In an industry striving for efficiency, autonomous vehicles have the potential to remove significant costs in the form of drivers, at the same time as creating a basis for fast rollout of new services (for example, Uber Eats food delivery). The human factor is omnipresent. While safety could be less of an issue than first mooted (driverless car safety records appear to be better than driver-based cars), many transport workers fear their roles may be superseded by robots. Already the commercial taxi industry has no greater hatred than Uber, which is testing its own autonomous vehicle fleets as we speak.
I had the chance to try an autonomous bus in Sion (Switzerland). The bus was going through a pedestrian element of the route: it turned 2m left, went forward 10 m, then 2m right, you couldn't see why. When I asked, I was told: – "It's programmed that way, as the restaurant opener has the possibility to open two additional tables." It was cold in November so he had 4 tables out but had the option for 6. If you need to program the route so exactly, you will try to stop it on a bike – I can see the kids making a sport of this.
In conclusion, short-term disruption from autonomous vehicles will mostly be felt by stakeholder groups, as they re-organise and develop new business and service models. While today's startups are not without ambition, the spectrum of different transport organizations will need to seamlessly collaborate to achieve multi-modal mobility in the future. The transport industry has a responsibility to innovate, to keep centuries-old infrastructure relevant and accessible to today's tech-savvy customers, and to create the job roles necessary to keep up with this change – and it is here where we are advising participants to focus their initiatives to build experience and understanding of what these roles need to be.
Many careers will be forged in inventing and building the technologies needed, including gathering, collaboration and analysis of sensor data and customer experience. Because, whatever the changes that happen within the transportation industry, the customer is interested only in having a smooth ride.