Blog note: this opinion piece references a grand jury report.
Public transit is in the process of being revolutionized. Autonomous or self-driven buses are already on the scene in parts of the U.S. and overseas. Their coming will be significant here in the North Bay, making previously uneconomical transit routes affordable.
The largest cost of operating a bus is labor. Take away the driver and 10-15 passenger vans and mini-buses can be run economically even on fixed schedule routes. Marin needs to be an early adopter once robot buses are certified as safe by the state.
What’s called the “first mile, last mile” is a quandary that perpetually plagues transit planners. It’s one thing to move large numbers of people from one fixed place to another. Peak-time commute buses from, say, San Anselmo to San Francisco, have long made sense as do trains on a trunk line bringing Sonoma County workers to Marin County jobs.
What’s not so easy to accomplish is efficiently transporting passengers from bus stops or rail stations a mile or so to suburban commuters’ homes and jobs. It’s the expense of labor that makes these services untenable.
The cost of the actual vehicle, regardless of how it’s operated, is a relatively minor economic component. Other than labor and administration, the only expenses are “wheel costs,” which include tires, wear and tear and fuel. The latter will be insignificant if self-driven buses are electric-powered.
Some Marinites remain skeptical that an automobile, much less a bus, van or stage will ever safely operate without a driver. These folks don’t live in Silicon Valley, where first-generation autonomous vehicles are today a common sight.
Pioneering robot buses have been introduced worldwide from China to the Netherlands. Norway expects to see 50 driverless buses on Oslo’s streets by 2021. Orlando, Florida is determined to be a national leader using AUTONOM, a 15-passenger French-made shuttle traveling a maximum of 16 mph. In California, Alameda County’s San Ramon started its own street-legal autonomous van.
The first efforts won’t replace drivers on big 48-seat Golden Gate Transit-style highway buses. That’s inevitably going to come, but the first steps will be shuttles on routes that previously had a prohibitive cost-benefit ratio.
As the Marin County Civil Grand Jury suggested in its report, “SMART: First Mile/Last Mile Options,” the first robot bus test could join Larkspur’s Ferry Terminal with SMART’s soon-to-open Larkspur rail station.
The use of inexpensive, environmentally friendly self-driving shuttles isn’t limited to SMART connections. They’d be useful internally within Mill Valley and Sausalito, creating a Tiburon Peninsula ferry feeder, in Ross Valley linking Fairfax with the Hub, tying the Twin Cities together and with multiple lower-demand routes in Novato and San Rafael that labor costs once made impractical.
The most difficult aspect of robot buses isn’t technology; its fairly treating long-time employees soon to be made redundant. It’s the same quandary experienced when elevator and telephone operators became obsolete; likewise full-service gas station attendants, Golden Gate Bridge toll-takers and increasingly, retail employees.
The wrong way to handle this dilemma is SB 336, introduced by Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa. The legislation would require that until Jan. 1, 2025, every agency utilizing a “fully-automated transit vehicle” must staff that bus with one employee.
Dodd’s bill is anti-transit, as it needlessly delays and makes prohibitively expensive a shift that would open public transit to many currently unserved passengers. At a minimum, SB 336 shouldn’t apply to shuttles carrying fewer than 16 passengers. The legislation is reminiscent of promoting “featherbedding,” made infamous when railroads were required to employ unneeded firemen after steam locomotives disappeared.
May 18, 2019
Marin Independent Journal
By Dick Spotswood
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