Passengers operate the scooters to complete short trips they might otherwise have taken in a car. They will move a 50 pound e-scooter around downtown Boise at speeds of less than five miles per hour without a passenger on board.
ZOMBIE QUEST BOISE DRIVER
Rather than trying to solve the extremely hard problem of a building a robot driver that can safely carry passengers long distances at top speeds with more skill and safety than a human driver, Spin and Tortoise have focused on an easier problem. As we learned, tragically, in 2018 in Arizona, not-ready-for-primetime full-sized robotaxis can kill people.
The US now lacks any national safety standards to certify the quality of the robotic driver. But the safety of those autonomous systems relies solely on the engineering and business decisions of the companies. With billions of investment dollars, those firms are barreling ahead with testing and deploying vehicles that weigh over two tons and move at highway speeds. The Boise e-scooter pilot offers an alternative path to a future of widespread use of shared electric mobility services than that taken by companies like Waymo, Cruise, and Zoox. A safer path to a future with shared, electric, autonomous vehicles In this final stage of the pilot program, e-scooters would also deliver themselves to charging stations at night, further reducing emissions compared to the existing practice of using high-emission vans for collecting and recharging scooters. The final goal of the pilot in late summer of 2021 is for users anywhere in downtown Boise to be able to summon an e-scooter to their location.
ZOMBIE QUEST BOISE DRIVERS
Once pedestrians and drivers become accustomed to seeing the devices operating safely, then the city will approve the e-scooters to travel longer distances on their own.
But empty scooters moving about with a bell ringing to announce their presence may take some getting used to, so the city plans to take measured steps with Spin to deploy the technology and build public confidence.Īccording to the mayor’s Transportation Advisor Bre Bush, initially the company will only repark e-scooters on one block.įind this article interesting? Support more research like this with a gift! For example, the new technology should eliminate misparked scooters that sometimes obstruct pedestrians and people in wheelchairs from making safe use of the sidewalk. A slow and safe rolloutīoise aims to improve the pedestrian experience in downtown. By making e-scooter trips more convenient and dependable, Spin hopes the new service will encourage more travelers to embrace e-scooters as a viable alternative to driving a car or hailing an Uber or Lyft. If there isn’t a traditional e-scooter in the vicinity, potential users might take a gas-guzzling car instead, but autonomous scooters don’t need to be nearby. A trip can end with a quick hop off the e-scooter at the final destination, without worrying about finding an approved parking location because the vehicle will find one by itself. They can provide true door-to-door service: riders can summon an e-scooter to their location to start their trip instead of spending time hunting for one. Zombie e-scooters could serve even more trips than the existing conventional (non-zombie) e-scooters in Boise. With nearly 60 percent of vehicle trips under 6 miles, fleets of e-scooters and e-bikes have the potential to serve a meaningful number of trips if operators like Spin can make them convenient for users.Ī trip can end with a quick hop off the e-scooter at the final destination, without worrying about finding an approved parking location because the vehicle will find one by itself. That’s more annual trips than was ever forecast for the $110 million downtown streetcar project that Boise’s new mayor, Lauren McLean, halted as lower cost alternatives emerged. Spin and its competitors Lime and Bird currently provide conventional shared e-scooter service in Boise that delivered over 700,000 low-emission trips without public subsidy in 2019. Spin plans to scale the service to cities across the country if the pilot is successful.Į-scooters could provide lots of cheap trips Spin, a Ford subsidiary, will offer the new service in partnership with Tortoise and Segway Ninebot. The three-wheeled scooters rely on small on-board cameras and remote operators to pilot the vehicle slowly along sidewalks and roadsides. It’s an invasion of the carbon snatchers.īoise will be the first city in the US to deploy a fleet of electric kick scooters that can self-drive at low speeds, responding to a user’s summons on a smartphone, parking themselves safely at the end of the trip, and trundling off to recharge when needed.
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