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Transit Leap in Practice
CHAPTER 11
Transit Leap in Practice: City of SeaTac Summary City of SeaTac, Washington, in 2017 engaged an automated vehicles consultancy (AVC) to explore automated vehicle applications deployment for community benefit, with a wide scope of possibilities left open for study. After examining trip patterns and geography, the AVC determined that a pilot project amounting to transit leap with available vehicles from the existing automated shuttle industry deployed in one residential section of the municipality would provide opportunities to serve multiple markets. At the same time, a program and economic pattern for wider, multi-city deployment in the near future would be established.
11.1 BACKGROUND As of April 2018, the Seattle suburb of SeaTac, Washington is engaged in an automated vehicle study project lead by one of this book’s co-authors. Under contract with the City of SeaTac, his automated vehicle consultancy (AVC) has set out to develop policies and activities to establish the suitability of the technology and viability of this municipality becoming a “Center of Municipal Excellence” in automated, driverless vehicle deployment for cost-effective public benefit. This is a self-proclaimed designation by the elected leadership that will be validated by what the City Government actually implements in new policies, programs, and revised road features to facilitate automated vehicle usage. Home to 28,000 residents, City of SeaTac covers 26 km2 of territory, located halfway between the cities of Seattle and Tacoma in Washington State in the northwest corner of the US mainland. The median age of residents is 34.2 years compared to a median age of 37.2 in King County that includes the Cities of Seattle, Bellevue, and Redmond, as well as SeaTac and others. The median household income in SeaTac is US$48,487, while in the entire County it is US$78,800. Within the city limits of SeaTac are 127 centerline kilometers of public roads, as well as the main commercial airport for the Seattle urban region, Sea-Tac International Airport, 10th busiest in the United States as of 2016. A representative sample of vehicle The End of Driving DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815451-9.00011-0
© 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Figure 19 Computer-generated map showing morning commute peak period reach of existing public transit service originating in City of SeaTac, located approximately in the center of this map. (Based on http://www.transitheatmap.com).
trip records collected by the traffic measurement firm INRIX revealed that 35% of vehicle traffic within the City is going to or from the airport, while 17% is in transit, passing through SeaTac. The city is served by three light rail stations on the regional rail transit spine that goes to downtown Seattle, but will in the 2020s reach Tacoma, south Snohomish County, and the King County suburbs of Bellevue and Redmond. The light rail service is provided by a regional authority known as Sound Transit that is independent of the Metro bus agency operated by King County. As a general rule, a combination of bus and light rail trips provides mobility to many destinations throughout the region, especially in the morning and afternoon peak periods as shown in Fig. 19. The elected officials who initiated the research and development project described in this chapter did so with an initial focus on the high volume of vehicle traffic going in and out of the Sea-Tac airport. An early assumption expressed by some project proponents was that the best opportunity for applying automated vehicles to traffic congestion reduction would most likely be on the roads and access ramps within and near the airport. However, based on ongoing monitoring and awareness of existing and near term technological capabilities from the automated vehicle industry worldwide, the AVC concluded that the complex, timepressured mix of human-driven private vehicles, hotel and parking shuttles, and ride-hailed vehicles would not be suitable for the application of driverless vehicles at current and projected capability levels over the
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period 2019 20, when a pilot project would be underway. Focusing on a calmer operating domain in the near term as a first step would better support the need for immediate experience that would contribute to longrun traffic improvement with a future generation of automated vehicles and services in and near the busy airport. The judgment that automated mobility in and near the airport would be difficult to achieve before 2020 was challenged in early 2018 by the growing claims of success in complex environments by General Motors and Cruise with automated vehicles on the streets of San Francisco. Waymo was making similar claims for less complex suburban environments in Arizona. But there were a range of forecasts that included more conservative views of technical progress in vehicle automation made by other development teams, so the judgment was made in SeaTac to focus on controlled environments with vehicles already demonstrated to work in other places. The AVC believed that this judgment was confirmed by the automated Uber fatality in Tempe, Arizona in March 2018 (Griggs and Wakabayashi, 2018). An example that influenced the AVC direction in SeaTac was the experience in Helsinki with the 12-passenger EasyMile robotic buses deployed in 2016 on a fixed route running 4/10 of a kilometer at speeds of 11 km/hour on a road near the harbor. This vehicle from the Sohjoa robot bus project traveled in a small loop safely for months for a few hours each day through the end of November 2017. It was not operated when there was snow on the ground. A video of its operation was posted on the Internet, and is reported as a forerunner of similar services that have already been deployed in other urban locations in Finland (Nissin, 2017).
11.2 STUDY With Helsinki’s robo-bus as an example, SeaTac’s project studied a variety of pathways for moving forward credibly to justify a claim of automatedvehicle-center-of-excellence status for the City. The AVC reached the conclusion that “excellence” would be demonstrated most readily by deploying as soon as possible Helsinki style, small, driverless, electric, and safe transit vehicles in passenger service within the City limits in a calm road environment in residential neighborhoods not subject to the bulk of airport traffic. In other words, this would be an opportunity for a tightly controlled Transit Leap 2 as described in Chapter 10, Transit Leap in Theory. The proposed shuttle vehicles could be set up with existing navigation and control capabilities to follow a fixed-route on a fixed-schedule initially,
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but could later evolve to flexible routing and arrival for traveler pick up and drop off in response to communicated demands of customers. Arriving every five minutes in the initial configuration, these continuously running robotic vehicles would provide convenient, affordable, quiet, accessible mobility for passengers in the SeaTac residential neighborhoods who are seeking to travel to or from light rail stations, community centers, shopping areas, medical services, and employment locations. The vehicles would be remotely monitored by humans at a central control point using data transmitted from the vehicles and the roadside by wireless radio and video signals. In the first few months, there would be human assistants on the vehicles for public education and assuring safety, but the absence of such on-board stewards in the long run, routine standard operating mode is essential for financial viability. There would always be at least two individuals on duty with the planned automated ride service at the central monitoring point who would be available to travel quickly to breakdowns, collisions, and other incidents. Vehicles such as these have the potential to provide mobility that is safer, less expensive, and non-polluting compared to today’s available alternatives. Such vehicles from several manufacturers, including EasyMile and Navya, are already being tested in numerous cities around the world. Specifications on these two brands of vehicles as summarized by the US Department of Transportation is shown in Fig. 20. The SeaTac team showed representatives from these two manufacturers a video of the planned pilot route, which they judged as useable by their vehicles with some further work to provide a clear view of the sky for back-up GNSS satellite reception and to support stop go signalization at busy intersections.
Figure 20 Examples of automated, electric microtransit vehicles collected by the US Department of Transportation. (Machek, 2017).
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The complete network of roads in City of SeaTac was surveyed through field observations and assessed via existing classification maps to find the streets that would be most appropriate for passage of automated vehicles mixed with non-automated vehicles without adding vehicle barriers. Fig. 21, taken from a city planning document, shows how roads are classified in this jurisdiction. Local streets, collectors, and minor arterials were all judged to be feasible roads, wide enough and with low enough speed limits—under 60 km/hour—to be considered for use by micro-transit vehicles which would travel at 30 km/hour or slower. Consideration was given to the destinations and neighborhoods connected by these three categories of lower volume roads, and these neighborhoods were marked as Pilot
Unrestricted access
Local streets
Increasing use of street for access purpose: parking, loading, etc.
Collectors
24th Avenue S
Minor arterials
Military Road S Increasing degree of access control International Boulevard
Full access control
Principal arterials
Freeways
I-5
No through traffic
Increasing proportion of through traffic, increasing speed
Little local traffic
Roadway classification relationships between mobility and access
Figure 21 City of SeaTac road classifications as shown in the jurisdiction’s transportation master plan. (City of SeaTac, 2015).
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transit leap deployment candidate sites. Each is marked with a star on the following city map (Fig. 22). The City of SeaTac’s AVC took advantage of learnings from the CityMobil2 demonstration project coordinated by the University of Rome in La Sapienza and financially supported by the European Commission. As described in Chapter 10, Transit Leap in Theory, slow-moving, fixed-route
Figure 22 Street map of City of SeaTac with residential neighborhoods marked with stars. (City of SeaTac, 2017).
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small transit vehicles were deployed in small fleets for testing in European urban environments. The approach is called an Automated Road Transport System (ARTS). As defined in Europe, ARTS is: . . .a transportation system that uses fully automated vehicles to provide a safe, secure and comfortable public transport service, on a particular network from one origin station to a destination station. According to the experiences of the demonstrations carried out in the CityMobil and CityMobil2 projects, the ARTS’ components should be: automated road vehicles; the infrastructure; the fleet and infrastructure supervision and management system; the end user Information System; the operator information system; and the communication system. (CityMobil2, 2016).
The CityMobil2 project was conducted during 2012 16 for a total budget of 15.5 million Euros with the EU contributing 61% of the funding. Activity was carried out by a consortium of 45 partners including many local government authorities, research organizations, universities, and five manufacturers, although just two makes of vehicles were deployed following screening and selection. Automated road transport was demonstrated on a test basis in seven European cities where a total of 60,000 passengers were carried and 26,000 vehicle-kilometers were achieved in fully automated mode. These vehicles shared road space with other vehicles, although dedicated lanes were painted on the streets and some notice signs were deployed. No pedestrians or bicyclists were injured during the operational trials which ranged in the demonstration cities between 3 and 6 months (CityMobil2, 2016). The recommended development process for ARTS that emerged from CityMobil2 is summarized in Fig. 23 from the project. As of early 2018, the SeaTac project team has previewed the steps in the CityMobil2 process. These steps had not yet been engaged as the technical tasks that they will become, as the project is pending approval of City Council to proceed further, and a significant tranche of development funding is needed from higher levels of government. However, the project is aligned with key elements of regional transportation policy, namely providing modal options, reducing emissions with clean fuel vehicles, using non single occupant vehicle access options to reach public transit stations, and support of mobility for youth, seniors, and disabled citizens. Another guide found useful in developing the SeaTac project is the “Mobility on Demand Operational Concept Report” (MOD) by Susan Shaheen and others, published in 2017 by the Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office of the US Department of Transportation
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Figure 23 CityMobil2 recommended process of Automated Road Transport System implementation as derived from experience. (Courtesy of CityMobil2, 2016. Copyright CityMobil2).
(Shaheen et al., 2017a). Particularly useful for the AVC is the section on “Primary Travel Constraint Types” that explains systematically the spatial, temporal, economic, physiological, and social barriers that travelers face. The checklist of barriers and means for dealing with them present a comprehensive array of opportunities that justify deploying step-by-step a new transportation system with service that meets particular needs of certain categories of SeaTac residents, such as seniors and high school students. From its reading of the CityMobil2 summary, the MOD concept report, and examination of existing transportation policy and planning documents from City of SeaTac and other authorities in the greater Seattle region, the SeaTac AVC concluded that a driverless shuttle service is technologically feasible, legally permissible, responsive to travel constraints faced by some residents, and sufficiently justified economically for the SeaTac municipality. Furthermore, detailed development work is required to be carried out by multiple parties, which will be motivated by the potential implementation benefits seen in the project justification. In the long run, all of the benefits of a service like the one proposed derive from people using it. Convenient, inexpensive, on-demand access to the senior center, post office, employment locations, neighbors, and light rail will be demonstrated to the extent that people are attracted to the service and choose to board the vehicles. The city seeks to pilot a new
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mobility choice for residents, and project success would be threatened if an insufficient number of riders choose to use the vehicles once it is running. The city views this pilot as a service deployment program, rather than a test of whether the vehicles can operate successfully on SeaTac residential streets. The latter capability will have to be demonstrated in advance, elsewhere, by vehicle makers, and on streets that are physically and functionally similar to the streets of the City of SeaTac. Indeed, that has already been demonstrated to a great degree in other cities worldwide. Clearly, an important requirement for proceeding is sufficient justification, based on an analysis, that users will adopt the service to the degree that its operating cost will be covered such that a government operating subsidy would be zero, or low enough to be politically acceptable, perhaps as cost offsets from other transit or parking facilities. To that end, financial modeling is being conducted to establish that deployment of 30 vehicles would be financially sustainable with available cost and ridership estimates at a reasonable fare. The project is seeking capital investment funding in 2018 to establish the pilot which would derive from public and private sources outside of the city, because of the limited tax base within the jurisdiction and because a full implementation scope over time would extend to other suburban cities throughout the greater Seattle-Tacoma region—the expected progress from Transit Leap 3 to Transit Leap 4. Thus investment should be regional and from higher levels of government. Steps are underway to build needed support in the region for a funding request to higher government authorities that recognizes a deployment of new automated mobility in SeaTac using multi-passenger vehicles as regionally and nationally significant. On March 23, 2018, a new $60 million in U.S. Government funds were authorized for projects like SeaTac is planning. Operating and maintenance funds for an initial pilot and for later expanded implementation would come from a combination of fares and subsidies from existing tax-funded accounts of the regional transit agency, King County Metro. The AVC has developed an action plan document that provides guidance to the city on why and how to proceed with development and implementation processes of learning, teaching, fundraising, and procurement of new technology applications for using automated vehicles to provide better mobility in the City of SeaTac. The AVC effort leading to the final version of this document included active engagement and collaboration
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Figure 24 Excerpt from State of Washington Governor’s Executive Order 17-02. (State of Washington, 2017).
with citizen and business interests, neighboring jurisdictions, Port of Seattle Airport, King County Metro Transit, the inter-city regional Sound Transit, non-governmental technology or mobility providers, and others. All of the work in this effort is consistent with the June 7, 2017, State of Washington Governor’s Executive Order 17-02 on autonomous vehicle testing and technology (Fig. 24). This order set out the requirements for a Pilot program like the one recommended for City of SeaTac to pursue. An excerpt from the order that enables pilot programs like this is shown here.
11.3 STATUS AND EARLY RECOMMENDATIONS The transit leap Pilot program recommended and pending approval as of May 2018 for further development in a forthcoming voted Council endorsement would cover the Riverton Heights neighborhood of SeaTac, indicated by the top most star marking on the previous map, Fig. 22, and detailed on the following map, Fig. 25. An 8-km loop route (red line on map) for 12-passenger automated electric shuttle buses like that shown in Fig. 20 at 5-minute intervals in both directions could serve passenger movement at 32 km/hour initially allowed speed with six vehicles providing headways of approximately five minutes between vehicles. This configuration would provide a total capacity of 480 passengers per hour if
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average trip length were four km (half the loop). The Tukwila light rail station, the SeaTac senior citizens center, and two main employment sites would be served, each indicated by a star. Blue lines show possibilities for future automated on-demand path branching. The project estimates that 500 boardings per day are a reasonable target for a service that runs 20 hours a day, 7 days a week. This number of
Figure 25 Riverton Heights neighborhood of SeaTac, Washington, showing proposed pilot route for automated microtransit in red with arrows, a total of eight kilometers. (Center for Advanced Transportation and Energy Solutions, 2017).
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boardings is equivalent to 15% of the households within 400 m of the route utilizing the service for one round-trip per day. The target fare to be phased in after an introductory period is the standard King County Metro transit fare of $2.75 with discounts for youth, seniors, disabled, and enrolled employers. It would be collected via smart card using the system already deployed on regional transit. An important part of the justification is that a pilot, electric, automated microtransit service could be the first phase of a service that could expand eventually throughout the residential neighborhoods in other jurisdictions near SeaTac. What has been laid out to gain regional, State Government, and Federal support is the development sequence shown in Fig. 26.
Figure 26 The development sequence recommended by the SeaTac automated vehicle consultancy in the Draft Action Plan. (Center for Advanced Transportation and Energy Solutions, 2017).
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As part of the transit leap pilot project going forward in 2018, the recommendation was made that as part of proclaiming excellence in automated vehicles, the City of SeaTac should go on public record with a Council vote on a resolution of willingness to facilitate the use of such vehicles within its jurisdiction, as shown in Fig. 27. There exists a risk that the pilot deployment of automated microtransit in a SeaTac neighborhood would turn out not to be justified by a pre-implementation planning forecast or by an achieved level of ridership and corresponding fare revenue collection that would make the service insufficiently cost-effective to be considered for continuation. Another risk is that outside capital investment to pay for establishing the pilot
Recommended Council Resolution by City of Sea-Tac on Automated Vehicle Excellence WHEREAS, many motor vehicle collisions with other automobiles, bicycles, pedestrians, and fixed objects are caused by driver errors or impairment leading to deaths and injuries; WHEREAS, technological advancement and business innovation has now resulted in the commercial availability of vehicles capable of moving on some public roads safely without constant, direct control by a human operator; WHEREAS the State of Washington has issued Executive Order 17-02 on autonomous vehicle technology development which serves to encourage the state’s private sector and all levels of government to support safe deployment of automated vehicles for citizen benefit; WHEREAS, City of SeaTac has an interest in developing and maintaining a municipal leadership role in supporting the deployment of vehicles with automated driving capabilities on public city roadways in order to nurture, cultivate, and advance the beneficial impact of this technology application; WHEREAS, the deployment of automated vehicles in the city will promote economic growth, bring new employment opportunity, provide research opportunities for the state’s academic institutions, and allow the State of Washington’s leading airport city to serve as an easily accessible state-wide and national demonstration site for innovative mobility services based on emerging new technologies; WHEREAS, the safe deployment and operation of automated, electric or hybrid vehicles is likely to produce societal benefits cost-effectively, minimizing injuries and saving lives that would otherwise be lost to vehicle collisions, reclaiming time spent waiting for rides; maximizing the ability to move people and goods quickly and safely throughout the city, improving mobility for youth, elderly, disabled and other non-drivers, and serving to reduce atmospheric emissions; WHEREAS, the City Council has funded and embraced the development of an Action Plan document with specific steps to advance automated vehicle deployment in the City of Sea Tac, and hereby offers the plan to its citizens and all others for discussion and supportive activities;
NOW THEREFORE, the City Council of SeaTac, Washington, hereby declares itself a Center of Municipal Excellence in Automated Vehicle Deployment to be evidenced henceforward by city staff pursuing available opportunities to propose changes in local and state laws impeding technology deployment, to pursue opportunities in cooperation with other jurisdictions to fund pilot projects demonstrating innovative excellence funded by the Federal Government and other external sources, and to aggressively pursue deployment of automated ride services operating within city boundaries as well as supporting services providing access to other geographic locations in cooperating neighboring jurisdictions.
Figure 27 Draft Resolution for City of SeaTac as recommended in the automated vehicle consultancy's Action Plan. (Center for Advanced Transportation and Energy Solutions, 2017).
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deployment cannot be obtained. In these cases, City of SeaTac could pull back from the transit leap approach designed by the AVC and retreat to a simpler position of willingness to authorize the use of streets for alternative automated service concepts proposed by the private sector, such as the deployment of roving automated sedans beginning to be deployed in The Villages community in Florida, as described in Chapter 10, Transit Leap in Theory. With that possibility in mind, the draft council resolution in Fig. 27 has been formulated with wording consistent with future offering of access to city streets as a deployment opportunity for entrepreneurial service providers either without restriction or under the terms of a franchise, in order to serve the mobility demands of residents. As part of openness to innovation and a requirement for status as a Center of Excellence, the city should stand ready to make good faith efforts to modify city regulations that evidence reveals as unnecessarily blocking automated vehicle deployment.
11.4 EXERCISES 1. From the standpoint of a SeaTac resident who wishes to urge the elected City Council to proceed with this project, what are the public benefits that would make this an appropriate use of city resources? 2. What are the biggest public objections you can imagine that may arise in future public consultation regarding the worthiness of this project for SeaTac? 3. List the considerations for deciding whether the city should proceed with low-speed Level 4 vehicles as were used in CityMobil2, or instead wait a few years for more taxi-like sedan vehicles to become automated and fully tested in other places, then becoming deployment-ready in SeaTac by companies working on that approach. 4. If law enforcement authorities in SeaTac were to express an interest in monitoring the neighborhoods along the micro-transit route using video cameras on the vehicles, what benefits, objections, and policy challenges do you see arising?
Transit Leap in Practice: City of SeaTac Summary City of SeaTac, Washington, in 2017 engaged an automated vehicles consultancy (AVC) to explore automated vehicle applications deployment for community benefit, with a wide scope of possibilities left open for study. After examining trip patterns and geography, the AVC determined that a pilot project amounting to transit leap with available vehicles from the existing automated shuttle industry deployed in one residential section of the municipality would provide opportunities to serve multiple markets. At the same time, a program and economic pattern for wider, multi-city deployment in the near future would be established.
11.1 BACKGROUND As of April 2018, the Seattle suburb of SeaTac, Washington is engaged in an automated vehicle study project lead by one of this book’s co-authors. Under contract with the City of SeaTac, his automated vehicle consultancy (AVC) has set out to develop policies and activities to establish the suitability of the technology and viability of this municipality becoming a “Center of Municipal Excellence” in automated, driverless vehicle deployment for cost-effective public benefit. This is a self-proclaimed designation by the elected leadership that will be validated by what the City Government actually implements in new policies, programs, and revised road features to facilitate automated vehicle usage. Home to 28,000 residents, City of SeaTac covers 26 km2 of territory, located halfway between the cities of Seattle and Tacoma in Washington State in the northwest corner of the US mainland. The median age of residents is 34.2 years compared to a median age of 37.2 in King County that includes the Cities of Seattle, Bellevue, and Redmond, as well as SeaTac and others. The median household income in SeaTac is US$48,487, while in the entire County it is US$78,800. Within the city limits of SeaTac are 127 centerline kilometers of public roads, as well as the main commercial airport for the Seattle urban region, Sea-Tac International Airport, 10th busiest in the United States as of 2016. A representative sample of vehicle The End of Driving DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815451-9.00011-0
© 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Figure 19 Computer-generated map showing morning commute peak period reach of existing public transit service originating in City of SeaTac, located approximately in the center of this map. (Based on http://www.transitheatmap.com).
trip records collected by the traffic measurement firm INRIX revealed that 35% of vehicle traffic within the City is going to or from the airport, while 17% is in transit, passing through SeaTac. The city is served by three light rail stations on the regional rail transit spine that goes to downtown Seattle, but will in the 2020s reach Tacoma, south Snohomish County, and the King County suburbs of Bellevue and Redmond. The light rail service is provided by a regional authority known as Sound Transit that is independent of the Metro bus agency operated by King County. As a general rule, a combination of bus and light rail trips provides mobility to many destinations throughout the region, especially in the morning and afternoon peak periods as shown in Fig. 19. The elected officials who initiated the research and development project described in this chapter did so with an initial focus on the high volume of vehicle traffic going in and out of the Sea-Tac airport. An early assumption expressed by some project proponents was that the best opportunity for applying automated vehicles to traffic congestion reduction would most likely be on the roads and access ramps within and near the airport. However, based on ongoing monitoring and awareness of existing and near term technological capabilities from the automated vehicle industry worldwide, the AVC concluded that the complex, timepressured mix of human-driven private vehicles, hotel and parking shuttles, and ride-hailed vehicles would not be suitable for the application of driverless vehicles at current and projected capability levels over the
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period 2019 20, when a pilot project would be underway. Focusing on a calmer operating domain in the near term as a first step would better support the need for immediate experience that would contribute to longrun traffic improvement with a future generation of automated vehicles and services in and near the busy airport. The judgment that automated mobility in and near the airport would be difficult to achieve before 2020 was challenged in early 2018 by the growing claims of success in complex environments by General Motors and Cruise with automated vehicles on the streets of San Francisco. Waymo was making similar claims for less complex suburban environments in Arizona. But there were a range of forecasts that included more conservative views of technical progress in vehicle automation made by other development teams, so the judgment was made in SeaTac to focus on controlled environments with vehicles already demonstrated to work in other places. The AVC believed that this judgment was confirmed by the automated Uber fatality in Tempe, Arizona in March 2018 (Griggs and Wakabayashi, 2018). An example that influenced the AVC direction in SeaTac was the experience in Helsinki with the 12-passenger EasyMile robotic buses deployed in 2016 on a fixed route running 4/10 of a kilometer at speeds of 11 km/hour on a road near the harbor. This vehicle from the Sohjoa robot bus project traveled in a small loop safely for months for a few hours each day through the end of November 2017. It was not operated when there was snow on the ground. A video of its operation was posted on the Internet, and is reported as a forerunner of similar services that have already been deployed in other urban locations in Finland (Nissin, 2017).
11.2 STUDY With Helsinki’s robo-bus as an example, SeaTac’s project studied a variety of pathways for moving forward credibly to justify a claim of automatedvehicle-center-of-excellence status for the City. The AVC reached the conclusion that “excellence” would be demonstrated most readily by deploying as soon as possible Helsinki style, small, driverless, electric, and safe transit vehicles in passenger service within the City limits in a calm road environment in residential neighborhoods not subject to the bulk of airport traffic. In other words, this would be an opportunity for a tightly controlled Transit Leap 2 as described in Chapter 10, Transit Leap in Theory. The proposed shuttle vehicles could be set up with existing navigation and control capabilities to follow a fixed-route on a fixed-schedule initially,
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but could later evolve to flexible routing and arrival for traveler pick up and drop off in response to communicated demands of customers. Arriving every five minutes in the initial configuration, these continuously running robotic vehicles would provide convenient, affordable, quiet, accessible mobility for passengers in the SeaTac residential neighborhoods who are seeking to travel to or from light rail stations, community centers, shopping areas, medical services, and employment locations. The vehicles would be remotely monitored by humans at a central control point using data transmitted from the vehicles and the roadside by wireless radio and video signals. In the first few months, there would be human assistants on the vehicles for public education and assuring safety, but the absence of such on-board stewards in the long run, routine standard operating mode is essential for financial viability. There would always be at least two individuals on duty with the planned automated ride service at the central monitoring point who would be available to travel quickly to breakdowns, collisions, and other incidents. Vehicles such as these have the potential to provide mobility that is safer, less expensive, and non-polluting compared to today’s available alternatives. Such vehicles from several manufacturers, including EasyMile and Navya, are already being tested in numerous cities around the world. Specifications on these two brands of vehicles as summarized by the US Department of Transportation is shown in Fig. 20. The SeaTac team showed representatives from these two manufacturers a video of the planned pilot route, which they judged as useable by their vehicles with some further work to provide a clear view of the sky for back-up GNSS satellite reception and to support stop go signalization at busy intersections.
Figure 20 Examples of automated, electric microtransit vehicles collected by the US Department of Transportation. (Machek, 2017).
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The complete network of roads in City of SeaTac was surveyed through field observations and assessed via existing classification maps to find the streets that would be most appropriate for passage of automated vehicles mixed with non-automated vehicles without adding vehicle barriers. Fig. 21, taken from a city planning document, shows how roads are classified in this jurisdiction. Local streets, collectors, and minor arterials were all judged to be feasible roads, wide enough and with low enough speed limits—under 60 km/hour—to be considered for use by micro-transit vehicles which would travel at 30 km/hour or slower. Consideration was given to the destinations and neighborhoods connected by these three categories of lower volume roads, and these neighborhoods were marked as Pilot
Unrestricted access
Local streets
Increasing use of street for access purpose: parking, loading, etc.
Collectors
24th Avenue S
Minor arterials
Military Road S Increasing degree of access control International Boulevard
Full access control
Principal arterials
Freeways
I-5
No through traffic
Increasing proportion of through traffic, increasing speed
Little local traffic
Roadway classification relationships between mobility and access
Figure 21 City of SeaTac road classifications as shown in the jurisdiction’s transportation master plan. (City of SeaTac, 2015).
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transit leap deployment candidate sites. Each is marked with a star on the following city map (Fig. 22). The City of SeaTac’s AVC took advantage of learnings from the CityMobil2 demonstration project coordinated by the University of Rome in La Sapienza and financially supported by the European Commission. As described in Chapter 10, Transit Leap in Theory, slow-moving, fixed-route
Figure 22 Street map of City of SeaTac with residential neighborhoods marked with stars. (City of SeaTac, 2017).
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small transit vehicles were deployed in small fleets for testing in European urban environments. The approach is called an Automated Road Transport System (ARTS). As defined in Europe, ARTS is: . . .a transportation system that uses fully automated vehicles to provide a safe, secure and comfortable public transport service, on a particular network from one origin station to a destination station. According to the experiences of the demonstrations carried out in the CityMobil and CityMobil2 projects, the ARTS’ components should be: automated road vehicles; the infrastructure; the fleet and infrastructure supervision and management system; the end user Information System; the operator information system; and the communication system. (CityMobil2, 2016).
The CityMobil2 project was conducted during 2012 16 for a total budget of 15.5 million Euros with the EU contributing 61% of the funding. Activity was carried out by a consortium of 45 partners including many local government authorities, research organizations, universities, and five manufacturers, although just two makes of vehicles were deployed following screening and selection. Automated road transport was demonstrated on a test basis in seven European cities where a total of 60,000 passengers were carried and 26,000 vehicle-kilometers were achieved in fully automated mode. These vehicles shared road space with other vehicles, although dedicated lanes were painted on the streets and some notice signs were deployed. No pedestrians or bicyclists were injured during the operational trials which ranged in the demonstration cities between 3 and 6 months (CityMobil2, 2016). The recommended development process for ARTS that emerged from CityMobil2 is summarized in Fig. 23 from the project. As of early 2018, the SeaTac project team has previewed the steps in the CityMobil2 process. These steps had not yet been engaged as the technical tasks that they will become, as the project is pending approval of City Council to proceed further, and a significant tranche of development funding is needed from higher levels of government. However, the project is aligned with key elements of regional transportation policy, namely providing modal options, reducing emissions with clean fuel vehicles, using non single occupant vehicle access options to reach public transit stations, and support of mobility for youth, seniors, and disabled citizens. Another guide found useful in developing the SeaTac project is the “Mobility on Demand Operational Concept Report” (MOD) by Susan Shaheen and others, published in 2017 by the Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office of the US Department of Transportation
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Figure 23 CityMobil2 recommended process of Automated Road Transport System implementation as derived from experience. (Courtesy of CityMobil2, 2016. Copyright CityMobil2).
(Shaheen et al., 2017a). Particularly useful for the AVC is the section on “Primary Travel Constraint Types” that explains systematically the spatial, temporal, economic, physiological, and social barriers that travelers face. The checklist of barriers and means for dealing with them present a comprehensive array of opportunities that justify deploying step-by-step a new transportation system with service that meets particular needs of certain categories of SeaTac residents, such as seniors and high school students. From its reading of the CityMobil2 summary, the MOD concept report, and examination of existing transportation policy and planning documents from City of SeaTac and other authorities in the greater Seattle region, the SeaTac AVC concluded that a driverless shuttle service is technologically feasible, legally permissible, responsive to travel constraints faced by some residents, and sufficiently justified economically for the SeaTac municipality. Furthermore, detailed development work is required to be carried out by multiple parties, which will be motivated by the potential implementation benefits seen in the project justification. In the long run, all of the benefits of a service like the one proposed derive from people using it. Convenient, inexpensive, on-demand access to the senior center, post office, employment locations, neighbors, and light rail will be demonstrated to the extent that people are attracted to the service and choose to board the vehicles. The city seeks to pilot a new
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mobility choice for residents, and project success would be threatened if an insufficient number of riders choose to use the vehicles once it is running. The city views this pilot as a service deployment program, rather than a test of whether the vehicles can operate successfully on SeaTac residential streets. The latter capability will have to be demonstrated in advance, elsewhere, by vehicle makers, and on streets that are physically and functionally similar to the streets of the City of SeaTac. Indeed, that has already been demonstrated to a great degree in other cities worldwide. Clearly, an important requirement for proceeding is sufficient justification, based on an analysis, that users will adopt the service to the degree that its operating cost will be covered such that a government operating subsidy would be zero, or low enough to be politically acceptable, perhaps as cost offsets from other transit or parking facilities. To that end, financial modeling is being conducted to establish that deployment of 30 vehicles would be financially sustainable with available cost and ridership estimates at a reasonable fare. The project is seeking capital investment funding in 2018 to establish the pilot which would derive from public and private sources outside of the city, because of the limited tax base within the jurisdiction and because a full implementation scope over time would extend to other suburban cities throughout the greater Seattle-Tacoma region—the expected progress from Transit Leap 3 to Transit Leap 4. Thus investment should be regional and from higher levels of government. Steps are underway to build needed support in the region for a funding request to higher government authorities that recognizes a deployment of new automated mobility in SeaTac using multi-passenger vehicles as regionally and nationally significant. On March 23, 2018, a new $60 million in U.S. Government funds were authorized for projects like SeaTac is planning. Operating and maintenance funds for an initial pilot and for later expanded implementation would come from a combination of fares and subsidies from existing tax-funded accounts of the regional transit agency, King County Metro. The AVC has developed an action plan document that provides guidance to the city on why and how to proceed with development and implementation processes of learning, teaching, fundraising, and procurement of new technology applications for using automated vehicles to provide better mobility in the City of SeaTac. The AVC effort leading to the final version of this document included active engagement and collaboration
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Figure 24 Excerpt from State of Washington Governor’s Executive Order 17-02. (State of Washington, 2017).
with citizen and business interests, neighboring jurisdictions, Port of Seattle Airport, King County Metro Transit, the inter-city regional Sound Transit, non-governmental technology or mobility providers, and others. All of the work in this effort is consistent with the June 7, 2017, State of Washington Governor’s Executive Order 17-02 on autonomous vehicle testing and technology (Fig. 24). This order set out the requirements for a Pilot program like the one recommended for City of SeaTac to pursue. An excerpt from the order that enables pilot programs like this is shown here.
11.3 STATUS AND EARLY RECOMMENDATIONS The transit leap Pilot program recommended and pending approval as of May 2018 for further development in a forthcoming voted Council endorsement would cover the Riverton Heights neighborhood of SeaTac, indicated by the top most star marking on the previous map, Fig. 22, and detailed on the following map, Fig. 25. An 8-km loop route (red line on map) for 12-passenger automated electric shuttle buses like that shown in Fig. 20 at 5-minute intervals in both directions could serve passenger movement at 32 km/hour initially allowed speed with six vehicles providing headways of approximately five minutes between vehicles. This configuration would provide a total capacity of 480 passengers per hour if
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average trip length were four km (half the loop). The Tukwila light rail station, the SeaTac senior citizens center, and two main employment sites would be served, each indicated by a star. Blue lines show possibilities for future automated on-demand path branching. The project estimates that 500 boardings per day are a reasonable target for a service that runs 20 hours a day, 7 days a week. This number of
Figure 25 Riverton Heights neighborhood of SeaTac, Washington, showing proposed pilot route for automated microtransit in red with arrows, a total of eight kilometers. (Center for Advanced Transportation and Energy Solutions, 2017).
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boardings is equivalent to 15% of the households within 400 m of the route utilizing the service for one round-trip per day. The target fare to be phased in after an introductory period is the standard King County Metro transit fare of $2.75 with discounts for youth, seniors, disabled, and enrolled employers. It would be collected via smart card using the system already deployed on regional transit. An important part of the justification is that a pilot, electric, automated microtransit service could be the first phase of a service that could expand eventually throughout the residential neighborhoods in other jurisdictions near SeaTac. What has been laid out to gain regional, State Government, and Federal support is the development sequence shown in Fig. 26.
Figure 26 The development sequence recommended by the SeaTac automated vehicle consultancy in the Draft Action Plan. (Center for Advanced Transportation and Energy Solutions, 2017).
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As part of the transit leap pilot project going forward in 2018, the recommendation was made that as part of proclaiming excellence in automated vehicles, the City of SeaTac should go on public record with a Council vote on a resolution of willingness to facilitate the use of such vehicles within its jurisdiction, as shown in Fig. 27. There exists a risk that the pilot deployment of automated microtransit in a SeaTac neighborhood would turn out not to be justified by a pre-implementation planning forecast or by an achieved level of ridership and corresponding fare revenue collection that would make the service insufficiently cost-effective to be considered for continuation. Another risk is that outside capital investment to pay for establishing the pilot
Recommended Council Resolution by City of Sea-Tac on Automated Vehicle Excellence WHEREAS, many motor vehicle collisions with other automobiles, bicycles, pedestrians, and fixed objects are caused by driver errors or impairment leading to deaths and injuries; WHEREAS, technological advancement and business innovation has now resulted in the commercial availability of vehicles capable of moving on some public roads safely without constant, direct control by a human operator; WHEREAS the State of Washington has issued Executive Order 17-02 on autonomous vehicle technology development which serves to encourage the state’s private sector and all levels of government to support safe deployment of automated vehicles for citizen benefit; WHEREAS, City of SeaTac has an interest in developing and maintaining a municipal leadership role in supporting the deployment of vehicles with automated driving capabilities on public city roadways in order to nurture, cultivate, and advance the beneficial impact of this technology application; WHEREAS, the deployment of automated vehicles in the city will promote economic growth, bring new employment opportunity, provide research opportunities for the state’s academic institutions, and allow the State of Washington’s leading airport city to serve as an easily accessible state-wide and national demonstration site for innovative mobility services based on emerging new technologies; WHEREAS, the safe deployment and operation of automated, electric or hybrid vehicles is likely to produce societal benefits cost-effectively, minimizing injuries and saving lives that would otherwise be lost to vehicle collisions, reclaiming time spent waiting for rides; maximizing the ability to move people and goods quickly and safely throughout the city, improving mobility for youth, elderly, disabled and other non-drivers, and serving to reduce atmospheric emissions; WHEREAS, the City Council has funded and embraced the development of an Action Plan document with specific steps to advance automated vehicle deployment in the City of Sea Tac, and hereby offers the plan to its citizens and all others for discussion and supportive activities;
NOW THEREFORE, the City Council of SeaTac, Washington, hereby declares itself a Center of Municipal Excellence in Automated Vehicle Deployment to be evidenced henceforward by city staff pursuing available opportunities to propose changes in local and state laws impeding technology deployment, to pursue opportunities in cooperation with other jurisdictions to fund pilot projects demonstrating innovative excellence funded by the Federal Government and other external sources, and to aggressively pursue deployment of automated ride services operating within city boundaries as well as supporting services providing access to other geographic locations in cooperating neighboring jurisdictions.
Figure 27 Draft Resolution for City of SeaTac as recommended in the automated vehicle consultancy's Action Plan. (Center for Advanced Transportation and Energy Solutions, 2017).
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deployment cannot be obtained. In these cases, City of SeaTac could pull back from the transit leap approach designed by the AVC and retreat to a simpler position of willingness to authorize the use of streets for alternative automated service concepts proposed by the private sector, such as the deployment of roving automated sedans beginning to be deployed in The Villages community in Florida, as described in Chapter 10, Transit Leap in Theory. With that possibility in mind, the draft council resolution in Fig. 27 has been formulated with wording consistent with future offering of access to city streets as a deployment opportunity for entrepreneurial service providers either without restriction or under the terms of a franchise, in order to serve the mobility demands of residents. As part of openness to innovation and a requirement for status as a Center of Excellence, the city should stand ready to make good faith efforts to modify city regulations that evidence reveals as unnecessarily blocking automated vehicle deployment.
11.4 EXERCISES 1. From the standpoint of a SeaTac resident who wishes to urge the elected City Council to proceed with this project, what are the public benefits that would make this an appropriate use of city resources? 2. What are the biggest public objections you can imagine that may arise in future public consultation regarding the worthiness of this project for SeaTac? 3. List the considerations for deciding whether the city should proceed with low-speed Level 4 vehicles as were used in CityMobil2, or instead wait a few years for more taxi-like sedan vehicles to become automated and fully tested in other places, then becoming deployment-ready in SeaTac by companies working on that approach. 4. If law enforcement authorities in SeaTac were to express an interest in monitoring the neighborhoods along the micro-transit route using video cameras on the vehicles, what benefits, objections, and policy challenges do you see arising?