How Will Autonomous Vehicles Change Public Transit?
By Chrissy Mancini Nichols
This article first appeared at Remix.com
Driverless transit can help tackle declining ridership
Every day another news article comes out about how autonomous vehicles (AVs) promise to transform how we get around. With every major automaker investing in driverless technology, most of these articles focus on personal vehicles.
But as AVs become more commonplace, and demand grows, the result could be a sharp increase in the number of single-occupancy — and even worse, zero-occupancy — vehicles on the road, which will only exacerbate congestion in ever-denser metro areas.
So it’s really transit that has the most potential to leverage autonomous vehicle technology to revolutionize transportation.
During last month’s Remix webinar, we explored the topic of autonomous vehicles (AVs) with a panel of four experts leading one of the nation’s first pilots for transit, discussing the best ways to implement driverless transit today, and what we need to do to ensure we don’t go off course in the future.
Here are the main takeaways:
1. Shared autonomous vehicles are an opportunity to grow transit ridership
Randy Iwasaki, Executive Director of the Contra Costa Transportation Authority (CCTA) in the San Francisco Bay Area, sees AVs as more than just shiny new objects. He sees AVs as the solution to the first/last mile problem for suburban transit systems.
As CCTA updated their countywide transportation plan, public feedback had a recurring theme — people couldn’t get to transit. The BART train station was too far to walk and its limited parking meant those who drove ended up clogging the streets. “We think of autonomous vehicles as complementing existing transportation for the first and last mile,” Iwasaki says.
He found a partner in Bishop Ranch, an office park in Contra Costa County with 30,000 workers who want fast and reliable access to BART, to build a pilot program to test out a proof of concept. Iwasaki also formed a partnership with the Livermore Amador Valley Transit Authority (LAVTA), a bus system in a low-density suburb that has experienced ridership decline.
LAVTA will begin an autonomous vehicle pilot to connect people in low-density areas to express buses and the Dublin BART station. The agency sees the vehicles as a unique opportunity to think differently about how to serve people in low-density areas where it’s unproductive and costly to run regular service. LAVTA thinks AVs can help grow transit ridership because they can provide service to people where it otherwise wouldn’t make cost effective sense to run regular bus routes and give them a mobility option other than their cars.
2. Start small and engage now — or risk being left behind
While it may be daunting to start a pilot of your own, the best way to inform a project in the future is to start small with something that mitigates potential negatives. “Many agencies think of AVs in terms of sweeping first/last mile solutions. But you can start small with a pilot,” Lauren Isaac, director of business initiatives at EasyMile, says.
Transit agencies and cities engaging now will be in a position to make decisions that influence policies around safety regulations, equitability, labor requirements, and other issues that haven’t even come up yet.
That’s exactly why LAVTA is engaging now. Christy Wegener, LAVTA’s Director of Planning and Operations, cautions against putting your head in the sand because the technology is here, today. It can take a lot of time to put the appropriate policies in place, so it’s important to have those conversations now, before someone else puts them in place for you.
3. Learn from others to overcome challenges
There’s no roadmap for how autonomous transit will be implemented in the future. As Iwasaki and Wegener both note, they’re making it up as they go along. But they also pointed to the support they’re getting from their board as they move through the process. Some of the challenges they’ve faced include:
Legislative: California law requires a driver in all vehicles to take immediate control of the wheel. However, EasyMile shuttles have neither drivers nor wheels. So the agencies worked to enact California Assembly Bills 1592and1444 to allow a pilot testing AVs without drivers or steering wheels, brake pedals, or accelerators.
Labor: One of the biggest opponents of driverless transit has been labor, with valid concerns over potential job losses. Both CCTA and LAVTA agree that drivers will still need to be on board for safety reasons but acknowledge the role of the driver will likely change with AV technology in the future.
Privacy concerns: Another decision point for driverless transit is how to take into account passenger privacy concerns. AV’s collect a lot of information on where the vehicles are going, how long they’re stopping and how many people are getting on and off. Most of the time that information is stored in third-party data centers.
An original draft of the CCTA pilot legislation included language that would have restricted data collection and storage, supported by privacy advocates. But after pushback from technology companies threatened to stall its passage, the final version of the legislation included a provision mandating only that shuttle passengers be informed what personal information would be collected. The bill’s sponsor, Susan Bonilla, said she supports a discussion on privacy and data but that time was closing in to begin testing and she didn’t want to lose the pilot opportunity to another state.
This week the U.S. House subcommittee on Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection approved a series of AV bills and debated making available accident and safety data. But the final legislation only requires that Congress revisit the issue in five years because the industry pushed back, saying mandatory data requirements would hurt competition. The full House isn’t expected to take up the bill until September.
Parking: AVs will certainly reduce future parking needs, especially at transit stations. So before spending millions of dollars on new parking facilities, it’s crucial to consider how AV technology will impact demand for parking — and ensure parking is retrofittable to new technologies.
Insurance: Insurance surprisingly wasn’t a big challenge for CCTA and LAVTA. They each were required to have at least $5 million in insurance to cover autonomous vehicle incidents. They had three options, including EasyMile the shuttle manufacturer, who provides insurance through its global insurance partner.
4. Don’t be afraid to take risks
There are two camps when it comes to AVs: those who are waiting to see how the technology will play out and those who are jumping in. “We have an amazing risk-taker as the head of our organization, and that’s allowing us to try new things,” Wegener says, which has allowed LAVTA to be innovative in addressing how to address declining ridership.
Transit agencies willing to take the risk and have the conversation with their boards and the public now will be in a position to set how AVs are deployed in their communities.
5. The federal role is still up in the air
As Iwasaki recently testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit, the CCTA and LAVTA pilots are stuck in limbo because they have state, but not federal authority, to run on public roads. They either need a waiver from the U.S. Dept. of Transportation National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) or agreement that they don’t need a waiver to do so. However, the legislation approved by the House Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection subcommittee this week moves the federal government closer to issuing clear guidelines because it would allow autonomous vehicles on the road. It would also ban states from passing their own regulations.
The federal government should also streamline procurement so that agencies can buy the latest technology and not be locked into an old model because procurement takes too long.
6. Autonomous vehicle technology is coming
Transit must always be looking forward. Plans enacted today will last generations so agencies must consider how to leverage tomorrow’s technology.
Learn from others, find great partners and start the dialogue to begin answering some of the questions on how AVs will be implemented in your communities to ensure they are shared and a safe enhancement to transit.
The Bottom Line
Reserve your seat at the table now so that AV policy grows transit ridership and that transit remains the backbone of our cities and economies, providing sustainable, equitable access and opportunity for everyone.
If you missed the webinar, you can watch the full discussion here:
