Time to cut bait on JTA's driverless Skyway replacement

[marcuscnelson]

Cruise has now announced it will suspend all driverless operations and return to on-board supervision.

[Jax_Developer]

Is JTA's leadership ready to face the consequences of blindly misleading the metro & wasting a ton of money? Probably not.

[thelakelander]

Nope. They already plan to have human drivers (attendants) for the foreseeable future.

[marcuscnelson]

Nope. They already plan to have human drivers (attendants) for the foreseeable future.

Which (for anyone not connecting the dots) really fundamentally defeats the point of this whole frenzied drive towards autonomous vehicles. Once you need more, smaller vehicles with attendants who have to be able to drive the vehicles anyway, and you need larger smaller vehicles because too many people attend football games, and you need dedicated lanes after all because headways are twice as long without them, then what do you really gain by doing this as opposed to a standard bus or the actually automated system that the existing Skyway is?

Anyone?

[Jax_Developer]

Lol Lake.. as expected I'm sure. I'm looking forward to those Ford Vans!

Hopes & Dreams Marcus. I'm surprised the someone federally hasn't stepped in. Aren't they funding this experiment portion? Im not a transit engineer, but the basic idea is hard to argue against.

[thelakelander]

^The Skyway was mostly federal money. The federal money is a small drop in the bucket for the U2C. Most of this U2C experiment is being funded with local money. One could argue that this is an indictment on the project.

[Charles Hunter]

Perhaps I am being too suspicious, but could JTA be envisioning U2C pods scuttling around on the Emerald Trail?

https://jaxtoday.org/2023/10/26/emerald-trail-agreement-pushes-project-forward/

Emerald Trail agreement pushes project forward
By Will Brown
Published on October 26, 2023 at 6:21 pm

The city of Jacksonville, the Jacksonville Transportation Authority and Groundwork Jacksonville celebrated their collaboration Thursday on the Emerald Trail project in the shadows of the Cummer Museum of Arts & Gardens.

The agreement between Groundwork, JTA and the city states the authority will take the lead in applying for federal dollars to augment the local funding and private donations.

JTA CEO Nathaniel Ford Sr. touted that the organization has won more than $200 million in federal grant funding over the past six years.

"We saw, even going back to the pandemic, the gaps in terms of transportation for certain members of our community," Ford said. "This trail will help with connectivity, mobility, economic vitality (and) health care. So, why wouldn't the JTA be a part of that?"

[marcuscnelson]

^Isn't this because City Council took the funding JTA originally wanted for U2C expansion and redirected it to the Emerald Trail? And still required JTA to oversee it?

[Jax_Developer]

Lol Marcus, what you just said makes so little sense but at the same time it does.. how is it that JTA has their hands in everything?? Truly unheard of lol. We got JTA implementing ground-breaking technology, overseeing public trails, and spending $5-10M annually on experimental projects.. I'm starting to think JTA is just a publicly funded basket of whatever.


(And we do Buses on the side.)

[thelakelander]

^Isn't this because City Council took the funding JTA originally wanted for U2C expansion and redirected it to the Emerald Trail? And still required JTA to oversee it?

Yes. This is the reason for JTA's role.

[Captain Zissou]

The city spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Chamber's annual "learning from" trips.  What city did we learn about the U2C from?  None of our peer cities or aspirational cities have wasted time and money on this, so why are we?  I think a group from the chamber is in charlotte right now.  Hopefully somebody notices the light rail and what it has done for their urban neighborhoods. 

[thelakelander]

Was going to ask, what city were they traveling to this year.  Charlotte has heavily invested in LRT and modern streetcar in recent years. Not sure if anyone from JTA is going but I do wonder if anyone on the trip will make a comparison of the U2C to Charlotte's transit system. Other than that, we're largely two different environments at this point. Hard to make apples to apples links after they've been hitting home runs that last 30 years, while we've been selling popcorn in the stands. The best thing to take away from them is the concept of the 3Cs. Everything in Uptown is clustered together pretty well. Same goes for TOD around the transit stops. One thing to not take away from them is how to combat gentrification. They have been pretty bad at it, imo.

[Captain Zissou]

I have been to South End a few times, but there was a ten year gap in between.  I was there most recently this July and it was completely changed.  It was full of mixed use multifamily and office space.  Even if Brooklyn completely filled in with mid-rise mixed use, it would be smaller and less dense than south end.  Charlotte is more comparable to Austin and Nashville than Jax.  Maybe in 10 years we can reach the vibrancy that Charlotte has today.

[thelakelander]

Unfortunately, we were larger than Austin, Nashville and Charlotte in 1990. Now we aren't in their league. Downtown has potential. They show what can happen here by 2050, if we don't let local politics become a market obstacle.

[marcuscnelson]

^I happened to be talking with some friends about Charlotte a few nights ago, and even just looking at Google Maps we were impressed by the degree to which the city has grown up just since the 2000s. Really shows what can happen if leadership pushes the ship in the right direction.

On a relevant note, JTA put out an RFI this morning on behalf of the Florida Public Transportation Association for the autonomous vehicle industry to demonstrate its capabilities to operate Level 4 vehicles in public. To use their words:

The goal of this RFI is to inform the FPTA on the capability maturity of the AV industry, and particular vendors, as it relates to a transit service operational model and their compliance with Buy America rolling stock regulations. This information will help the State plan future AV deployments by matching capability maturity with operational design domain (ODD) requirements, including route selection, service model, and operations and maintenance activities.

As of when I checked it before sending this, only Beep had examined the RFI solicitation.

Another interesting quote:

The capability of emerging technologies like automated vehicles (AVs) are maturing, with pilot and small-scale deployments occurring across the State of Florida, nationwide, and globally; however, challenges remain based on the maturity of the technology, and a lack of specific physical and potential digital infrastructure. Automated vehicles that operate within a mixed-traffic environment with human roadway users must contend with their unpredictable behavior, which is especially important when interacting with vulnerable road users. Other challenges are posed by temporary changes in the environment like work zones or incidents that modify the availability or configuration of travel lanes, for example.

These are things we say when we're ready to spend half a billion dollars, right?