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.
"The CID invested $400,000 in the Cumberland Hopper pilot program."
https://www.masstransitmag.com/alt-mobility/autonomous-vehicles/news/53067186/ga-what-we-learned-aboard-cumberlands-free-selfdriving-bus
Meanwhile, how much is Jacksonville on the hook (so far) for their autonomous car program? And when will that program be on the streets? This decade?
It's unclear, because they won't just tell laypeople that, get upset when you mention the known capital cost overruns, and City Council isn't curious enough about their $430+ million transit project to make them answer. JTA's most recent
budget for FY23 shows $4.5 million for U2C Planning (presumably a result of the RAISE planning grant) as part of the bus capital budget, but there's no mention of the U2C by name in the FY22 budget, while the
FY20 budget shows $29.1 million in federal, state, and JTA funding for the Bay Street Innovation Corridor.
FY21 curiously mentions that under the Corporate budget, "Services is based on the expected need for the Automation department's continued progress in the testing and design phases related to" the U2C and Bay Street. That year, the Services budget went up by about $1 million compared to the previous year. But
the next year, that part of the budget says "Services for Automation department were moved to Bus Division" and shows a $1.4 million decrease there, while at the same time the Bus Division budget shows a nearly $5 million increase (over 30%) in Services.
So… who knows how much they've spent, really? Maybe they don't even know. Their most recent insistence is that vehicles will be operating on Bay Street by June of 2025, while the Bay Street Innovation Corridor website says the program will be complete by December 2025, which I believe is when the BUILD grant requires it be complete.
Yes, hence why I think it's safe to say we are deciding color schemes on the Ford EV right now.
I'm still not convinced they'll let it be that, but I suppose we're being forced to see.
In unrelated news, one thing I've been curious about for a little while now is that on JTA's website with
U2C Documentation, they include a
letter from the FTA regarding the remaining FTA obligation in Skyway vehicles, including a $1.6 million payback requirement to relieve federal interest in the trains. However, we've never seen the version of this letter about the Skyway's
infrastructure, the cost of which I recall being a major part of the argument for why the U2C was the only feasible option to continue the infrastructure through the end of its useful life, which therefore meant we had to spend $246 million (or more, now) converting it into the road for autonomous vehicles. There were at one point claims by JTA that demolishing the Skyway could require anything between 40 to 50 million to be repaid to the FTA to the
entire original federal contribution to the construction of the Skyway. But for the life of me, I don't believe we've ever seen anything from the FTA to back that up. I wonder why that is.
