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Are We Ready For Driverless Buses? (www.ibtimes.co.uk)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days 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.