Driverless buses are coming to UK roads, with Milton Keynes and Sunderland leading the charge.

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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    13 hours ago

    Are We Ready For Driverless Buses?

    If they’re on a set of parallel metal beams on the ground, absolutely!

  • SigHunter@lemmy.kde.social
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    12 hours ago

    The moment I read “roads” I realized this is not about USB or busses of that sort. I was curious what driverless might improve here

  • themurphy@lemmy.ml
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    16 hours ago

    I’m actually going to disagree a bit here and say, I think it somewhat makes sense.

    Buses have specific routes, and can be trained to perfect those. Not all routes will be suitable, but some will.

    Hope they make a public database for these routes, and are able to use the self driving data to learn from it.

    • Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      13 hours ago

      Agreed - in my area busses drive on dedicated bus routes with no other vehicles. Realistically, they should be trollies. There’s no reason that it couldn’t be automated.

  • haverholm@kbin.earth
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    1 day ago

    I’m sort of okay with driverless trains — they are pretty much/ideally limited to the railway tracks. This has too many possibilities for error for my taste.

    • haverholm@kbin.earth
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      1 day ago

      Perhaps the real question is, are we ready for a world without bus drivers? I think they’re a net positive in the daily commute.

      • MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com
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        24 hours ago

        Took the bus a lot as a kid/young adult. Some bus drivers were nice, but most were rude or basically had no impact on my commute. I’ve had a driver hit on me and then miss my stop multiple times after I declined. At least where I am, busses don’t stop at all stops unless there’s someone that needs to be picked up or dropped off and will regularly just skip stops if they’re running behind, regardless of how packed the bus or stop is. Have a bike, or need wheelchair access? The bus driver is going to give you attitude the whole time, if they stop for you at all. Some bus drivers were nice and would remember you and say hi, or help people who had questions, but it was a minority in my experience.

        I’m not saying we’re ready to move to AI, but I can’t imagine what kind of positive they’re adding to your life that it is seen as a valid reason to keep them if they’re not actually needed. Like if they’re actually nice people, I would love to make sure they’re working jobs that need to be done and could use the injection of positivity you’re describing.

        • haverholm@kbin.earth
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          23 hours ago

          Ugh, sorry to hear about your experiences. Yeah, I’m not going to bat for all bus drivers. I’m speaking in favour of having a human onboard, because the passengers aren’t necessarily an ideal crowd either…

          The role of being a proxy authority figure can definitely turn some asshole drivers further to the dark side… I don’t want to come off as defending those.

    • JasminIstMuede@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 day ago

      This is a very good point. It makes me a bit uneasy, even though it is still better than driverless cars. Aside from this, I also have mixed feelings about the fact that every pound being put into development and purchasing of these busses could have been put into the expansion of existing routes…
      And it’s not even something that would drastically improve my experience if it was fully successful. Busses are already one of the safest modes, being safer than trains in several countries. Maybe I’ve missed something and someone can correct me, but this feels like throwing money at technology for technology’s sake.

      • haverholm@kbin.earth
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        24 hours ago

        Yeah, the reasoning seems to have been “Think how much we’ll save on driver salaries! Plus, the computer will never unionise or cause a fuss about hours.” That’s the only arguments I can think of.

        At the same time, I can think of several times I’ve been glad to have a human driver on the bus, mostly to do with obnoxious fellow travelers…

  • Adanisi
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    15 hours ago

    Well, considering that they’re canceling the one which was running in Fife (?) because it required two drivers, I don’t think so.

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub
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    1 day ago

    Oh god, not another fucking pod.

    This article reads like a paid advertisement. The whole website looks like it’s just shilling techbro bullshit.

    Remember kids, always reject corporatization of public services.

  • foxymulder@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    surely it doesnt make economic sense to buy a smartbus over a dumbbus and paying a driver. this seems like a weird move

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    23 hours ago

    I think that driverless busses are probably much less of a dramatic change than driverless cars.

    If you have one person in a car driving to work and the car is fully-self-driving, then you free up one person’s time. You potentially change where parking is practical. You may permit people who cannot drive a car to use one, like young or elderly.

    With a bus, the passengers are already free to do what they want. You’re saving labor costs on a bus driver, maybe getting a safer vehicle. But I’d call that an evolutionary change.

    https://proxy.parisjc.edu:8293/statistics/300887/number-of-buses-in-use-by-region-uk/

    In 2020/21, the number of buses amounted to 37800 in Great Britain.

    Those probably get heavier use than cars. But you want scale, since driverless vehicle costs are mostly fixed, and driver labor costs variable. You’re talking about not having maybe 38k people driving. You need to cover all of your costs out of that. That’s not nothing, but…okay, how many tractor-trailers are out there?

    https://www.statista.com/topics/5280/heavy-goods-vehicles-in-the-uk/

    Heavy goods vehicle registrations bounced back above their pre-pandemic levels in 2021, reaching 504,600 vehicles in circulation.

    If you have driverless trucks, that’s an order-of-magnitude difference in vehicle count from busses in the UK.

    I’m not saying that there aren’t wins possible with self-driving busses. But it doesn’t seem to me to be the vehicle type with the greatest potential improvement from being self-driving.