Driverless Buses Ruled Out For London, For Now

An anonymous reader writes The office of the Mayor of London went into a bit of a panic this week after their own paper suggested that driverless buses could appear on the streets of the UK's capital at some point in the next four decades. The Mayor's office went so far as to suggest that they were really talking about driverless underground trains. Even more bizarre was the reaction of the city's taxi drivers' association — whose spokesperson claimed that the failure to deliver 'simple' software tasks such as speech recognition meant there was no chance of driverless buses appearing on London's streets.

Comments

I'm officially old I guess

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

When I was younger, I worked on speech recogntion problems - well, expert systems and neural networks in general. It was the toughest nut our team had ever been tasked to crack, and we didn't crack it.

When the man on the street perceives speech recognition to be simple - and coming from a taxi driver, that's more than a little ironic, considering they're essentially human Traveler Salesman Problem solvers - you know technology has overtaken you beyond hope.

Me, I can't stop being complete blown away by what can be achieved today. Driverless cars are almost a reality everybody can buy, yet I still vividly remember MIT experimental self-driving trucks trying to hold a straight line on a closed circuit at 1 mph!

Trains sound like a good idea.

[SuricouRaven]

There have been a number of drivers' strikes that I'm sure make them unpopular. No doubt management would leap at the chance to be rid of them. The hard part will be keeping the union from finding out too soon and taking preemptive protest action against redundencies.

Re:Trains sound like a good idea.

[Torp]

Let me guess, an american who has never seen public transport :)
Hint: the OP is talking about in-city transportation.

Re: Trains sound like a good idea.

[prefec2]

There are already some driverless underground railways in operation. For example in Nuremburg and even in London. Buses would be possible when driverless cars are working. In most cases talking to the driver is limited to asking for a ticket by specifzing the destination. A ticket machine can provide the same service.

Re:Trains sound like a good idea.

[dkf]

US moves 10 times as much over rail as Europe does, over 25% of all freight is moved by rail in the US

I suspect that this difference may be in large part due to the more widespread use of water-based transport in the EU; it's a lot more efficient than even rail (provided you've got a suitable river going in the right direction or are close to the sea, which describes more of the EU than the US).

How many drivers?

[MrL0G1C]

Tried googling, couldn't find anything much other than job adverts.

How many professional drivers are there in the UK or US? Including bus, taxi, cab, private mini bus, postal, delivery and haulage? My guess would be 500,000 to a 1,000,000 in the UK alone.

That's a lot of jobs that could be lost to autonomous driving.

Re:How many drivers?

[CrimsonAvenger]

That's a lot of jobs that could be lost to autonomous driving.

Seems to me a lot of jobs were lost when we gave up on horse-drawn carriages also.

So, should we be required to keep professional drivers employed in spite of the job being completely pointless in a few years to a decade?

Re:How many drivers?

[bhalter80]

It'll be a long slow death, commercial aviation has been in this position for decades and most commercial ops still require a crew of 2. There are a lot of factors that can go wrong, especially when co-mingling autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles. What you will see though is wage pressure and those jobs will pay less.

Re: How many drivers?

[iamhassi]

Will be as in inevitable or will be as in the jobs are in the future so they're not really "lost" since they don't exist yet? I'm guessing you mean both. Very few will be fired from driverless cars, I'm guessing most people will stop choosing a career as a bus driver. Besides 40 years is long enough that everyone who drives a bus now probably won't be in 40 years.
Taxi drivers could be replaced by smartphone apps, you'll tell your smartphone where you want to go and a taxi arrives to take you do the destination, no need to tell anyone in the taxi where you need to go so no problems with speech recognition or a language barrier

ATO - GoA 4

[buchner.johannes]

Unattended train operation is a reality -- see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I wasn't aware of that. See also here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:ATO - GoA 4

[drosboro]

You make it sound like the trains are crashing, killing people. Of the 54 Skytrain deaths, 44 are suicides, and the rest are people falling onto the tracks at the stations and being struck by trains. These are not deaths due to train collisions. There have been no Skytrain collisions since it opened in 1985. Perhaps you were thinking that a driver would have spotted the person on the track and stopped the train - but that’s pretty doubtful. Trains don’t stop on a dime. All in all, nearly 30 years of operation with zero train collisions is a pretty compelling argument FOR driverless trains, I’d say.

Re:ATO - GoA 4

[Maxo-Texas]

Well first.. those two numbers are very similar.

Second- as he points out, a lot of them were suicides. Suicides also occurred on the Portland.

These are exceptions which will be figured out- and once they are there (and they will be) will never be "rookie" drivers or "sad drivers because they had a death in the family" or "old drivers" or "sleepy drivers" again.

And if you are suicidal enough to jump in front of a train (a grisly way to die), then you are probably going to find another way to suicide (like jumping off a building).

I don't think your argument is very powerful. You have a point. But we allow a lot more deaths to occur for other reasons which don't save as much money.

Re:ATO - GoA 4

[drosboro]

Probably not many. There's not many spots on the Skytrain track where you can see the track "about a mile up", especially coming into stations. The design of the track is recessed, which doesn't help either. Additionally, if I recall correctly most of the suicides have been of the "throw yourself in front of the train as it enters the station" variety. There are closed circuit cameras monitoring the stations (not to mention transit police some of the time), and they DO stop the trains if something goes amiss on the tracks. But if there's no time to stop, there's no time to stop.

Either way, MAX and Skytrain are two rather different systems - MAX is at-grade light rail, Skytrain is elevated / subway with an , etc. Pretty hard to draw safety conclusions based on one factor (driver vs. driverless) when there's so many other variables at play. Most of the "experts" that I've heard/read on the topic of Skytrain safety have been much more interested in changing station design to avoid accidental falls onto the tracks, and much less concerned about placing a driver on the trains.

False equivalence

[aepervius]

The loss happened at the heigth of industrial revolution where there was a lot of other job openning, compeltely new job market for uneducated and untrained people.

Nowadays the job market for untrained and potentially uneducated job is *shrinking*. This is not the same as back when horse cariage were gone and automobile came in.

There is a high chance that untrained and uneducated job lost today, are definitively lost thru job market shrinkage. Think about that. Think about what that means for the economy as a whole when 100.000 jobs are lost. Nothing good for the economy or for the social stability.

"So what?"

[Doghouse13]

Yes, and the buggy-whip makers won't be pleased, either.

That argument does not pass the "So what?" test, and never has. Technology advances, and society changes; it's why we're not still all running around dressed in skins, hunting down our food with rocks. When it does, some types of job inevitably become less-sought, or even redundant. If that job's what you do, or me, that's just tough; the world doesn't owe anyone a living. If your job goes away, you go look for another. Yes, there's a social argument for cushioning the transition, if things are moving so fast that lots of people are going to find themselves out of work in the same place at the same time - but that's rarely what actually happens.

Living in the past!

[nightfire-unique]

Let's face it, driverless buses don't really exist. But so long as we don't regress back into the awful world of proprietary or non-standard extensions, why should buses need drivers outside of those shipped with the kernel?

Methinks the mayor of London has a soft spot for microchannel!