Connecting the countryside – autonomous concepts for rural areas

In rural areas in particular, private cars remain the transport of choice for many. Buses run only infrequently. Services for the so-called last mile, i.e. from the bus stop to one’s doorstep, are often lacking. Are driverless buses the answer here?

On the Future Forum Stage of BUS2BUS 2024, Thomas Drewes, director of Driverless Vehicles, DB Regio Straße at DB Regio AG, presented the concept which his company aims to implement by 2030 in order to put 6,000 driverless vehicles on the road. Now that the technology was market-ready, it was the high cost that was the challenge, he said. The aim therefore was to finance model regions in order to show that the technology was viable and functioned in practice. On a technical level, he saw networking the various systems as being important. That included the bus monitoring system, which passengers could use to request outside help if problems occurred, or the operating system for retrieving vehicle data. The DB subsidiary ioki, which was currently driving digitalisation and networking transport services, was at present undertaking this task.

Roy Uhlmann, CEO of MOTOR Ai, has observed a general openness on the part of district councils and public transport companies towards driverless systems. They were aiming to solve problems such as school transport, where children had to be picked up from villages that were far apart. Scaling services was important, he said. He was convinced that people in rural areas would be prepared to pay for good transport links, providing they were as readily available as private cars.

Marvin Ruf, senior account executive at HERE Technologies, was in favour of guaranteeing mobility in rural areas. Mobility was crucial to a healthy social life, and with the current shortage of skilled labour this could only be achieved with driverless vehicles. His company develops maps that are essential for driverless vehicles. Marvin Ruf firmly believes buses are well suited to winning people over to this new technology. Both coaches and public transport buses were good choices for driverless vehicles, he said. He saw them as part of an intermodal mix that included regional train lines, regular bus routes and blanket on-demand services, where customers needed to cover 200 metres at most to reach the next stop. In many regions people would be willing to pay if the services met their needs.

Kathrin Kind-Trueller, chief data scientist/AI A. Director Nordics at the Berlin-based startup Cognizant Technology Solutions, noted that much of what had been learned from shared mobility also applied to driverless vehicles. China and the US were making rapid progress in this field, whereas Germany still lacked the necessary legal framework. A mobility ecosystem required a whole range of systems fine-tuned to people’s actual needs, she said.