A self-driving bus is coming to the Edmonton region this fall thanks to the company that runs St. Albert’s buses.
Dan Finley of the Pacific Western (which runs the buses for Red Arrow and St. Albert Transit) announced last week at the Shaw Conference Centre that his company would test a self-driving shuttle in Calgary and Edmonton this fall. It’s the first time that a fully autonomous vehicle will be tested in the Edmonton region.
The announcement coincided with a conference on autonomous vehicles held last week at the conference centre.
Driverless technology is already at work in some of today’s cars in the form of technologies such as lane-assist, Finley said in an interview. Pacific Western wants to test how people interact with automated vehicles by offering free rides on a self-driving bus in Calgary this September and Edmonton in October.
The bus, dubbed Ela, is a 12-passenger electric model EasyMile EZ10 model that has no steering wheel. To navigate, it uses GPS, lidar, and video cameras to create a 3D map of its surroundings.
Finley, vice-president of business development for Pacific Western, said this model has been deployed about 170 times in 20 nations without any safety problems and was already doing full-time routes in Singapore and Texas.
This pilot study, organized in partnership with Telus, Atco, and the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta, will see the bus carry passengers along short, fixed routes that are closed to traffic, Finley said. The bus can do 45 km/h, but won’t go faster than about 12 km/h for this test.
In Calgary, the bus will shuttle people between the Calgary Zoo LRT station and the Telus Spark Science Centre about a kilometre away along a service road, Finley said. They haven’t figured out a route for the Edmonton trial yet, but hope to have multiple stops on it.
Passengers will board the automated bus by pressing a button on its side when it stops, Finley said. Press a second one on the inside, and the bus heads off, stopping whenever its sensors detect an obstacle. A fully trained bus driver will be on the bus during this pilot to explain the system and stop the bus in emergencies.
Finley said he was inviting everyone to give the bus a shot, and said he could arrange for a similar trial to be held in St. Albert if the local council was interested.
St. Albert Transit was definitely interested in such a trial, but has yet to discuss the matter with council or Pacific Western, said city transit director Kevin Bamber. The city would likely have to wait until the province passed regulations to allow self-driving vehicles to be tested on public roads as well, which Alberta Transportation has hinted should happen later this year.
The EZ10 is on the lower end of automation when it comes to autonomous vehicles and wouldn’t be able to handle regular traffic, said St. Albert’s Paul Godsmark, who is the transportation specialist with the Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence and not involved with this bus trial. This trial was important, as it would give people a chance to experience autonomous cars first-hand.
“The technology is really quite close to mainstream deployment on public roads,” said Godsmark, adding that the U.S. company Waymo has plans to field automated vehicles commercially later this year.
“The more people are aware that this is real, it’s happening, the better.”
Finley said that he didn’t expect self-driving cars to put bus drivers out of work even in the medium term.
“A bus driver’s job is much more than just driving the bus,” he said, and there would still be a need for someone to handle passenger safety and customer service.
He predicted that automation would come gradually into transit through technologies such as adaptive cruise control.
Visit www.ridewithela.ca for more on the automated bus project.
