“However, once autonomous technology works door to door things change. Quite a lot of train travellers might prefer the driverless proposition over the public transport alternative. The technology needs to handle all the issues - dogs, playing children, cycles and so on. Maybe that will be eight years or 20 years - nobody knows.”
But if this is ordering a wake-up call, it’s far from certain when to set the alarm for.
“A wake-up call suggests that they are sleeping, but I can’t judge that. But the sector should be aware that the economics of rail-bound transport versus road-bound transport will fundamentally change in the next ten years. Many of the travellers you currently have will not be there forever. They are now with you because they prefer your proposition. But the road-bound propositions will dramatically improve over the next decades. We suggest the rail industry should act.”
On October 11 2016 the UK witnessed a first, as a driverless vehicle nosed its way among the public in Milton Keynes. It was confined to a one-kilometre circuit of pavements around the railway station. A two-seater, people took it in turns to sit beside a safety driver, who was there to take over if required. The aspiration is to provide 40 of the pods for a public service next year.
The BBC News website reported: “The trial in Milton Keynes is the culmination of 18 months planning, which required a virtual mapping of the town along with extensive work with Milton Keynes Council to ensure the vehicles would be safe, conform to regulations, and be accepted by the public.”
Less than a month later Iain Forbes, head of the aforementioned Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles, gave evidence to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee (another branch of the Government investigating AVs). He told them: “Initially it looks like that technology will be deployed in constrained environments, and views about when that might hit the market in a serious way really do differ. Some people say the 2020s, some people are saying the 2050s… making sure we have a strategy which is robust enough for a range of different scenarios is one of the things that’s really important.”
There has been a lot of confident talk about how quickly one day we will run, given our tentative baby steps so far. One potential next step, says Steffens, is ‘platooning’, where several vehicles come together on the motorway to form a ‘road train’.
“It is an intermediate step towards full autonomy. It helps in the highway transport in the next decade. But if the technology stops at platooning, there will not be a big disruption . It is very useful, but in the end the technology should work without platooning - so completely autonomous door to door by one vehicle. If driverless technology were not to move beyond platooning, I don’t see a big risk for the rail sector.”
But others doubt we’ll even get that far. “AVs have been massively oversold,” believes Campaign for Better Transport Chief Executive Stephen Joseph. “There are all sorts of reasons why there are problems with them. People are just starting to wake up to these.
“There are ethical issues here. Suppose someone runs out in front of your car… a child or a dog. How are the algorithms set? Does the car run over the dog or the child? Does it swerve across the carriageway and hit an oncoming vehicle? Does it protect the occupant at all costs? There are big questions. We’re so far away from this that I would be surprised if it was a real threat immediately.”
But could it form part of a genuine public transport picture?
“I don’t think the way it is being talked about at the moment is public transport. If you listen to advocates and ministers who have been sold on this, it is terribly seductive. What it is, is exactly the current journeys people are making but without them having to drive. Even if they are shared, they are part of a public transport network in which fixed-route rail looks like part of the story.
