Op-Ed: AV Transit Is Coming, But You May Not Like the Ride
Hang around the transportation planning field long enough, and you’ll hear the pitch: Our cities are strangled by congestion, our streets an unsafe bedlam of inattentive drivers and beleaguered commuters, our transit agencies rotting from within as ridership declines, and rideshare startups struggling to produce a viable profit model.
Out of this cloud of gloom emerges our saviour: the automated vehicle (AV).
With one fell swoop, we are told, congestion will be cleared away, our roads will become a safe, orderly clockwork, and commuters will finally be given the freedom to do what they’ve always wanted to do: perform more work on the way to and from the office.
Amid the breathless blog posts, glittering auto shows, and Elon Musk’s swaggering assurances, there is an arena of proposed AV implementation that’s usually the last to be discussed: how transit agencies may apply AV, or CAV (connected automated vehicles, linked to smart infrastructure) technology to improve operations. In a sense, automated transit is probably something of an inevitability, but one question is still lingering around, unanswered: will transit riders even like riding on an automated system?
As Ralph Buehler stated recently in the Journal of Public Transportation, transit agencies may not have much of a choice but to adopt AV technology, since the personal automated car poses several existential threats to transit: it allows the passenger to do something besides driving while en route to their destination, it further increases the demand for Americans’ preferred travel mode, and it will assuredly require large public investments in new infrastructure that may drain available funding away from transit.
There are numerous competitive reasons why transit agencies would want to adopt AV tech in order to stay competitive and efficient, such increasing fuel economy by 23–39% and congested traffic speeds by 8–13%. However, the most likely reason transit agencies will want to implement AV is the cost of drivers. Making up, on average, about 70% of transit operations, drivers are the both the living heart of transit agencies, and the source of many agencies’ constraints. A hypothetical world with fully automated transit would free up agencies to run service more frequently, or along variable, demand-driven routes, through all hours of the night - a ceaseless hive-like orchestration of vehicles, seamlessly picking up and depositing riders and maintaining clockwork reliability. Or that’s the hope at least.
Indeed, one recent study by researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico looked at a novel way to improve transit reliability by incorporating stigmergic principles into a hypothetical AV transit system. Their system, modeled after the behavior of eusocial insects such as termites and ants, would be designed to create a highly adaptive flock of transit vehicles that communicate their positions to each other in order to maintain a rhythmic regularity of arrivals and departures -- one that can even intelligently adapt to unforeseen stoppages. The logic driving this model and others like it is that the demand elasticity of increased frequency and reliability, estimated to be around .3, has a stronger pull on potential riders than lowering fares. But, for every new bus or train you want to add to a route to increase frequency, you have to not only pay for the driver of that one bus, but several more to be on-call substitutes in case of no-shows or unexpected breakdowns. This cost “lumpiness”, as Jarrett Walker puts it, would begin to mount and eventually cause transit agencies to balk at providing high frequency outside of their most popular corridors. In an C/AV world, however, agencies would be able to increase frequency across the network at a fraction of the cost.
Lost in the NAUM team’s stigmergic model, however, is much discussion of passengers. An essential component of their system is that vehicles must obey a strict adherence to maintaining their headways. Where passengers are discussed, it is in regards to the author team’s proposals for a faster, more efficient alighting and disembarking procedure designed to, you guessed it, improve headways. But does such a finely-tuned, efficient system account for riders of different ages or levels of ability? The vagaries of human behavior are limitless, and certainly so within the domain of getting on, riding, and getting off a bus or train -- riding transit for a few days is more than enough to illustrate that particular reality. Can this stigmergic system truly respond to the myriad ways humans are capable of messing it up?
These models and hypothetical improvements and efficiency gains used to sell AV tech around the world all tend to ignore the gritty mundanities of day-to-day transit operations. The fact of the matter is that transit operators do a lot more than simply drive us around. They shepherd elderly and disabled patrons, provide directions to the directionally-challenged, and offer friendly conversation from time to time. In Philadelphia, SEPTA buses are even part of the city’s disaster-response team. And we haven’t even discussed the widespread economic impacts of eliminating tens of thousands of stable, high-paying, jobs from the the labor force.
The giddy optimism surrounding AV technology is mostly warranted -- if it is all it promises to be. We should embrace technologies that make transit more sustainable and attractive to travellers, and that includes AV applications. That middle road might look something like the AI-assisted driving technology that’s already entering the auto market. Perhaps transit operators of the future might be more of a mix of stewards and drivers. As Buehler asserts, a fully automated future is not even a given at this point, much less happening anytime soon, but it will happen. In our quest to create an automated, utopian ideal transit system, let’s not make automatons out of ourselves. Rather, let’s embrace both the fallibility and the resilience humans lend to the system, and always be on the lookout for ways to make the ride a little better.
Out of this cloud of gloom emerges our saviour: the automated vehicle (AV).
With one fell swoop, we are told, congestion will be cleared away, our roads will become a safe, orderly clockwork, and commuters will finally be given the freedom to do what they’ve always wanted to do: perform more work on the way to and from the office.
Amid the breathless blog posts, glittering auto shows, and Elon Musk’s swaggering assurances, there is an arena of proposed AV implementation that’s usually the last to be discussed: how transit agencies may apply AV, or CAV (connected automated vehicles, linked to smart infrastructure) technology to improve operations. In a sense, automated transit is probably something of an inevitability, but one question is still lingering around, unanswered: will transit riders even like riding on an automated system?
As Ralph Buehler stated recently in the Journal of Public Transportation, transit agencies may not have much of a choice but to adopt AV technology, since the personal automated car poses several existential threats to transit: it allows the passenger to do something besides driving while en route to their destination, it further increases the demand for Americans’ preferred travel mode, and it will assuredly require large public investments in new infrastructure that may drain available funding away from transit.
There are numerous competitive reasons why transit agencies would want to adopt AV tech in order to stay competitive and efficient, such increasing fuel economy by 23–39% and congested traffic speeds by 8–13%. However, the most likely reason transit agencies will want to implement AV is the cost of drivers. Making up, on average, about 70% of transit operations, drivers are the both the living heart of transit agencies, and the source of many agencies’ constraints. A hypothetical world with fully automated transit would free up agencies to run service more frequently, or along variable, demand-driven routes, through all hours of the night - a ceaseless hive-like orchestration of vehicles, seamlessly picking up and depositing riders and maintaining clockwork reliability. Or that’s the hope at least.
Indeed, one recent study by researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico looked at a novel way to improve transit reliability by incorporating stigmergic principles into a hypothetical AV transit system. Their system, modeled after the behavior of eusocial insects such as termites and ants, would be designed to create a highly adaptive flock of transit vehicles that communicate their positions to each other in order to maintain a rhythmic regularity of arrivals and departures -- one that can even intelligently adapt to unforeseen stoppages. The logic driving this model and others like it is that the demand elasticity of increased frequency and reliability, estimated to be around .3, has a stronger pull on potential riders than lowering fares. But, for every new bus or train you want to add to a route to increase frequency, you have to not only pay for the driver of that one bus, but several more to be on-call substitutes in case of no-shows or unexpected breakdowns. This cost “lumpiness”, as Jarrett Walker puts it, would begin to mount and eventually cause transit agencies to balk at providing high frequency outside of their most popular corridors. In an C/AV world, however, agencies would be able to increase frequency across the network at a fraction of the cost.
Lost in the NAUM team’s stigmergic model, however, is much discussion of passengers. An essential component of their system is that vehicles must obey a strict adherence to maintaining their headways. Where passengers are discussed, it is in regards to the author team’s proposals for a faster, more efficient alighting and disembarking procedure designed to, you guessed it, improve headways. But does such a finely-tuned, efficient system account for riders of different ages or levels of ability? The vagaries of human behavior are limitless, and certainly so within the domain of getting on, riding, and getting off a bus or train -- riding transit for a few days is more than enough to illustrate that particular reality. Can this stigmergic system truly respond to the myriad ways humans are capable of messing it up?
These models and hypothetical improvements and efficiency gains used to sell AV tech around the world all tend to ignore the gritty mundanities of day-to-day transit operations. The fact of the matter is that transit operators do a lot more than simply drive us around. They shepherd elderly and disabled patrons, provide directions to the directionally-challenged, and offer friendly conversation from time to time. In Philadelphia, SEPTA buses are even part of the city’s disaster-response team. And we haven’t even discussed the widespread economic impacts of eliminating tens of thousands of stable, high-paying, jobs from the the labor force.
The giddy optimism surrounding AV technology is mostly warranted -- if it is all it promises to be. We should embrace technologies that make transit more sustainable and attractive to travellers, and that includes AV applications. That middle road might look something like the AI-assisted driving technology that’s already entering the auto market. Perhaps transit operators of the future might be more of a mix of stewards and drivers. As Buehler asserts, a fully automated future is not even a given at this point, much less happening anytime soon, but it will happen. In our quest to create an automated, utopian ideal transit system, let’s not make automatons out of ourselves. Rather, let’s embrace both the fallibility and the resilience humans lend to the system, and always be on the lookout for ways to make the ride a little better.
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