launcht Forget the autonomous car, experts believes the cities of the future should feature self-driving buses whizzing around. Amos Haggiag, one of the major players behind the Las Vegas’s autonomous bus program, sees a future where cities crack down on self-driving cars and push people to take the bus instead.
The number of people living in urban areas increases is projected to reach 66% by 2050, so autonomous driving poses a problem. With no taxi driver in the equation, the cost of private transport will drop and the number of people wanting to be on the road will spike to unsustainable levels. In a single system, cities could offer a fixed monthly price for all transit needs, with people switching from car to bus to get around the otherwise congested central areas.
Autonomous bus transportation makes… more sense than autonomous cars, Think about the bus that drives the same route each day. It’s much easier to train the computer vision and machine learning of autonomous vehicles to ride a certain route than to ride everywhere.
– Amos Haggiag, CEO Optibus.
Haggiag spends a lot of time thinking about making cities efficient. Optibus, which maps out routes for 200 cities, uses machine learning to create the best schedules for public transport based on how passengers really move around. The company uses a range of sources to schedule these routes, from the likes of mobile signals, location data from mobile applications, and even sensor data collected by the local government.
