Up next: Google self-driving buses, finally American buses run with the same attention to time tables that Swiss ones do. And added benefit: they obey traffic safety laws.
I have actually visited Mountain View, from Switzerland, and caught a bus on El Camino. Probably not far from where this incident happened. Yeah. Timetables are not a thing that happens there.
...I remember once in Zurich when my local bus was two minutes late. The people at the bus stop were really quite cross.
How is it possible to run buses with perfectly accurate timetables? I imagine traffic conditions are somewhat unpredictable in Switzerland, just like anywhere else.
There's enough slack in the timetable to account for delays. If the bus would normally take one minute to get from one stop to the next, the timetable will actually account 90 seconds, etc.
Then there are certain stops where the bus will, if it gets there early, stop and wait. They don't do this on every stop, but they're frequent enough to keep the service regulated. Intelligently, these stops are also the ones which synchronise with other transport systems. For example, when I take the train home from work I know that there'll be a bus waiting for me when I get off at my station.
It's not perfect, but the overwhelming majority of the time it Just Works.
In heavy snow, busses (and especially trams) tend to not run on schedule anymore in Zurich. During reasonable conditions, they normally do. One thing they have is buffer time at the end of the lines, so that if it's late on one run, it won't be late for all runs. Some longer lines don't run quite on schedule, especially during rush hour, but their high frequency usually makes that a non-issue.
I’ll report what I observed in 2 years of 3 to 4 times of using the bus a day in Germany.
Every time a bus was late, or tried to break the sound barrier™ in the hope of reducing some of the delay, was due to one of the following issues:
(a) A tourist with texan accent trying to get onto the bus, discussing with the bus driver if he can pay with credit card or in dollar (no), then asking the bus driver to wait while he’s going to get money from the nearest ATM (happens at about 5% of stops in the downtown areas where the tourists are)
(b) Rush hour traffic, 200 people squeezing into a single bus, and another few hundred waiting at the bus stop – busses coming every one or two minutes, and it takes quite some time until people stop trying to get into the bus, and leave enough space for the doors to close
(c) some kids with invalid tickets trying to cheat and getting caught
These issues can’t be fixed by automated busses, or trains.
Only by less tight schedules, and more busses and trains.
(a) is fixed because there's probably no-one for the Texan to talk to on the bus. For trains, the person to talk to is on the platform, and can simply let the train depart (example: Copenhagen Metro, although good luck spotting any staff).
It could be more easily fixed by accepting foreign credit cards (Gothenburg manages this, London if the card is contactless) or telling drivers not to wait.
(b) is partly solved if the cost of running buses/trains is significantly reduced, as that leaves money for extra vehicles.
Already many cities today operate busses by taking unemployed people and forcing them to take the job as bus driver for no pay (they'd have to continue living off of welfare), otherwise they'd lose 50% of their welfare money.
That's how you get bus drivers for free — automated vehicles can't really beat that.
I think that this amounts to a small pebble in the mountain of technologies that have to be developed to enable AVs.
Here's an easy solution: every bus stop has a kiosk that dispenses a RFID bus pass if you put in your payment info. Then, when the bus comes, you can enter from any door and the RFID receivers detect your presence. Attempts to board without a bus pass are detected with weight sensors and a camera network (current computer vision techniques are probably reliable enough for this application; they'll be even better in a few years). Unauthorized persons are advised to get off at the next stop by audio recording and identified by displaying a snapshot of their face (taken earlier on the bus). If they don't get off the transit police are summoned.
Fix with POP (Proof-of-Purchase). That is, you can enter the vehicle through any door, but you must have a valid ticket. Occasional inspectors check the tickets, and issue fines for people who don't have tickets such that the expected cost of not paying your fare is on the same order or lower than fare beating.
Put a fare vending machine which accepts cash and credits cards on the bus, which also makes it very obvious how to get a single fare. (This exists for example for trams in Berlin, modulo the accepting credit cards part)
We’re currently in the process of switching to RFID-cards as tickets, and allowing people with RFID credit cards to also pay via those.
But yes, all these issues are solveable – but "how close does the bus operate to the schedule" usually is not related to who drives it, but to how these issues are solved.
In fairness, I think the best way to fix (a), (b) and (c) would actually be by automated buses or trains, that would enforce reasonable limitations strictly, without the possibility of negotiation.
i.e. the passenger would be prevented from boarding the vehicle without a valid ticket and provided there was sufficient capacity for a speedy and comfortable boarding.
I wager that if this happened, it would both increase the use of public transportation and increase the public opinion of AVs (assuming it is done once the technology is acceptable). Probably not as profitable for the companies producing the consumer vehicles though.
Maaybe for the "easy" stuff like public transport. But for many of the specialised jobs that also boil down to a human operating a vehicle, e.g. excavators, log cutting machines, snowplows etc. it takes a human who already knows how to drive a car many months, even years to learn how to do it. Since the market for these machines is many orders of magnitude smaller than for cars, and each machine type is so specialised that there is limited overlap, so the cost-benefit ratio is much worse than for cars. Thus I think it will take a lot longer for these jobs to be automated away.
if replacing a machine costs $5 million, and the automatic model $1 million ontop of that, and you pay an operator $60k a year, the value proposition isn't very clear.
For classes of machines where only a few thousand, or even a few tens/hundreds of thousands of units exist total, the costs of developing the sophisticated AI that requires are not going to be that low for a lot longer than 5-10 years from now. Especially considering the market is split between many player and none are going to share their secret sauce AI.
