The Problems With Pods
Autonomous pods should be considered experiments at this point. There is no mass-transit application of the technology in North America, yet transit bureaucrats are wowed by the sales presentations and promises of a cheap mobility nirvana grounded in contracts with private operators like BEEP.
A new review finds low-speed autonomous shuttle applications have been ineffective in North Carolina. The NCDOT recently published findings of studies of two AV pilot programs using the French-made Navya autonomous shuttles.
“The vehicles still include too many limitations to manage urban traffic settings, and travel at speeds too slow to satisfy most riders. These are just some of the findings in a July 2024 report on the use of the autonomous vehicle (AV) shuttles by the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT).
One of their biggest limitations is capacity. Each Navya pod has 11 seats. In the Orlando service, an attendant polices who gets onboard, makes sure everyone is seated with their seat belts on, and ensures that there are no passengers under the age of 16 riding without an adult. The attendant also overrides the vehicle’s crash avoidance system when it halts the pod due to the presence of other vehicles, people, animals, bending tree branches and waving banners near the side of the road, in cases when they pose no threat.
A single modern streetcar holds 160 passengers seated and standing, plus wheeled things like bikes and wheelchairs. With a single driver. It would take an army of pods, each with its own attendant, to equal that capacity. You need 16 pods to equal 1 streetcar. That’s 192 pods per hour for the Beltline and 32 employees at all times.
Sarah Searcy, a senior advisor at the NCDOT, observed, ““I would say that the ‘autonomous’ in the name is aspirational,” Searcy said. “What we’ve learned from the project is that these vehicles are automated … but right now the human is really an important part of the system.” See the entire NCDOT article at the link in our profile or at https://bit.ly/pods-not-ready-for-prime-time.
