Driverless buses are coming to UK roads, with Milton Keynes and Sunderland leading the charge.
if you want to have a reliable driverless system, you’re going to have to invent trains… again
Normally yes, but Japan also came up with an alternative and rather literal combination of the two, because of course they did:
I can’t check because I’m at work, but is that the Tom Scott video?
At least, I think I remember him doing a video on that thing, maybe it was just someone kind of like him.
For how janky driverless cars can be, I am not optimistic that we’re close. I wouldn’t want a huge bus full of people getting confused on the road. If driverless cars didn’t require so much human intervention to function normally, I would have a different feeling.
This could be ok on dedicated bus lanes in cities that are well designed… I’m not sure if any place in the UK fits that criteria
The moment I read “roads” I realized this is not about USB or busses of that sort. I was curious what driverless might improve here
Are We Ready For Driverless Buses?
If they’re on a set of parallel metal beams on the ground, absolutely!
The advantage of busways is that they’re a lot cheaper to build than trains. You just need some paint on pavement to build a dedicated bus lane. All you have to really build are some nice bus stops. The big problem with trains is vertical and horizontal alignment. You can’t just lay train tracks on top of an existing road system. Cars and buses can handle much greater slopes and perform much steeper turns than trains can.
For example, you can make a busway over an existing road bridge, without any need to rebuild the bridge itself. But you can’t just slap some train tracks on an existing road bridge, as the train would be unable to make it up the slopes designed for car traffic.
