As the first self-driving bus in the city — and likely the state — starts ferrying people around a South Philly office park this week, the technology is drawing highly polarized reactions.
At the Navy Yard Tuesday morning, the launch of a pioneering autonomous vehicle was a cause for celebration. Navy Yard staff lined up next to the shuttle van for photos, and TV cameras tracked the AV as it headed out on its first trip with passengers, following months of testing.
The shuttle operator, retired SEPTA bus driver Donald Brock, put his hands on his arm rests, the steering wheel jerked slightly to the left, and the van started rolling forward.
“This is it. This is autonomy,” said Nicholas Pilipowskyj of Perrone Robotics, the Virginia firm that designed the self-driving system. “No big fanfare, should just be a normal, regular ride. That’s what we strive for.”
The packed nine-passenger van made a slow circuit of the Navy Yard’s business district, on a couple occasions halting when another vehicle approached from the side or entered the lane ahead, but for the most part driving normally.
At one point, when the shuttle was stopped at an intersection, a pedestrian approached to catch a ride and Pilipowskyj told him it was full.
Workers and residents in the area are excited about the vehicle and are looking forward to using it to get around the neighborhood, said Kate McNamara, who oversees the Navy Yard as senior vice president at the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation.
“This is an important first step, trying it out on kind of a controlled environment, but with real passengers. If it’s successful, we can expand it and make it bigger,” McNamara said. “It certainly would have applications in the city of Philadelphia and beyond.”
It’s that prospect of broader use that alarms some people, locally and nationally.
A Transport Workers Union local in the Columbus, Ohio area recently secured contract language “giving the union veto power over the deployment of autonomous vehicles,” and barring layoffs because of technological advances, according to national TWU officials.
The union plans to use the Ohio language as a template as its 37 locals across the country negotiate new contracts. Those include Local 234 in Philadelphia, which is gearing up to start bargaining with SEPTA this spring ahead of its November contract expiration.
“I am totally against the autonomous technology when it comes to operating mass transit vehicles,” said Local 234 president Brian Pollitt, whose union came close to striking in October before reaching its most recent labor agreement.
Software and hardware hacks could endanger passengers, he argued, and AVs could someday put his members out of work.
“You’re talking about bus operators, or trolley operators, or train operators no longer having employment,” Pollit said. “It’s of paramount importance for the union and for me especially to keep my people working.”
Connecting an island to transit
Pilipowskyj said that, as far as he knows, there’s no AV mass transit routinely operating anywhere in the world, making Philadelphia’s shuttle one of the first of its kind ever.
However, driverless “robo-taxis” began giving rides in San Francisco last year — and having numerous mishaps along the way — and Perrone and other companies are piloting vehicles along the lines of the Navy Yard shuttle in Virginia and other places.
Among many other projects, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey ran a month-long driverless shuttle pilot at Newark airport last September, and this month the Beep AV company started operating its boxy, large-windowed self-driving vehicles at a college in Jacksonville, Florida.
Autonomous shuttles with room for 4 to 15 passengers have been deployed in Arizona, California, Colorado, Michigan, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Washington, D.C., Wyoming, and Virginia, according to the Transit Workers Union. They’re typically pilot programs with a human operator aboard, although some, like a shuttle being tested at JFK Airport, are totally driverless.
The AVs often operate in what Perrone calls “bounded zones,” like an office park or housing development, rather than being able to roam freely. Pilipowskyj said the Navy Yard shuttle could not be directed to navigate to Philadelphia City Hall, for example, although there are plans to extend its route to the stadium area and SEPTA’s NRG Station on the Broad Street Line subway this summer.
That future connectivity drove PIDC’s interest in piloting the shuttle, McNamara said. The Navy Yard is on a former island at Philly’s southern tip, and parts of it are a mile or more from the BSL.
“This service is really part of a longer-term initiative to connect workers and future residents down here at the Navy Yard with Philadelphia’s public transit system, so that it’s more accessible, more sustainable, and we can have a greater share of folks riding transit down here, versus driving in single occupancy vehicle,” she said.
Driving itself, but not driving itself
The Philly shuttle is a joint project with PennDOT, the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, the engineering firm AECOM, and Drexel University, whose researchers helped test the vehicle last year.
For now, PennDOT requires two operators or safety attendants in the vehicle when the AV system is running, Pilipowskyj said. The operator in the driver seat stops the shuttle to let people on or off, helps disabled passengers — something the AV system can’t do — and can take over as driver as needed.
Once two operators have driven the shuttle for a specified number of hours, PennDOT will allow it to run with just one.
Will it ever run without any human attendant? “That will probably depend more on Pennsylvania law and what PennDOT says is allowable and appropriate,” Pilipowskyj said.
On Tuesday morning, former SEPTA driver Brock was in the driver’s seat and fellow operator Ed Glenn was riding shotgun. They both work for a contractor, Krapf Transportation.
Brock said he’s been driving regular Navy Yard shuttles and buses for five years, and he was previously with SEPTA for 18 years, driving routes like the 16, 4, 18, and 26, “almost everything that goes north and south and some of the east and west.”
Brock said he’s not worried about the potential impact on union workers.
“It’s always going to have to be somebody on the vehicle, so they really aren’t taking any jobs,” he said. “It’s not like it’s actually driving itself. It’s driving itself, but it’s not driving itself.”
The job “helps me out, because I’m about ready to retire,” he said. “That’s a nice, easy, cushy job.”
Drawing a line in the sand
The PIDC views the new shuttle as a way to enhance public transportation, per McNamara — as a novel solution to the “last mile” problem of how to connect a relatively far-flung location to the subway and buses, and from there to the region’s expansive transit system.
But to the Transport Workers Union, AVs offer a dark, corporatized vision of transit, devoid of the live operators who make it safe and reliable and who depend on transportation jobs for their livelihood.
“Big Tech and its profit-mongering investors are aggressively trying to foist on Americans a future where everything is automated, including mass transit,” TWU International President John Samuelsen said in a press release. “We’re fighting to stop them.”
“If they get their way, hundreds of thousands of bus operator jobs would disappear. The economic impact on working communities would be devastating. These are jobs that are the economic foundation of working communities across the country,” he said.
By getting the anti-AV language into the Ohio contract, the union “has drawn a line in the sand” as part of a “national strategy against job-killing technology,” TWU said.
The union says that bus drivers in various places have done things no automated system has done or is likely to do — spotted lost children and reunited them with parents, performed CPR, reported crimes in progress, helped pregnant women going into labor, and helped disoriented senior citizens.
“No matter how far technology advances, a human bus operator should be on board. They do much more than drive the bus,” Samuelsen said.
No SEPTA plans for AVs
Samuelsen also noted that self-driving cars have killed and injured people. “It’s outrageous that people are being used as crash-test dummies for this technology,” he said.
Pollitt, the Local 234 president, also put safety at the center of his argument against AVs.
“We live in an age where they’re hacking the Pentagon. What makes you think that some idiot somewhere wouldn’t be in his dormitory trying to plan a way to take one of those autonomous vehicles over the Ben Franklin Bridge?” he said. “We carry life. There’s 60, 70, 80 people on a bus in major cities like Philly and New York.”
SEPTA spokesperson Andrew Busch said he was not aware of any discussions at the agency about using AVs or any plans to purchase autonomous vehicles. He said it was too soon to say whether it would come up in negotiations with the union.
“Certainly, SEPTA is open to discussing any concerns that the union has, whether it is part of contract negotiations or in the course of our regular meetings with them,” he said.
Pollitt said his local has 5,000 members, about half of whom are vehicle operators. He expects contract negotiations with SEPTA will begin around the end of March. AVs will come up, but the union’s top priority will be increasing safety on the system, with the goal of enticing back riders who have been riding trains and buses less since the pandemic, he said.
Gov. Josh Shapiro has highlighted the need for safety improvements on SEPTA as he tries to get legislative approval for his proposed $283 million budget hike for transit systems statewide. SEPTA would receive $161 million more annually.
“We need to agree that we’re going to provide a deterrent to distract the crazies from doing what they’re doing on our system,” Pollitt said.
