GOING MOBILE
People with disabilities hope autonomous cars deliver independence
Myrna Peterson predicts that self-driving vehicles will be a ticket out of isolation and loneliness for people like her, who live outside big cities and have disabilities that prevent them from driving.
Peterson, who is quadriplegic, is an enthusiastic participant in an unusual test of autonomous vehicles in this corner of northern Minnesota. She helped attract government funding to bring five self-driving vans to Grand Rapids, a city of 11,000 in a forested area along the Mississippi River.
The project’s self-driving vans always have a human operator in the driver’s seat, poised to take over in complicated situations. But the computers are in control about 90% of the time, and they’ve given 5,000 rides since 2022 without any accidents, organizers say.
“It’s been fun. I’m really sold on it,”said Peterson, who used to rely on her power wheelchair to travel around town.
Autonomous vehicles, which can drive themselves at least part of the time, are being tested in urban areas. Rural experiments have been set up in a few other states, including Iowa and Ohio. Peterson hopes the pilot projects help usher in a time when fully autonomous cars and vans assist the estimated 25 million Americans whose travel is limited by disabilities.
But fully independent vehicles are far from an everyday option as of yet, as automakers struggle to
perfect the technology.
Peterson is among those who believe autonomous vehicles someday will become safer than humandriven models.
“Look at how many times the light bulb failed before it worked,” she said.
Unlike many smaller towns, Grand Rapids has public buses and a taxi service. But Peterson said those options don’t always work well, especially for folks with disabilities.
The autonomous vehicle program, known as goMARTI, which stands for Minnesota’s Autonomous Rural Transit Initiative, offers a flexible alternative, she said. She hopes it eventually will ease a national shortage of drivers, which tends to be acute in rural regions.
The project is funded through spring 2027, with more than $13 million from federal, state and local sources — much of it coming from the 2021 federal infrastructure bill.
The project’s Toyota
minivans are outfitted by a Michigan company, May Mobility. Slogans painted on the side invite the public to “Experience Self Driving in Minnesota’s Nature.” The vans bristle with cameras, radar, GPS and laser sensors. Their computer systems constantly monitor surroundings and learn from situations they encounter, said Jon Dege, who helps manage the project for May Mobility.
Users arrange free rides via a smartphone app or the 211 social service telephone line.
On a recent chilly afternoon, a goMARTI van pulled up near Peterson’s house. She emerged, bundled in a purple parka honoring her beloved Minnesota Vikings. She rolled her electric wheelchair to the van, up a ramp and into the back.
Van operator Mark Haase helped strap the wheelchair in, then climbed into the driver’s seat for a demonstration.
As the van pulled onto the street, the steering wheel seemed to shudder, reflecting tiny adjustments the computer made. Haase kept his foot near the brake pedal and his hands around the steering wheel, ready to take over if a problem arose. After moments when he needed to take control of the vehicle, he pressed a button telling the computer to resume command. “It was weird at first, but it didn’t take long to get used to it and trust the system,” Haase said.
The Minnesota Department of Transportation helped direct federal money toward the Grand Rapids project, which followed a similar effort in the southern Minnesota city of Rochester. Tara Olds, the department’s director of connected and automated vehicles, said her agency sought smaller communities that wanted to give autonomous vehicles a shot.
Neither kind of driver will ever be perfect, Olds said. “You know, humans make mistakes, and computers make mistakes,” she said.
Frank Douma, a research scholar at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies, has analyzed the Grand Rapids project and other autonomous-vehicle programs. He said running such projects in smaller towns isn’t necessarily harder than doing so in urban areas.
“It’s just different.”
For the foreseeable future, such services probably will need to run on predetermined routes, with regular stops, he said. It would be more difficult to have autonomous vehicles travel on demand to unfamiliar addresses out in the countryside.
Developers will need to overcome significant challenges before autonomous vehicles can become a regular part of rural life, he said, “but it’s no longer something that can be dismissed as impossible.”
A recent report from the National Disability Institute predicted that autonomous vehicles could help people with disabilities get out of their homes and obtain jobs.
Tom Foley, the group’s executive director, said a lack of transportation often causes isolation, which can lead to mental health problems. “There’s an epidemic of loneliness, particularly for older people and particularly for people with disabilities,” he said.
Foley, who is blind, believes that the vehicles someday will become a safe alternative to human drivers, including in rural areas. “They don’t text. They don’t drink. They don’t get distracted,” he said.
The Grand Rapids project covers 35 miles of road, with 71 stops. The routes initially avoided parking lots, where human drivers often make unexpected decisions, Dege said. But organizers recognized that the street-side stops could be challenging for people, especially if they’re among the 10% of goMARTI riders who use wheelchairs. The autonomous vans now drive into parking lots to pick riders up at the door.
During the recent ride with Peterson and Haase, the van turned into a parking lot. A woman in an orange car cut across the lot, heading for the front of the van. The computer driving the van hit the brakes. A split second later, Haase did the same. The orange car’s driver smiled and gave a friendly wave as she drove past.
The autonomous vans have gone out in nearly all kinds of weather, which can be a challenge in northern Minnesota, where snowfall is a concern.
“There were only three or four times when it was so snowy we had to pull it in,” Dege said. He said the driving systems can handle snowflakes in the air and ice on the pavement. They tend to get confused by snow piles, though. The human operators step in to assist in those situations while the computers learn how to master them.
The robot drivers can also get stymied by roundabouts, or traffic circles. The setups are touted as safer than four-way stops, but they can befuddle human drivers, too.
Haase took control each time the van approached a roundabout. He also took the wheel as the van came up on a man riding a bicycle along the right side of the road. “Better safe than sorry,” Haase said. Once the van was a few yards past the bicycle, he pressed a button that told the robot to resume control.
Peterson takes the vans to stores, restaurants, community meetings, hockey games — and church, of course, every Sunday and Wednesday, she said.
She said the project has brought Grand Rapids residents together to imagine a more inclusive future. “It’s not just a fancy car,” she said.