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Now that Uber Eats delivery robots are crisscrossing Philly streets, could autonomous, self-driving SEPTA buses hit the pavement next?
Will we become accustomed to the ghostly swiveling of their steering wheels as they maneuver 20 or 30 tons of vehicle and passengers around potholes, double-parked cars, lumbering trash trucks, and speeding electric scooters?
It appears unlikely, given current bus technology, government regulations, union opposition, and SEPTA planning — but state Rep. Ben Waxman isn’t taking any chances.
The Center City legislator is writing a bill that would require any transit vehicle that uses an automated driving system, and weighs more than 10,000 pounds, to have a licensed driver on board.
“Things are moving quickly,” Waxman said. “I’m not an expert. I’m a politician. But my read on where the technology is and where people think it’s going to go is that this could be a real thing that could happen.”
He said the bill will likely be written to apply to buses and trolleys, not the subway or trains. One of his main concerns is safety, and the potential for a “catastrophic” technological mishap involving a fully automated bus full of passengers operating in a densely populated city, according to a legislative memo he circulated last month.
He also cites the Transport Workers Union’s concerns about potential job losses. “This is a public agency. These are good jobs, decent-paying jobs with benefits, and we need more of those in Philadelphia, not less,” he said.
The planned bill is part of a broader ongoing effort by lawmakers to slow the advance of artificial technology in its various forms — whether that’s chatbots in children’s toys, health insurers and hospitals using AI to make medical decisions, or companies replacing employees with AI tools.
“I am not comfortable with Elon Musk and Sam Altman deciding what is going to happen to the rest of us,” he said, referring to the leaders of SpaceXAI and OpenAI. “Unfortunately, because of how our economy is structured, how these companies are structured, it’s an extremely small number of people who are making all the decisions, and so I think that that is what we have to push back against.”
Feasible within a decade?
Various types of automated or AV transit buses operate in Asia and Europe, including small “robobuses” in several Chinese cities and full-size buses in Norway that started carrying passengers without a driver earlier this year.
AV taxis from Tesla, Google’s Waymo, and Amazon’s Zoox are plying the streets in a dozen U.S. cities, and Waymos (with human operators) are being tested in Philadelphia. Automated shuttles have been piloted in many places, including Philly’s Navy Yard, and a few transit authorities are running small AV shuttle services in Jacksonville, Atlanta, and some other places.
A 40-foot bus that traverses a big city every day has to respond to detours and a variety of other situations, unlike a shuttle that sticks to one short route that it has been specifically trained on. That said, the examples of Waymos and of driverless semi trucks operating in Texas suggests that fully autonomous buses are technologically possible.
Experts differ on if and when they’ll actually arrive. Jim Aloisi, a lecturer on urban transportation at MIT and a former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation, said cities aren’t prepared for the many potential hurdles to AV bus adoption, including the labor impacts and the need for improved street design.
“In 75 years, will we have a different point of view about that? I don’t know,” he said in an interview. “Maybe, but for the time being…”
However, his colleague Awad Abdelhalim, assistant director of research at the MIT Transit Lab, said AV buses will come much sooner.
“A bus that’s driving along the same route a bajillion times, there and back, and at relatively low speeds… They operate in environments where automation is much, much more short-term than 75 years. Certainly no more than 10 to make it feasible,” he said. “I’m not arguing for it. I’m just saying that it is going to be very feasible very soon.”
Unions fret about job losses
Will Vera, a former SEPTA bus driver who is president of Transport Workers Union Local 234, said he’s been following the development of AV technology for years.
Vera says he believes SEPTA management wants self-driving buses so they can reduce staffing and save money. He has a theory that their plans for AVs motivated the authority’s New Bus Network project, which launches later this month after years of planning. It will cut some bus routes, add others, and reroute some lines, with the aim of achieving faster, more reliable service.
“Our system is actually designed perfectly, to be honest. There was no reason to restructure the lines,” he argued. “Restructuring the lines is because they want more of the lines to go straight, so that ultimately they can bring autonomous vehicles.”
“We have a route in the Northeast called the 84 that probably has about 20-plus turns from beginning to end. An autonomous vehicle can’t make that many turns,” he added. (The 84 could be shortened as part of a potential fourth phase of the New Bus Network in fall 2027, but the final routing has not been determined, SEPTA spokesman Andrew Busch said.)
Vera said he doesn’t see autonomous buses coming to Philadelphia in the next few years, but like other unions is preparing for their eventual arrival. A TWU local in Ohio secured contractual language in 2024 giving it veto power over self-driving vehicles, and Vera said he’ll make a priority of securing similar terms when he negotiates his union’s contract renewal next year.
“My concern would be 10 years from now, 15 years from now, 20 years from now, when our children are trying to get jobs here in the city of Philadelphia within SEPTA, and those jobs won’t be available no more,” he said.
A debate over potential cost savings
Asked about Vera’s theory, Busch said the New Bus Network was designed to improve service and there’s “no connection” to AVs.
The bus system overhaul will actually require a boost in hiring of new drivers, Busch said. The most recent TWU contract increased starting wages and sped up pay hikes with the aim of narrowing the authority’s ongoing staffing gap.
The idea that AVs could cut costs and help transit agencies cope with a national driver shortage has some traction among public transportation advocates and conservative spending hawks. When Waxman posted on X about his proposed bill, commenters accused him of “hamstringing” the perennially financially beleaguered authority or trying to stick SEPTA with “costly specialized labor.”
“While I respect where this is coming from, this strikes me as a really bad idea. Autonomous transit works great all over the world, including in some very old cities. I am worried about saddling transit with costs that individually-owned AVs won’t have to face,” wrote Jon Geeting, director of policy and advocacy at Build Philly Now, a pro-growth think tank.
Geeting and other commenters were primarily referring to the idea of fully automating train systems — like SEPTA’s Regional Rail, for example — rather than to buses. AV trains are used in many U.S. airports and in Hawaii’s Skyline metro system, and some other rail service providers are considering full automation.
But with buses, while full automation could have some benefits, in general it wouldn’t lead to substantial cost savings, Abdelhalim said.
“Whatever you save in labor, you need it in compute, you need it in cloud, you need it in whatever it is that maintains those systems,” he said. “There could be savings in insurance and other places if you have a safe system, but I don’t think you just automate and you suddenly save a lot of money.”
At any rate, SEPTA officials say they have no plans to acquire any fully-automated buses.
“There’s nothing that’s on our horizon right now. We buy buses pretty regularly, and our next bus procurement, we don’t have anything really spec’d into that at this point in time,” said Ryan Judge, the authority’s senior director of strategy and analysis.
SEPTA buys about 100 buses a year, but it’s far from clear when AV transit vehicles might be genuinely feasible, much less desirable, given all the regulatory, financial and other challenges, he said.
“It’s hard to speculate on a timeline without knowing how the technology is starting to settle up and any federal guidance on how things should be handled. And there’s a lot of questions that remain about how people board at bus stops, how ADA boarding assistance is handled, and all these types of things,” Judge said.
Waxman said he discussed his bill with SEPTA officials and they indicated they’d prefer to have “as much freedom as they would like to have” to try out AV technologies. Busch declined to elaborate, saying the agency will continue to discuss the proposed measure.
Operators do “a lot more than just drive the bus”
Vera and other critics of AVs cite theoretical safety risks like hackers who gain control of vehicles, or problems that Waymos have experienced, like their tendency to get submerged on flooded roads. He pointed to an incident where the AVs got stuck in Fourth of July traffic in San Francisco and ran out of power.
“Think about Fourth of July here in Philadelphia, between FIFA and the 250th birthday,” Vera said. “I’ve heard nothing but positives about my union members and how they helped move Philadelphia that day. If we had a full fleet of vehicles that did not have operators on these buses and trolleys, we would not have been able to navigate through this.”
Waymo cites evidence that its cars are involved in many fewer crashes and are generally safer than vehicles driven by the average person. Waxman countered that transit vehicles are more complicated to operate, while Abdelhalim said buses perform fewer maneuvers than the typical private vehicle. Both said there isn’t any safety data, positive or negative, on AV transit buses.
Even if the technical problems are solved, the more concrete challenge would remain of how to maintain all the other important services bus operators provide, they said.
“The bus driver does a lot more than just drive the bus,” Waxman said. “They’re also keeping an eye on what’s happening, how the passengers are interacting with each other. If there’s some kind of an emergency, whether it’s medical, whether it’s a public safety emergency, they’re the ones that are able to call for help.”
“Bus operators have to deal with so much on and off the bus — helping someone with their wheelchair, or if there’s someone rowdy on board,” Abdelhalim said. “If you automate the bus and you automate the driving, you’re not automating the job. I just don’t think you can get away with that. We’ll still need humans on the job for a very long time from now.”
Judge likewise noted drivers’ multi-faceted responsibilities, including handling emergencies. “Having a role for somebody on board is something that most of the research shows continuing,” he said.
Starting a broader conversation
Waxman’s bill wouldn’t ban automated buses in Pennsylvania. Its requirement for a human operator on board could still allow transit authorities to test AV technologies, he said, and adopt any that meet the law’s requirements.
A first step could be, for example, an automated bus rapid transit or BRT line, where the bus runs on a dedicated lane that other vehicles can’t access, or gets priority over other traffic, Aloisi said.
“That, to me, is sort of the most logical place to begin thinking about, what would bus automation look like?” he said. “Then I’m not having to deal with fighting double-parked cars and all of the stuff that goes along with the urban bus — Uber picking someone up, someone getting a scooter delivering their hot cocoa.”
It could be difficult to fit a bus rapid transit system into an existing transportation grid, which Aloisi said points to the broader challenge of finding space for all the elements of a contemporary urban streetscape, including buses, bicyclists, pedestrians, Ubers, Waymos, delivery robots, electric bikes and scooters — and large numbers of private cars.
“Now you’re into a very political, very difficult, very challenging conversation, because we live in a world where the ingrained expectation is that streetscapes are designed for auto mobility and nothing more,” Aloisi said. “Thinking about automating bus is, for me, not an isolated discussion. It’s a discussion that needs to take place holistically in a larger conversation about how do we want the urban streetscape to function.”
Whether or not you agree with the language of Waxman’s planned bill, it’s an opportunity to start an important discussion about the future of urban streets and automated systems in general, the MIT experts said.
“Transportation is one of those sectors where we are seeing this mass interaction with automation and artificial intelligence that is embodied in real life, not just like your chatbot or whatever,” Abdelhalim said. “It is a foray for cities to understand the broader impacts, whether it’s on labor or economy, of intelligent systems that move in the real world.”
Editor’s note: The name of the Transport Workers Union was corrected.
