operate along two routes that bisect the campus core.

Jeremy Dilmore, a Department of Transportation engineer overseeing implementation of the UCF shuttles, said the electric vehicles would cost between $300,000 and $600,000 each, depending on size and ability to recharge quickly.

Funding will come from a federal grant of $12 million awarded this year to assist Central Florida in developing safer streets for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians.

“What some manufacturers will tell you is they work best interacting with pedestrians versus with vehicles,” Dilmore said of the autonomous shuttles.

Lessons learned with UCF shuttles may apply to Orlando’s Lymmo and other routes, he said.

One of the nation’s pioneers in autonomous buses, Las Vegas, made headlines this year when one of its vehicles crashed during an inaugural outing. Police cited the driver of a truck for backing into the shuttle, which had stopped. There were no injuries.