Autonomous vehicle (AV) technology has made its way into Atlanta and is about to expand even more. Rideshare provider Lyft and AV tech firm May Mobility are partnering to bring driverless cars to users in 2025. May will soon deploy a fleet of its driverless Toyota Sienna minivans as an option for Lyft users, the early iterations of which will have operators to monitor the ride.
Atlanta is far from the first city to host May’s AVs on its streets.
“I think in all of our deployments that we’ve done, the reception is very positive,” David Carroll, May Mobility’s director of business development and commercial sales, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Carroll said that May’s main clientele are government agencies that have fleets, such as DOTs and transit agencies. Part of this will help with a labor shortage that government transportation entities have been facing.
For the Lyft deployment in Atlanta, the main goal for May is to make a larger pool of vehicles available for users. That, in theory, should make the service more convenient and affordable.
Atlanta’s program will be a pilot, Carroll said, to determine how AVs fit in that landscape.
Toyota is an investor in May Mobility and May’s autonomous operating system is in each Sienna minivan deployed for AV use. Operators will be aboard these vans, at least at first, to make sure the ride is smooth.
“When we go out into a community, we build a central hub, like an office, where we hire locally. And we train – we bring people up to speed,” Carroll explained. “(The reason we are starting with operators) is to make sure that everyone feels safe and the vehicle is doing what it’s supposed to.” Carroll said the eventual goal is to remove the operators.
Atlanta is the site of May’s first Lyft partnership, but the firm has deployed in many areas with, among other things, its direct-to-rider service that has completed more than 400,000 successful rides. May’s AVs run in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Detroit; Eden Prairie, Minn.; Grand Rapids, Minn.; Sun City, Ariz.; Arlington, Texas; Martinez, Calif.; Miami; and, very recently, Nagoya, Japan.
May’s AVs are not completely new to Metro Atlanta. Their Siennas are traveling up and down Technology Parkway in Peachtree Corners’ Curiosity lab off of Peachtree Parkway. The Curiosity Lab has tested AV buses before and has been using intelligent left-turn technology, too.
While new to Atlanta, driverless rideshare or taxi services have been in use for several years in the U.S. Waymo’s vehicles run all over San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin.
With any new technology comes criticisms. One of the biggest gripes with any kind of driverless cars has been how they interact with pedestrians and other unpredictable obstacles or impetuses in the commuting system.
Waymo taxis have been sometimes criticized for blocking roads and for relentlessly honking at each other late at night, as they self park next to each other at the end of their working days.
But Waymo has found that while its cars have made errors, they have typically driven safer than the average human would have over the same period of time.
Driverless technology could eventually help account for MARTA’s driver-shortage. AVs could add to rideshare fleets and extract the labor costs from the price of grabbing one of those rides at peak times.
But, of course, this would also lead to the eventual decrease in jobs in those fields.
With every yin, there is a yang.
People should start to look at AVs with an open mind and will eventually get the chance to, at least, try it with May Mobility and Lyft. Trying driverless rideshare vehicles with operators is a great way to warm up to the technology. It requires little commitment from users and is totally up to them to use it or not.
May’s Carroll said that the firm chose Atlanta because of its business and tech-friendly atmosphere. Let’s hope our city’s commuter base is equally hospitable.
Doug Turnbull has covered Atlanta traffic for over 20 years and written “Gridlock Guy” since 2017. Doug also co-hosts the “Five to Go Podcast,” a weekly deep dive on stories in motorsports. Contact him at fireballturnbull@gmail.com.
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