Lot that could be said here. Figure it makes sense to re-up this.
The Atlanta autonomous shuttle is now running... the manufacturer is... Beep. The shuttle will be called " The Cumberland Hopper ".
https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2023/07/25/driverless-shuttle-launches-cumberland/
https://ridebeep.com/
Beep isn't a manufacturer. Their actual job in theory is to be a transit agency for places without transit agencies (such as master planned developments, college or medical campuses, places of that nature), but specifically for autonomous shuttles. So you (as the municipality, or developer/CDD, or BID) give them a contract to design, provide vehicles for and then operate a shuttle route, whereas you would normally have a transit agency design, provide buses and drivers for and then operate a bus route.
The vehicles are supposed to be manufactured by other companies, like Local Motors or Navya. But those companies have now gone bankrupt so they're either in a similar position to JTA in the early 2010s and having to figure out how to keep maintaining vehicles that are now out of production, or scrambling to find other companies (like ZF and Holon) to get them new vehicles on some reasonable timeline. Of course there's no way they're currently profitable right now so they have to do all this while interest rates continue to rise, constraining new VC money to fund operations and development while their costs continue to escalate.
So that leaves Beep two options until the technology works well enough to remove the attendants and have a consistent, high-quality vehicle that lets them reduce costs (whenever that happens):
1) Keep finding enough master planned developments and agencies willing to hand them few hundred thousand dollars at a time to run "pilots," or
2) Find a gullible enough, future-obsessed enough transit agency willing to hand them millions, potentially tens of millions of dollars to operate a shuttle route.
I wonder who that would be.
But yeah, this makes a great deal more sense given the actual state of the technology (especially seeing the
recent news out of San Francisco despite GM's massive investment compared to JTA and friends). Leveraging existing dedicated transit lanes to run a pilot shuttle in a circle during off-peak times (every 8 minutes at best is worse than the current Skyway's capability and well below the 3-minute frequencies promised in the U2C's TCAR studies) is about what this stuff is safely capable of, and still requires an on-board attendant.
Of course, this will only motivate Nat Ford to switch from his one argument for the U2C (that it's so innovative and game-changing so we need to do it) to his other argument (that everyone else is leaving us behind so we need to do it).
Donna Deegan can demand an end to this whenever she'd like.
