Autonomous vehicle adoption is accelerating across the United States, and it is inevitable that most transit agencies will soon begin deploying autonomous fleets, especially for microtransit, given the significant and wide-ranging benefits of autonomy. To implement this new model, transit agencies should leverage ecosystems, as appropriate, that have been (or are being) developed for robotaxis and autonomous commercial vehicles. That said, transit agencies must be both strategic and intentional about aligning their operations to robotaxi and commercial vehicle ecosystem vendors.

Today, you can find many ecosystem models depicting the various technologies that enable the overall autonomous vehicle market, including the robotaxi and commercial vehicle market segments. These ecosystems include several foundational layers such as hardware and components (NVIDIA, Intel, etc.); automated driving systems (Waymo, Tesla, etc.); map and geolocation services (HERE Technologies, Mobileye, etc.); fleet orchestration and asset management (Beep, Autofleet, etc.); mobility service providers (Waymo, Beep, etc.); and smart mobility infrastructure (such as state and municipal agencies).

Transit agencies may realize meaningful benefits from partnering with established vendors in certain layers of the common autonomous vehicle ecosystem models. For example, the appropriate use of certain established ecosystem vendors may minimize risk, accelerate time to deployment and optimize investment expense for transit agencies. That said, the operating model for transit agencies differs from the operating models for robotaxi and commercial vehicle operators, introducing critical considerations for transit agencies when evaluating and selecting certain target vendors.

Transit agencies should evaluate partners for best fit at each ecosystem layer but also evaluate partners holistically, meaning they should evaluate the capabilities of partners to address the strategic requirements of the respective transit agency across ecosystems layers. To perform this evaluation, transit agencies should start to define their near-term, medium-term and even long-term vision for autonomy. This will lead to the definition of critical strategic principles such as whether the agency should prioritize a tightly integrated vertical technology stack or an open, horizontally integrated architecture to accommodate mixed fleets and maximize optionality.

To assist with this decision-making calculus, following is a list of key considerations for transit agencies by ecosystem layer.

Hardware And Components

These systems are foundational for autonomy, so they are designed to operate independent of specific use cases. Transit agencies should expect these systems to be largely adaptable to the transit market except for vehicle form factors which will be use-case dependent. Transit agencies should evaluate the systems in this level largely based on price performance characteristics.

Automated Driving Systems

Theoretically, the models underpinning most ADS solutions are highly extensible. However, at this time, these models tend to be optimized for distinct use cases (e.g., robotaxi operations in certain urban locations or long-haul trucking across certain highway corridors). As a result, transit agencies should evaluate the ability of ADS vendor models to support the strategic requirements of the transit agencies’ fixed route and microtransit systems.

Map And Geolocation Services

The offerings of several map and geolocation service vendors are adequate to support a range of autonomous requirements. However, certain requirements for autonomous transit, such as curb management, may require enhanced, non-standard data and associated features. Therefore, transit agencies should evaluate map and geolocation service providers based on data coverage, density, frequency and quality, as well as data and map feature extensibility.

Fleet Orchestration And Asset Management

Although similar, transit fleet orchestration differs from robotaxi and commercial vehicle fleet orchestration, and transit operators will likely deploy vehicles from multiple different OEMs and ADS developers over time. Therefore, transit agencies may want to prioritize open, vendor-agnostic fleet orchestration solutions designed for seamless horizontal integration. Because autonomous vehicles will introduce unique asset management requirements, transit agencies will want a holistic view of autonomous and human-driven assets. As a result, transit agencies should evaluate the ability of autonomous vehicle asset management solutions to seamlessly integrate with existing enterprise asset management solutions.

Mobility Service Providers

Presumably, transit agencies will operate mixed fleets (i.e., a combination of autonomous and human-driven vehicles) with a variety of form factors for the foreseeable future. Therefore, transit agencies should evaluate the ability of mobility service providers to harmonize the operations of autonomous and human-driven vehicle across a transit network, as well as their ability to manage autonomous vehicles from multiple different OEMs utilizing various ADS solutions.

Smart Mobility Infrastructure

Transit agencies must continue to comply with a myriad of regulatory frameworks and will want to leverage an ever-growing network of smart city sensors to maximize the safety and operating efficiency of their transit networks. Therefore, transit agencies should evaluate the ability of autonomous transit fleet ecosystem partners to conform to various regulatory frameworks.

Transit agencies should also evaluate the best technical approach to enable communication between infrastructure sensors and individual autonomous vehicles as well as aggregate, analyze and distribute smart city sensor data across their transit networks which will include a mix of autonomous and human-driven vehicles for the long-term.

In closing, it is inevitable that transit agencies will adopt forms of autonomy across their transit networks, requiring these agencies to start identifying technology partners from across the emerging autonomous vehicle ecosystem. When selecting partners, transit agencies must consider not only the technical capabilities of vendors within each layer of the autonomous vehicle ecosystem but how to optimize the use of partners across all layers of the ecosystem to support the strategic requirements and the associated target operations model for the respective transit agency.

In other words, transit agencies will benefit from defining a target technical and operational architecture for their autonomous fleets early in their autonomy lifecycle. While this will require some effort on the part of transit agencies, it will lead to better strategic outcomes and fortunately there are already existing success stories in Atlanta, Jacksonville and Orlando that can serve as reference cases.