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Self-driving buses easier to implement than cars but concerns remain: Experts

SINGAPORE — Driverless buses could address the shortage of local bus drivers and be easier to implement than driverless cars or taxis, but concerns over safety and the livelihood of drivers need to be addressed, said experts and industry players yesterday.

Mr Ng Chee Meng (right), the Acting Education Minister (Schools) and Senior Minister of State

Mr Ng Chee Meng (right), the Acting Education Minister (Schools) and Senior Minister of State

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SINGAPORE — Driverless buses could address the shortage of local bus drivers and be easier to implement than driverless cars or taxis, but concerns over safety and the livelihood of drivers need to be addressed, said experts and industry players yesterday.

The fixed routes of buses could mean a less complex process of route-finding than autonomous cars and smaller vehicles that go everywhere, said transport analysts.

They felt that autonomous-vehicle technology could first be rolled out for vehicles that follow a fixed route, such as buses and logistics vehicles, although it is unclear when the technology would move beyond trials to be deployed on a wider scale.

Professor Lee Der Horng of the National University of Singapore does not expect driverless buses to become the norm in the next five years.

The trial of two driverless buses in the area around Nanyang Technological University (NTU) will be costly compared to a conventional bus operated by a human driver, he said, but “maybe this trial is meant to test technology and user acceptance”.

Although bus-driving jobs will not “go away so quickly”, job disruption for bus drivers may occur sooner than for taxi drivers, said SIM University senior lecturer Walter Theseira.

“To some extent, there will be some increase in demand for related jobs — for example, technicians … But the end-goal of this kind of technology is to substitute for expensive manpower. So we should expect that overall, the employment numbers in the transport and related industries should, in fact, go down,” he said.

Some industry players noted that safety issues must also be ironed out.

As heavier vehicles that carry more people, the safety of such driverless buses is a bigger concern than smaller vehicles, said Prof Lee.

School bus driver Ng Ee Teen asked if parents of young schoolchildren would trust driverless technology more than bus drivers and their sidekicks, the “bus aunties”.

There are also the quirks of bus travel that the technical experts will have to figure out.

“If today I’m taking the bus on a daily basis, and the bus is leaving the bus bay, I can wave my hand and the driver can stop and open the door. With the driverless bus, I don’t think this is going to happen. Even though Singapore has been very aggressive in promoting driverless technology, I do not know if this is the future society we’d like to have,” said Prof Lee.

SIM University senior lecturer Park Byung Joon said some of the quirks can be addressed by, for example, installing sensors on the bus. There can be one tracking the number of people boarding and alighting, or one tracking the division of weight on the bus to know if passengers are moving to the rear. The latter could also trigger an announcement when it senses that passengers are not moving in, he said.

National Transport Workers Union executive secretary Melvin Yong said the union views the agreement between the Land Transport Authority and NTU, in particular the pilot of self-driving buses, with “both interest and concern”.

“With the advent of this technology, there will be new job opportunities for our transport workers. It is also likely that we will see future changes to today’s jobs.

“The union is keeping a close watch on the development and will continue to work with our tripartite partners to help our bus professionals upskill and be updated on the latest technologies in the industry,” Mr Yong wrote on Facebook.

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