From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Las Vegas’ newest tourist attraction has nothing to do with casinos,
neon lights or Cirque du Soleil. It’s a driverless shuttle that will
make a half-mile loop all day long on city streets in the downtown
Fremont East district, starting Wednesday.
AAA of Northern California, Nevada & Utah is sponsoring the
yearlong pilot program along with two French companies: Keolis, a global
transportation company that already runs Las Vegas’ public bus system,
and Navya, which manufactures the driverless shuttle. The goal is
twofold: to expose the public to the futuristic technology and gain
insights on how people view it.
“Las Vegas prides itself on being first, getting out there and trying out new things,” said city spokesman Jace Radke.
Its sponsors say this is the first self-driving vehicle in the United
States to offer rides to the public in live traffic, and the first to
tie into city infrastructure such as traffic signals. The shuttle will
receive wireless notification of whether lights are red, green or
yellow, as well as other information to help traffic flow. Keolis and
Navya already run similar shuttles in London, Paris and Lyon, France.
The bright-blue, all-electric, bubble-shaped vehicle, which travels
at 10 to 15 mph, has no steering wheel, accelerator or brake pedals. It
does have a video-game-like joystick controller, which an onboard
attendant can use if there’s a need for human control — if a stoplight
is out of service, for instance. But the attendant is primarily there to
reassure passengers, analogous to the role elevator operators used to
play.
“People were initially skeptical of this new technology to rapidly
take them up flights of floors, so they had an attendant to ease
concerns,” AAA spokesman John Moreno said. “But all the attendant did
was flip a button and close the gate.”...
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