Next stop: driverless mass transit?

Maybe.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation on Feb. 2 quietly launched a research project exploring autonomous buses, an emerging sector of the automotive industry that uses new technologies to either aid human drivers or eliminate them entirely.

At this point, MnDOT’s main goal is to plan to find a partner: a private company currently making autonomous buses that would be willing to test them out in Minnesota’s harsh climate. MnDOT researchers will also look into how the state would have to alter statutes, insurance policies, roads and bridges to accommodate a fleet of autonomous buses.

MnDOT is motivated by safety concerns, said Jay Hietpas, state traffic engineer with the agency. Autonomous buses could be a lower-risk form of transportation.

“We’ve had a zero-death initiative for a long time, and over the last few years our fatality numbers have plateaued. We think autonomous buses could reverse that trend and get fatalities to decrease again,” said Hietpas, director of MnDOT’s office of safety and technology.

Safety is also a top concern for Mark Lawson, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union’s Local 1005, a union that represents 2,500 front-line workers at Metro Transit. About 1,600 of ATU’s members are bus drivers. The union is skeptical about the safety of driverless technology, and concerned about the enormous impact it may have on transit jobs.

“It seems like they haven’t worked the kinks out. Can they handle every type of bad weather,” Lawson asked rhetorically. “The Google vehicles do very well on bright sunny California days, but if you throw some rain or snow at them, not so much.”

The insurance industry is largely supportive of efforts to create autonomous vehicles, said Jim Whittle, assistant general counsel with the Washington, D.C.-based American Insurance Association, as most of the components used in them are refinements of safety technologies that are commonly used today.

Even so, insurers are concerned about the vehicles’ possible vulnerability to hacking, he said.

Humans have many drawbacks, but for the time being they cannot be hacked. And in the short term, at least, they will continue to be the official conductors of any bus that may be on the road: As it turns out none of the autonomous buses currently in testing has hit the road unmanned.

“In the few places they have deployed [autonomous buses] in testing, there was a driver at the controls,” Whittle said. “That’s not an autonomous vehicle by the common understanding, which is the absence of a person at the wheel.”

In July 2016, for instance, Daimler AG unveiled its Mercedes-Benz Future Bus, which dazzled the public with a short 20-kilometer journey along a bus rapid transit line in Amsterdam.

The Future Bus is only partially autonomous, according to the company’s press release. A human operator is at the wheel, but the vehicle’s on-board system does most of the driving.

Lawson, the union leader, noted that driving the bus is only a small part of an operator’s duties today. The driver also must deal with passengers, who have the very human tendency to become unruly or fall victim to medical emergencies.

Given those dual responsibilities, MnDOT’s Hietpas said the role of bus driver would likely change in an autonomous vehicle. The operator would be more oriented toward managing passengers and customer service, and less focused on the road.

Metro Transit spokesman Howie Padilla said Wednesday the agency is not involved in MnDOT’s study and that officials from both agencies haven’t discussed the matter in any depth. Metro Transit is aware of the issue, he said, but hasn’t done research of its own and hasn’t taken a position on autonomous buses.

By Whittle’s estimation, it will be a few years before autonomous vehicles of any kind are ready for widespread use. Right now, autonomous buses are not even available for purchase. Indeed, all the models Hietpas has heard of are in demonstration mode only.

Nevertheless, MnDOT wants to get an early start on the issue.

“We’re getting ready for this,” Hietpas said. “This technology is starting to take off around the country and the world and we don’t want to wait. We want to shape how this plays out.”

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