AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES TRANSIT LEAP ing apparent,8 the application of robotic vehicles to public transit


is gaining advocates. We see successful instances of the use of robotics for transit applications on constrained routes and limited networks9


via government-franchised, private investment as well


as public investment. Already, on the public side, there are semi- robotic vehicles providing very high frequency transit in closed environments such as airports (driverless circulators among ter- minals) and elevated rail systems (Vancouver, BC’s SkyTrain sys- tem). Meanwhile, the private sector is quickly developing its own transit routes, still driven by human drivers, such as Chariot and UberHOP. One can easily imagine these routes persisting – and growing – as operating costs drop during the transition to robot- ics. These public or commercial TaaS applications would address most or all of the barriers faced by early, access-limited, self-driving


SIDEBAR 5: SHARING HYPE


Clearly it makes rational, economic sense not to own a car if you can reli- ably call up the exact vehicle you need with a click on your smartphone and have it arrive in a promised two or three minutes. And there seem to be many forecasts for an ability to fulfill such promises in huge numbers years in advance of a practical capability to deliver them! However, once someone begins to deliver on this promise, Robin


Chase may be sensible to say: “If you’re financially smart and living in the city and you don’t need a car to get to work, you’re insane to own one.” And for people who do not yet own a vehicle or have one they hardly use, she would also be clearly correct. Unfortunately, there are many reasons people own a vehicle and dialing up an instant robocab addresses only some of them. Most people who current own a vehicle would need to have several


concerns addressed. This is more about behavioral economics than the rational economics that Chase is describing. To have a majority of drivers abandon ownership for the various forms


of sharing expected to become dominant, many concerns in addition to job access must be addressed. These include convenience, time saving, anytime-anywhere access, social status, personal objects in the car, trans- porting loads and small children as well as personal privacy, hygiene, and safety. It is the perceived value of all these benefits weighed against the financial savings that will be telling.


SIDEBAR 6: CITYMOBIL2 EXPERT POLL


We cannot use empirical studies to determine the future. That means in the run up to robotic vehicles, we cannot determine the future volume of car sharing or the decline in vehicle population or growth in VKT or changes in transit demand. Some transportation academics have run simulations that use current origin-destination data to ask what would happen if everyone used only robotaxis. Based on very optimistic, often fanciful assumptions, most such simulations show we’d only need one car in ten – something Zipcar first claimed about their service about a decade ago. Unfortunately, they assume everyone would be willing to share vehicles and rides, they do not include all the new users that might be served, they ignore the fact the current world motorized VKT demand doubling time is about 20 years, and they generalize the results based on data from more populated central urban areas. These simulations of city vehicle populations tell us the maximum potential efficiency for vehicle sharing (we clearly have an embarrassment of excess capacity), but sadly, they are not a reliable gauge of future, revealed demand.


CONNECTED CANADA SUPPLEMENT 24 While many journalists and sharing-economists have succumbed to


the illusion “everyone will share”, there is yet another way we try to guess the truth about the future: ask a lot of experts, then pool their opinions. In March 2015, experts from Europe, the US, Japan and Sin- gapore met in La Rochelle in the context of the European project City- Mobil2. After discussing socio-economic impacts, these experts were polled about the expected long-term impacts of road vehicle automa- tion for four different urban environments – suburban, urban, rural and small compact city – and for two different scenarios: dominant self-driving household cars and dominant self-driving robocabs. The direction of the responses point to more VKT, lower vehicle occupancy and lower ownership. When considering this, remember that demand for VKT will continue to rise independently in most countries during the switch over from driver to robotics. Hence, according to this group of experts vehicle robotics would likely make the growing problem of congestion a bit worse still.


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vehicles in the driveways of household consumers. As this hap- pens, the autonomous vehicle could find an important niche in dis- rupting transit – and with more, not fewer, transit jobs, as described below. By design, public transit vehicles are limited in their routes and


spatial ranges. Targeted, spatially constrained, affordable, roadway preparation would be associated naturally as autonomous transit applications and routes are mapped and prepared one-by-one. There would be no opportunity for access anxiety among users of such services. Add robotic, on-demand taxis and shuttles (limited networks at


first, extended over time) in seamless multimodal integration with each other, along with rail and autonomous transit vehicles. With focused effort and public-private cooperation, significant trans- portation-as-a-service (TaaS) systems can be realized in the early 2020s. Driverless vehicles in public service would be designed with


life cycles appropriate to rapidly evolving technology and high vehicle-turnover due to 10 to 16 hour daily use cycles. With lower per-mile user costs, user-fees can be set for cost recovery. With growing ridership, user-fees could support public-private part- nerships (P3s) as investors and fleet managers.


INTRODUCING TRANSIT LEAP Transit Leap means public-use, robotic, shared-mobility appli- cations that start small, expand by demand, grow, merge, and spread (Fig 2, bottom). The core motivation for focusing on Transit Leap is to accelerate the arrival of Gartner’s Plateau of Productivity and all the promised social value of robotic mobility. Transit Leap encourages the incursion of robotic mobility into


the urban landscape incrementally, application-by-application and area-by-area rather than car-by-car and owner-by-owner, as has already started with Feature Creep technology releases such as Tesla’s ADAS and Volvo’s planned Level 3 autonomy pilot for Gothenburg in 2017. The spatially constrained nature of early transit and robo-


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