Nadezhda Kosareva, CEO at Unitsky String Technologies Inc.
The development of autonomous systems is rapidly changing modern logistics. Many countries are testing the possibility of transporting passengers with driverless vehicles and are involving artificial intelligence (AI) in route planning.
For example, driverless electric buses have been operating in the Norwegian city of Stavanger since 2022. In December 2024, a fully autonomous bus began circulating in Matsuyama, Japan. First Bus, a company providing bus services across the UK, uses AI to develop and update bus timetables.
Given such rapid progress, Zion Market Research expects the global autonomous public transport market to expand at a rate of 20% annually between 2024 and 2032. Let’s take a closer look at the trends and challenges currently facing the autonomous transport industry.
Why Is The Autonomous Transport Market Growing?
Zion Market Research attributes the expected growth in this market to several factors, including increasing public-private partnerships, growing urbanization and advances in technology.
The need for passenger transport is convincingly demonstrated by the fact that in 2023, the same report found that about 57% of global autonomous public transport market revenue was accounted for by electric buses. And this figure is only growing over time.
What Are The Advantages Of Autonomous Transport?
On a regional level, the introduction of electric buses could help transform logistics and reduce costs. Under AI control, driverless vehicles could help optimize traffic flow and maintain a constant speed. I believe driverless electric buses will soon be fully capable of using real-time data to plan their routes, safely traveling close to each other, and integrating with intelligent traffic management systems.
The rapid development of AI should further simplify the implementation of electric buses, which requires complex coordination of time intervals on the route and precisely timed charging schedules. All this can allow bus companies to develop new, highly convenient routes for passengers, optimize rolling stock loading, and schedule movements to eliminate downtime.
Good transport accessibility could also lead more people to choose to live outside urban centers, potentially increasing the value of such real estate and contributing to the expansion of cities and agglomerations. These changes could potentially affect economic activity and the spatial distribution of businesses and populations.
Overall, I believe the introduction of electric driverless vehicles can help transform urban traffic flow into a single, synchronously operating mechanism, reducing downtime, delays and congestion. The convenience of public transport routes could reduce the number of private cars and cut down on CO2 emissions and fuel costs.
What Are The Challenges To The Development Of Autonomous Transport?
Right now, there is still no reliable way to make autonomous passenger buses and shuttles full participants in urban traffic. In my opinion, driverless vehicles can only effectively operate in dedicated lanes, and depending on location, someone may still need to be inside. This is because modern sensors and algorithms still struggle when faced with complex weather conditions, unusual road situations or equipment failures.
Another significant problem is the amount of data generated by ground-based driverless vehicles. As noted in Wired, this includes “video from arrays of cameras inside and outside the vehicles, audio recordings from microphones, point clouds mapping objects in space from lidar and radar, diagnostic readings from vehicle parts, GPS readings, and much more.”
For example, a driverless taxi service began testing the autonomous Jaguar I-Pace crossover at the end of 2019. One car generated more than 1,100 gigabytes of data per hour of driving. Another company, TuSimple, which conducted its first driverless trucking route in 2021, maintains a storage capacity of 50 petabytes.
It can be extremely expensive to store all this data in cloud services, and the mass implementation of autonomous driverless vehicles has not yet begun. It is hard to imagine how much data will be generated then and what the storage costs will be.
One way to avoid some of these difficulties is by moving passenger transportation to the space off the ground. In my experience, autonomous transportation on above-ground rails often does not require significant modernization of urban infrastructure and can greatly reduce the possibility of accidents. (Full disclaimer: My company offers solutions in this space, as do others.)
When an overground transport moves along a fixed track, it typically requires a minimal set of control devices compared to road transport. Therefore, it is not surprising that rail transport was among the first to undergo automation.
One prominent project is China’s T-Flight, a high-speed elevated maglev system designed to transport passengers at ultra-fast speeds. Elevated designs like these have the potential to reduce the need for extensive land acquisition, making them viable solutions for expanding urban transit networks.
Another example is the Sydney Metro and its driverless trains. It is Australia’s first fully automated metro train system. The network features driverless trains that enable faster journeys. The system includes modern safety features such as platform doors, constant monitoring and hundreds of tunnel cameras.
While above-ground systems are well-suited for city infrastructure, one drawback is the bulky nature of certain systems, such as monorails or elevated railways.
The Autonomous Public Transport Market: Prospects
Despite certain technical difficulties, autonomous public transport is actively developing, and in many countries, this is directly supported by government institutions. For example, the UK government has passed a special Automated Vehicles Act, which supports the development of driverless vehicles by requiring them to meet rigorous safety checks.
Government-funded initiatives like Innovate UK are also helping companies work toward improving the future of mobility. Another example is in Norway, where the FusionProcessing project has successfully covered 75,000 kilometers and transported 27,000 passengers with autonomous buses.
All this creates good prospects for companies that are developing driverless passenger vehicles and can create ready-made solutions for implementation.
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