Do drivers make buses more interesting?

A driverless bus doing trips over a bridge that’s 144 feet above the North Sea.. Yep, it’s definitely the banter we’re missing from the driver.
 
Most bus drivers don't tend to interact with the passengers very much. You can get some right nasty jobs worth types such as one where someone was a few seconds late and he shut the doors in their face and drove off. Some are nice and helpful to people. My ex-wife is a bus driver and her bus driving is as poor as her car driving. She has had a few accidents since starting. She wrote off a couple of ours cars while we were together and had numerous more accidents. I would not get a bus she was driving for sure.

As for driverless. I'm not sure this is something we are ready for quite yet. Unless they were like trams or something.
 
As for driverless. I'm not sure this is something we are ready for quite yet. Unless they were like trams or something.

The minute you can make a truly driverless vehicle is the day you can pretty much replace every human with a robot.

I saw a video of these buses when it was announced and they still needed a "safety" driver behind the wheel.

Untill they can invent an Ai that can see and think like a human then it will never replace a human as the sensors/radar way of doing it at the moment falls flat on its face with weather, longer distances etc or unfamiliar territory due to needing to learn it's surroundings.
 
The minute you can make a truly driverless vehicle is the day you can pretty much replace every human with a robot.

I saw a video of these buses when it was announced and they still needed a "safety" driver behind the wheel.

Untill they can invent an Ai that can see and think like a human then it will never replace a human as the sensors/radar way of doing it at the moment falls flat on its face with weather, longer distances etc or unfamiliar territory due to needing to learn it's surroundings.

Yeah - I was driving home at night during one of the recent storms and was thinking about how an AI would cope - I had to make some quite complex decisions to avoid flooding and other incidents, anticipating weather vs the road ahead i.e. places exposed to wind, drawing on decades of local knowledge of where was likely to be bad, likely state of alternative routes, etc. to get home without incident - we are such a long way from an AI with that level of training and decision making.
 
I imagine the low ridership was due to the route not having massive demand (or possibly reliability or frequency issues idk) rather than people not wanting to go on a driverless bus.

Route does look a bit odd to me:
Goes from a park and ride on the north side of the bridge to a random train & tram station in a low density business park on the outskirts of the city, with only one intermediate stop on the south side of the bridge. I imagine there aren't many journeys where that bus route would make more sense than either driving all the way to your destination or getting the train. Or getting one of the other buses that goes further into Edinburgh.

Also, lmao "needed two crew on board for safety reasons" they managed to make a driverless bus that needed more staff than a regular bus :p
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom