Cool.
Metro is restarting its delayed study of autonomous transit, with the full-throated support of outgoing Houston mayor Sylvester Turner as a vital step toward a region not further choking on cars and trucks.
“Those objectives do not end at the end of anybody’s term,” Turner said at a Metropolitan Transit Authority event touting the agency’s new shuttle and electric bus. “Those are things you have to continue if you want to get where you are going.”
Both the shuttle and bus will go into service in the coming weeks, officials said, once they complete all the needed testing. Each are part of efforts, largely supported by federal funds, to transition Metro away from diesel-powered buses toward cleaner fuel types such as electric, fuel cell and hydrogen.
Metro Chairman Sanjay Ramabhadran said the agency remains committed to change, but not to any one technology. The agency is also balancing where it is deploying new technologies to add services where there is demand, Ramabhadran said, and where Metro can improve air quality by lowering its emissions in neighborhoods affected by poor air quality.
“There is a growing desire for robust, equitable transit,” he said.
There is also interest in transit that can be scaled to neighborhoods that need better access but do not need a full-sized bus, driving some of the interest nationally and in Houston with autonomous vehicles. The autonomous shuttle is operated by a system called ToNY, an acronym for To Navigate You, developed by Perrone Robotics. Metro, the Houston-Galveston Area Council and others are involved in the upcoming testing.
See here for some more on the initial version of this, which involved smaller vehicles just on the TSU campus, and here for a mention of the new version in the context of Cruise and other autonomous vehicles operating in Houston. There’s a fuller explanation of this service later in the article – it will run in a loop from the Eastwood Transit Center to the TSU library, and there will be an operator on board, among other things. This is a 12-month pilot funded by a Federal Transit Administration grant, and what happens after that depends on how this goes. I’ll be very interested to find out.
how does the matter of whether the bus is autonomous have any impact on the number of cars on the road? and with an operator on board anyway, i don’t even see how this reduces costs. completely baffled by the premise.