Could this self-driving bus soon be taking you to work or the airport?

Belfast Telegraph

3 days ago

A new self-driving shuttle bus was launched yesterday, ahead of going into service in Belfast Harbour in the coming months.
The Harlander is planned to operate 12 hours a day, carrying up to nine passengers at a time on a route around Belfast's Titanic Quarter.
Belfast Harbour hopes to expand these routes in coming years, connecting to the airport and potentially connecting other areas of Northern Ireland to more mainstream public transport.
The driverless shuttle is currently completing safety testing, but can already be seen doing practice runs around roads in the area.
Belfast Harbour plans the Harlander to run a 15-20 route, on a timetable aligned to the arrival of trains at Titanic Halt station. The timetable currently has approximate running hours from 6:30am to 6:30/7:00pm.
The shuttle will initially run with safety attendants sitting at the driver's seat, however Belfast Harbour aims to eventually run it with no direct human input at all.
Mike Dawson, 53, the people and digital transformation director at Belfast Harbour, says 'the purpose of the bus is to create last mile connectivity between the Titanic halt and initially, the Catalyst building.
'Then we have a loop of about four stops on the estate that it will stop on initially, to get a model and a blueprint that's viable for other services.'
Mr Dawson says there are several goals for the current testing phase: 'What we'd like to do is have this run, learn from it, particularly the passenger experience and customer experience.
'What does that look like? What does that feel like? What needs to be tweaked, improved? How do you make sure there are no barriers to entry for people to be able to get on and access it?'
Self-driving vehicles can be an unnerving technology for some, but Mr Dawson wants the shuttle to become 'reassuringly boring, that you're just getting transported from point A to point B.'
He says the advantage is 'cost, more than anything else.'
'Translink run a great service, the Glider, up and down. But when we looked at it, we wanted more people to potentially use the train.
'You've got that 1.3 miles, how do you get people to do that? If the weather's atrocious, you're putting people off. How can we incentivise people to have a seamless experience: you get on the train, you get on the Harlander, [it] takes you to Catalyst, you're at your place of work.'
The shuttle has been designed in partnership with several other companies including eVersum, Oxa, Angoka, BT and Horiba Mira.
eVersum is an Austrian company which develops electric buses, and they created a right-hand drive model specifically for the Harlander.
The self-driving technology comes from Oxa, who Mr Dawson describes as 'world-class in this space'.
Safety testing has been carried out by Coventry-based firm Horiba Mira who have 'tested to death' the vehicles.
'They have a model of the Harbour estate on their land, they've run this model for months and months and months.
'We're going to do the same here, we've been doing it for the last few weeks, we're going to do it for another three to four. We're very confident it does what it needs to do. But, fundamentally, you still have a driver's seat there, you still have a steering wheel, you still have the ability to intervene should it be necessary.'
While there will be safety attendants sitting in the driver's seat at first, Mr Dawson says 'the truth is, it will largely run in autonomous mode.'
There are plans to get the Hardlander to a 'level four' self-driving vehicle, where 'there is no safety attendant, there is no driver.'
Mr Dawson said he 'would like to see' an expansion of self-driving transport across Belfast and Northern Ireland.
'We would like to see more of these, where you can create connectivity on the estate itself.
'We see this as a much bigger play regionally, not just for Northern Ireland, but also for GB, where you can get connectivity to those main routes. Imagine you had estates in the city where you had these types of routes feeding the Glider route.
'It doesn't replace bus drivers, it augments what we have in place today.'
Joe O'Neill, chief executive of Belfast Harbour, says the Harlander is a vital cog in its five-year strategy' and wants better connectivity 'with some of our other services, like Cruise, bringing passengers into the city.
'Connectivity to the airport is an important one as well, how we can work with the Belfast City Airport,' he added.