Singapore to test self-driving public transit vehicles by end of 2016

Singapore’s Land Transport Authority (LTA), the government agency responsible for the city-state’s mass transit infrastructure, today announced it plans to begin testing of self-driving vehicles in Singapore in the second half of 2016. According to a Facebook post, it has received eight national and international proposals on how self-driving vehicle technology can be put to work on public transportation services.

The trials will take place in one-north, Singapore’s business area where several technology and research-related facilities are based, including the Block 71 startup hub. Testing will be carried out by local institutions I2R (Institute for Infocomm Research) and A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology, and Research), as well as the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART).

See: Singapore’s self-driving car makes Google’s version an unnecessary luxury

“We hope to one day deploy a network of demand-responsive shared vehicles to form a new mobility system for intra- and inter-town travel. This will provide convenient point-to-point transport mode within towns, and help us rely less on private cars. In time to come, we also wish to have self-driving buses operating on fixed routes and scheduled timings to reduce the heavy reliance on manpower,” mentions the post by LTA.

The LTA plans to use CCTV to monitor and better understand the self-driving vehicles’ behavior on the road. Further down the line, it aims to install short-range communication beacons to help the vehicles find their way more easily and provide them with information such as traffic density, nearby road work, and so on.

This is not Singapore’s first foray into testing this technology, although previous tests have been limited to tourist locations such as the Chinese and Japanese Gardens.

Source: The Business Times