Up next: Google self-driving buses, finally American buses run with the same attention to time tables that Swiss ones do. And added benefit: they obey traffic safety laws.
...I remember once in Zurich when my local bus was two minutes late. The people at the bus stop were really quite cross.
There's enough slack in the timetable to account for delays. If the bus would normally take one minute to get from one stop to the next, the timetable will actually account 90 seconds, etc.
Then there are certain stops where the bus will, if it gets there early, stop and wait. They don't do this on every stop, but they're frequent enough to keep the service regulated. Intelligently, these stops are also the ones which synchronise with other transport systems. For example, when I take the train home from work I know that there'll be a bus waiting for me when I get off at my station.
It's not perfect, but the overwhelming majority of the time it Just Works.
I’ll report what I observed in 2 years of 3 to 4 times of using the bus a day in Germany.
Every time a bus was late, or tried to break the sound barrier™ in the hope of reducing some of the delay, was due to one of the following issues:
(a) A tourist with texan accent trying to get onto the bus, discussing with the bus driver if he can pay with credit card or in dollar (no), then asking the bus driver to wait while he’s going to get money from the nearest ATM (happens at about 5% of stops in the downtown areas where the tourists are)
(b) Rush hour traffic, 200 people squeezing into a single bus, and another few hundred waiting at the bus stop – busses coming every one or two minutes, and it takes quite some time until people stop trying to get into the bus, and leave enough space for the doors to close
(c) some kids with invalid tickets trying to cheat and getting caught
These issues can’t be fixed by automated busses, or trains.
Only by less tight schedules, and more busses and trains.
It could be more easily fixed by accepting foreign credit cards (Gothenburg manages this, London if the card is contactless) or telling drivers not to wait.
(b) is partly solved if the cost of running buses/trains is significantly reduced, as that leaves money for extra vehicles.
(c)... well, who will notice?
Already many cities today operate busses by taking unemployed people and forcing them to take the job as bus driver for no pay (they'd have to continue living off of welfare), otherwise they'd lose 50% of their welfare money.
That's how you get bus drivers for free — automated vehicles can't really beat that.
Here's an easy solution: every bus stop has a kiosk that dispenses a RFID bus pass if you put in your payment info. Then, when the bus comes, you can enter from any door and the RFID receivers detect your presence. Attempts to board without a bus pass are detected with weight sensors and a camera network (current computer vision techniques are probably reliable enough for this application; they'll be even better in a few years). Unauthorized persons are advised to get off at the next stop by audio recording and identified by displaying a snapshot of their face (taken earlier on the bus). If they don't get off the transit police are summoned.
Put a fare vending machine which accepts cash and credits cards on the bus, which also makes it very obvious how to get a single fare. (This exists for example for trams in Berlin, modulo the accepting credit cards part)
But yes, all these issues are solveable – but "how close does the bus operate to the schedule" usually is not related to who drives it, but to how these issues are solved.
i.e. the passenger would be prevented from boarding the vehicle without a valid ticket and provided there was sufficient capacity for a speedy and comfortable boarding.
Isn't Rio Tinto already using AI to operate its haulers?
Even in niche specialized corners, the value prop of self operating machines is going to become increasingly overwhelming.
20k?
It's all coming.