Driverless Bus Service In Scotland To Be Withdrawn Due To Lack of Interest (theguardian.com) 37
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The UK's first driverless bus service, originally heralded as a breakthrough of global significance, is being withdrawn from service because too few passengers used it. The autonomous buses, operated by Stagecoach, have been running between Fife and Edinburgh along a 14-mile route over the Forth road bridge since May 2023 to relieve the heavy congestion which can bring traffic to a standstill.
The CAVForth service, a collaboration between Fusion Processing, the coach-building company Alexander Dennis, Napier University in Edinburgh and the Bristol Robotics Lab -- a joint venture between the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England -- was touted as the most ambitious and complex in the world. Built at an estimated cost of more than 6 million pounds, partly funded by the UK government, the fleet of five single-decker buses had the capacity to carry 10,000 passengers a week but needed two crew on board for safety reasons. Stagecoach said in a statement: "We are proud to have achieved a world first with our CAVForth autonomous bus service, demonstrating the potential for self-driving technology on a real-world registered timetable in East Scotland. Although passenger adoption did not meet expectations, the trial has significantly advanced the understanding of the operational and regulatory requirements for autonomous services, delivering what was expected from this demonstrator project. The partners remain committed to exploring new opportunities for self-driving technology in other areas across the UK, ensuring that this exciting innovation can play a transformative role in future transport networks."
The CAVForth service, a collaboration between Fusion Processing, the coach-building company Alexander Dennis, Napier University in Edinburgh and the Bristol Robotics Lab -- a joint venture between the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England -- was touted as the most ambitious and complex in the world. Built at an estimated cost of more than 6 million pounds, partly funded by the UK government, the fleet of five single-decker buses had the capacity to carry 10,000 passengers a week but needed two crew on board for safety reasons. Stagecoach said in a statement: "We are proud to have achieved a world first with our CAVForth autonomous bus service, demonstrating the potential for self-driving technology on a real-world registered timetable in East Scotland. Although passenger adoption did not meet expectations, the trial has significantly advanced the understanding of the operational and regulatory requirements for autonomous services, delivering what was expected from this demonstrator project. The partners remain committed to exploring new opportunities for self-driving technology in other areas across the UK, ensuring that this exciting innovation can play a transformative role in future transport networks."
one driver vs two safety personnel. (Score:3, Informative)
traditional bus: one employee, the driver
autonomous: two employees: safety personnel.
progress!
It's a bit like moving to the cloud... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a bit like moving to the cloud... We had a sysadmin managing our colocated rack servers, anything you asked him was done within the day. A new CTO brought his guys to move us to to the cloud (the old sysadmin quit as they were put above him). Yes, there are advantages with the cloud setup, but we somehow suddenly need 3 cloud engineers minimum to keep up! Well, we have 2 actually, but they definitely can't keep up...
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It's only until they have finished testing the technology.
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Actually...
Way back when: one driver, one conductor. One to do the actual driving, one to assist the passengers.
Cost-cutting: one driver. He can either drive the bus or assist passengers, not both at the same time.
This: two people to assist passengers.
So yeah, unless you take the very narrow view that progress is only through making things cheaper, I would indeed call this progress.
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and for that price they could have just built extra lanes and really solved the problem, self- serving overpaid bureaucrats are our real problem, typical incompetence in a classist system
What problem exactly (Score:2)
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did the passengers have with the drivers on these busses?
That they weren't there, perchance?
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If they ran busses along a crowded motorway to ease congestion but nobody wanted to ride the bus, I'd say the problem is, people prefer to be in their own vehicle.
Especially if they didn't reserve a lane for the bus, and since there were only 5 of them I suppose they didn't. Perfect, now there's absolutely zero reason to ride that bus as you are still in the congestion moving along at exactly the same speed as the cars, except making more
Re: What problem exactly (Score:3)
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But they were. Each self-driving bus had two employees onboard.
And what is the cost to ride one of these new “self-driving” vehicles that requires not one but two employees aboard? The hell is the point in claiming self-driving again? Starting to believe price might have been a deterrent. Doesn’t sound like cheap new hardware.
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It was a demonstrator project, ie a PoC. Obviously long-term the aim was to move to operations without staff, but equally obviously, complex projects run in stages, and safety-critical projects with the public are over-engineered for caution at the outset.
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If you want to jump the traffic queues, probably the best option is to take the train. Depending on which specific stations you want to travel between, there's about 3 - 4 trains per hour.
Train from the south side to north side of the bridge takes 3 minutes and costs £3.30. That is what the driverless bus is competing with.
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If you want to jump the traffic queues, probably the best option is to take the train.
That's the second-best option. The best option is to live somewhere else, like Oslo.
Traffic “problems” (Score:2)
..along a 14-mile route over the Forth road bridge since May 2023 to relieve the heavy congestion which can bring traffic to a standstill.
Traffic problems, eh? I wonder how much of that congestion is being caused by RTO mandates after years of doing a job remotely?
Maybe some new competition mature enough to recognize the value-add of WFH will come along and gobble up your best talent. Seems to be all it takes these days.
Typical automobile first / shiny distraction strat (Score:2)
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To make public transport interesting (for non students, old people, tourists and people too poor to afford a car) you have to let traffic degrade to the level of inner parts of major cities, or you need to make it too expensive for poor people who can still afford a car. If you let the traffic degrade, that will also degrade deliveries, emergency services and even buses because you can't really use bus lanes everywhere. So not an option, that leaves pricing out the working class ... aka the majority. That m
Re: Typical automobile first / shiny distraction s (Score:3)
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You know there are dozens and dozens of cities around Europe that give the lie to your assertions, right? Paris, Madrid, Munich, etc etc.
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Re:Typical automobile first / shiny distraction st (Score:4, Informative)
It is competing with a train that takes 3 minutes to do the crossing (on the nearby Forth Rail Bridge) and costs £3.30,
Re: Typical automobile first / shiny distraction s (Score:2)
I agree with the infrastructure bill criticism - although much of that is aimed at encouraging electric vehicle adoption. One of the most difficult aspects about US transportation is distance, both between cities and that associated with urban sprawl (something less common in Europe). Both of these make it tough to operate small local rail lines in much of the U.S. But it does exist in the larger urban areas (NYC's Metro North and NJTransit being one example). When people live a 45 min drive from their sub
Country where the Legend of the (Score:1)
...Headless Bus-Driver came from, possibly a variant of the Sleepy Hollow story. It's like selling hamburger grinders in India.
Re: Country where the Legend of the (Score:2)
And the bus stop joke! "Give me a quid or you're getting stabbed"
along a 14-mile route over the Forth road bridge (Score:4, Funny)
I think I see the problem.
Only a handful of people understand Forth
but those that do really like it.
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Ingoing hypothesis: Stagecoach fucked it (Score:3)
Which is no surprise, because they've got form in being shite at things.
I suspect the basic problem is that they only ran 5 buses on a 14 mile route and I would be completely unsurprised to learn that the origin and destination stops and timings weren't integrated into other forms of public transport either, so that the passenger experience consisted of a long journey to a start point, waiting ages for the bus, a short-ish journey over the bridge, and arriving at a destination that wasn't convenient for anything and with no easy onward travel.
Re: Ingoing hypothesis: Stagecoach fucked it (Score:3)
Re:Ingoing hypothesis: Stagecoach fucked it (Score:5, Informative)
Edinburgh is a great city, but the public transport is a mess.
I would be completely unsurprised to learn that the origin and destination stops and timings weren't integrated into other forms of public transport
Almost certainly right. Also, in Edinburgh, you have various bus companies, but your ticket is only valid for one company. So if you need to change buses, you have to buy multiple tickets. This is also the city that nearly bankrupted itself installing a tram running from the airport to downtown, even though there was a perfectly good bus route doing the same thing. The tram isn't faster, and it is more expensive.
Driverless bus not the problem (Score:3)
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Whose idea was it... (Score:2)