Automated buses in Europe: An inventory of pilots: Final Version

Automated bus systems are a promising means of future first- and last mile public transport solutions, and can even possibly become a regular part of the public transport network. Therefore, many projects appear throughout Europe to pilot the feasibility of automated bus system implementation on various locations. Keeping up with the rapidly increasing pace in which these pilots appear, this report aimed to provide an overview of past, currently on-going, and concretely planned pilots with automated bus systems in Europe. Via extensive internet searches, exhausting personal networks, and gathering information from other sources, a detailed overview was developed. In the first version, established March 2020, 118 pilots were found which were characterized by vehicles with predominantly low speeds, low capacities, and short operation routes. In this final version, established February 2021, aside from additional information on known pilots, another 13 were found, making a total of 131 pilots throughout Europe. The search in itself proved to be difficult due to the often lacking detailed information of pilots, which was argued to be due to most scientific pilots being of recent years, and therefore often still on-going, and consequentially not having published any information yet on their research. Another difficulty arose due to the rapid increase of occurring pilots with automated buses, which leads to the report already being out-of-date as this report is being written. Therefore, this report was updated early 2021. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic situation appears a major issue for automated bus systems pilots during the year 2020. The results show that currently the vast majority of automated bus system pilots occur with the presence of a steward on board, due to legislation, technological challenges, as well as passengers requesting them, raising concerns regarding (e.g., economic) efficiency. Although there are a few automated bus systems that actively show efficient operation without on board stewards, this still appears to be a future development.