Autonomous vehicles - trials no longer to take place on the Busway

Readers with  long memories - and a wider interest in public transport developments, perhaps - may recall the plan for a trial of autonomous vehicles to utilise the southern section of the Busway. According to our last blog post on the subject, the first paying passengers were expected this year.

Things have changed! In a brief report to the September meeting of the Greater Cambridge Partnership Joint Assembly it was announced that the trial will no longer take place on the Busway, but will instead utilise the University's West Cambridge site. Other aspects of the trial have also changed - not just the timeframe (only to be expected in the current circumstances) but the number of vehicles being produced (halved from 6 to 3).

The Busway had been selected because it offered the prospect of filling the early morning/late evening/weekend voids in the timetables for scheduled bus services. Although there has been some filling of these voids in the past 6 months, there is no suggestion in the Joint Assembly report that the switch away from the Busway was due to lack of potential benefit.

Autonomous vehicles - £3.2m awarded for trial

This follows up my 17 October 2017 posting, and again uses information from Business Weekly (not, I admit, my go-to publication for Cambridge news...).

The government has recently announced awards totalling £22.4m to 22 connected and autonomous vehicle (CAVs) R&D projects, of which £3.2m is coming to Cambridge. This money will be used to build and trial six 10-15-seater self-driving shuttles to operate on the southern (Trumpington) section of the existing guided busway, initially for an out-of-hours service, when ordinary buses aren’t running.

The details are a little vague - at least in the published reports. Although one of the strengths of this section of the busway is - for the purposes of a trial - that it is segregated from general traffic, the trial is supposed to serve the Biomedical Campus, where busway vehicles share road space with hoi polloi. And emergency vehicles.

Prototypes are due to be tested in late summer 2019, with the first paying passengers boarding a year later. It's unclear if the first few months of public service are part of the trial (in which case funding is already guaranteed) or are to be part of the County Council's "transport" portfolio.

The vehicles will be developed by Aurrigo, part of the RDM Group. This follows the same company's involvement in the earlier trial using a 4-seater autonomous "pod".

Autonomous vehicle trial starts on Busway

I've decided to stick with Business Weekly's definition in the title for this posting. The Cambridge News prefers "driverless robot buses" (which begs the question as to how it would be defined if actually driven by a robot...). Whilst the BBC goes for "driverless bus 'pod'". As you can tell, even defining what it is that's being described isn't easy!

Simply because it seems to repeat a press release, I'll stick with Business Weekly (links to all of the sources referenced appear at the end of this posting).

It reports that the "RDM Group is utilising its existing driverless PodZero to complete feasibility studies ahead of the potential deployment of a number of 10-seater autonomous buses that will run between Trumpington Park and Ride and Cambridge Station, via the strategically important Cambridge Biomedical Campus (Addenbrooke’s) site." The idea being that a successful trial could lead to the introduction of an autonomous bus service after 8pm in the evening and during the weekends.

An RDM member of staff notes that the Trumpington to Cambridge section of the Busway is an ideal route as "it is segregated from the highway allowing the pods to whizz up and down without traffic congestion slowing them down and also segregated from pedestrians and cyclists meaning it is a really safe route."

I wonder whether that person has actually surveyed the route at the Cambridge end of this section? It was at precisely the point where buses and cyclists aren't segregated - at the end of the guided section near the Railway Station -  that an accident happened earlier in the summer.

Funding is being provided by Innovate UK, and delivered in partnership with Connecting Cambridgeshire and the Smart Cambridge Programme.

More at the following sources - although there's a good deal of overlap, since so much of the reporting is based on the initial press release:

Business Weekly: https://www.businessweekly.co.uk/news/automotive/autonomous-vehicle-trial-starts-cambridge
Cambridge News: http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/driverless-robot-pods-take-cambridge-13772841
BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-41644810

I submitted a previous report at the time the funding  was first announced:
http://travellingtheguidedbusway.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/driverless-minibuses-feasibility-study.html

Driverless minibuses - feasibility study funded

According to a report posted yesterday (13 April) on the Local Transport Today website (LTT is "the authoritative, independent journal for transport decision makers"):

"The government has awarded £31m to 24 connected and autonomous vehicle projects.
One project to receive funds is the Cambridge autonomous bus system feasibility study, which could lead to driverless minibuses operating over part of the Cambridgeshire guided busway."

So it looks as though one of the Smart Cambridge projects is going to receive government backing to evaluate its feasibility.

If you want to learn more about what Smart Cambridge is investigating, there's a detailed Cambridge News report to answer all your questions. (Admittedly, I'm guessing this is the same project as the one that HMG is investing in, although in the 4 March CN report it says quite clearly that the feasibility study is already being funded - by the City Deal and Cambridge Ahead. Puzzling.)