Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Vaz. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich (Sarah Coombes) for securing this important debate.
I have no doubt that one day autonomous vehicles will be the norm on our buses, and I am perfectly okay with that, because I am fairly sure that any robot would be better at driving a bus than I would be. I am keen to hear from the Minister whether he has a timescale for the publication of the automated passenger services permitting scheme consultation.
Technology has moved at pace over the last two decades; LiDAR—light detection and ranging—tech, radar and cameras all working together so that autonomous buses can handle junctions and roundabouts, and keep pace with the general traffic. I thank Ian Pulford, who has recently been telling me about the self-driving shuttles in Milton Keynes that have transported thousands of passengers without incident. I also thank a pair of Dans—Dan and Dan—who talked me through the Connector project. When I travelled on that, I found that it worked rather well, albeit that it had perhaps been programmed to be a little too cautious; it felt a bit like the 21st-century equivalent of having a man with a red flag walking along in front of the bus. Particularly when we sat waiting to turn left into oncoming traffic, I felt that basically we needed braver autonomous buses.
I think that passengers will be just fine with AV buses. After all, people travel happily on the driverless docklands light railway or airport shuttles without a second thought. Indeed, research from the University of the West of England has found that in the main passengers’ desire for a safety driver is not so much about the technology within the vehicle, but more about other aspects of safety, for instance personal security.
However, there is still some way to go. The Oxfordshire Mi-Link team freely admit that they had not fully anticipated quite how tightly controlled roadside vegetation has to be for their autonomous buses to work, and sometimes on windy days the buses get confused by moving branches, which they regard as hazards. The Connector team also told me that rain sometimes disrupted the sensors on their buses—while tech might be changing rapidly, I do not think that British weather is going to. Also, if potholes frustrate people today, imagine the outcry if the faded white lines along the side of the road stopped buses altogether. Council maintenance regimes would have to change radically; indeed, they would require a complete overhaul.
Then there is the question of the highway code. The current one was obviously written for human beings, for our reaction times and our capacity to make judgments in complex situations. I am sure there will have to be an update of the highway code and that it will have to be more than just a basic legal update; there will need to be an entirely conceptual update. Does the Minister envisage that we will need two sets of rules, one for human drivers, and one for the robo-buses of the future?
Finally, I turn to cost. Large-scale commercial deployment will mainly rest on cost. The main cost saving with autonomous vehicles is on driver hours, although a human being must still be present under current legislation, of course. I note that the Scottish trial between Edinburgh and Fife’s park-and-ride system seems to have met many of its technical goals. The problem was that, as with many other kinds of buses, the buses in this trial did not attract enough passengers. As we all know, buses outside London have bit of an image problem and many people who could use buses do not use them, not because of the service itself, but because of the perception.
As the Minister knows, it has always been my mission to get more fare-paying and probably middle-class passengers on to buses, because increased farebox revenue is the key to sustainable services. However, I wonder whether we need to think more about what autonomous buses of the future will look like, because we seem to be going down two different paths. The ones being deployed in places such as Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge look and feel much more like a regular bus or minibus: they have a steering wheel that is moving, albeit no one has to turn it. The Milton Keynes example, which is also being used in Suffolk and in Birmingham at the National Exhibition Centre, has no steering wheel; it is a little shuttle thing that feels a bit more futuristic.
Is this the moment that we could be using to grow passenger numbers? We could attract people who might never in a million years think about catching the bus. It may be that we cannot persuade them to catch a bus, but if it were billed as exciting, technological and futuristic, they might happily get aboard a “zog-pod” or something like that.