Public transportation is always improving as more companies introduce revolutionary ideas and technologies that reinvents the way we travel around. The sector has improved drastically over the years and the next frontier is already ahead of us. In the coming years, we could be seeing on-demand and self-driving busses dominating the streets.
The European Union is on a mission to bring self-driving buses in streets all over the world under a project called the Future Automated Bus Urban Level Operation Systems or FABULOS for short. There are a few companies vying to make that dream a reality and one of those is Strathcona, Vancouver-based Spare Labs
The company is currently working on the technology that is sure to please the EU. Not only are the company’s upcoming buses self-driving, but they are also on-demand. This basically means passengers can hail buses on-the-go using the internet or their mobile devices instead of having to sit through and wait for a bus on a fixed schedule.
Spare Labs CEO Kristoffer Vik Hansen recently appeared on On The Coast hosted by Gloria Macarenko. Regarding how their technology should work, Hansen said, “basically what you do is you say where you want to go, from where you want to go to and when you want to go.”
The Spare Labs team is small and it only consists of nine people including Hansen himself. Most of the staff are University of British Columbia grads that previously worked on a carpooling app. Hansen and his team, later on, abandoned this idea and they have decided to adapt it into something more general.
The company is trying to make the similar technology work with self-driven buses but it is currently being used in human-driven buses in Dallas, Texas and in Oslo and Stavanger in Norway.
What the FABULOS project hopes to achieve
The goal of the FABULOS project will focus heavily on streamlining the bus service in cities. By making buses automated, the commuter service will become more efficient in the sense that the vehicles are moving at a set pace and route. The idea sounds good on paper but the EU believes that “a demonstration of the economic, technical, societal and legal maturity of the solution needs is required.”
As such, the EU is hoping that it will be able to realize its goal with the help of third-party companies. The EU is backing the project with 5.5 million euros. Each of the contracted companies including Spare Labs will get a maximum of 1 million each. They expect it to be completed by 2020. The buses will soon be tested in European including Estonia, Finland, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, and Portugal.
Automated buses are the future of public transportation. Spare Labs plans to introduce the convenience of on-demand services like Uber that will greatly improve the commuting experience in Canada. With the support of the EU under the FABULOS project, the technology might be coming to our streets soon.