Future of Buses: Highlights from the Conference

They might not be as sexy as Flying Taxis, Hyperloop, or the Cybertruck, but the truth is that full-size and mini buses are going to play a far bigger role in tomorrow’s Mobility landscape. Buses are now quickly becoming electric and automated, eventually fully autonomous, and are starting to get integrated in transport infrastructure and the energy grid. Digital technologies have already transformed the way how people use buses and helped create new mobility services such as On-Demand Transport. Those were the topics of VDI’s Future of Buses conference.

Together with Gerhard Nowak who hosted the first day I had the great pleasure of chairing the second part of this conference last week in Amsterdam. Here is a summary of the highlights and insights from the event.

Vehicle fleet and infrastructure integration is specific for every deployment

Incumbents like Volvo, Evobus, MAN, and Scania spoke about the evolution of their e-buses and new features of their next generation vehicles. There was great detail about when and where to charge the buses (at night in the depot vs. during day when the bus stops on route – known as depot vs. opportunity charging). Means of charging and battery size depend on topography, distances, climate, passenger load and other factors. The driver is of paramount importance: as Marcin Seredynski from Volvo presented, a good driver can recoup up to 40% of energy through recuperation, while a poor driver might only make 5%. Prioritization of bus traffic and coordinated traffic signaling can further reduce energy consumption while at same time increasing passenger comfort. Full Automation for full-size buses will be first rolled out in the bus depot where complexity is limited, and risk is low.

Autonomous Shuttle providers ohmio, ZF, and Hamburger Hochbahn presented experiences and strategies in deploying their vehicles on public roads. Quite thought provoking and much discussed was ohmio founder Mohammed Hikmet’s vision on how vehicles will be controlled from a central coordination system, in a paradigm similar to baggage systems at the airport. According to Mohammed, the industry needs a mindshift to progress fast into Autonomy. Natalie Rodriguez presented Hamburger Hochbahn’s HEAT project with their main challenges and lessons learned. Her team has started to roll out a trial in Hamburg’s HafenCity and is in progress to integrate the minibus with their existing control center.

Digital Technologies have enabled new New Mobility services around buses

FlixMobility VP of Operations Stefan Tontsch made it clear that electric buses are a promising technology for the market leader in intercity bus services (even though FlixBus discontinued their e-bus service between Frankfurt and Mannheim last week). It was impressive to see how digital technologies have been used for real-time tracking, on-board entertainment, payments and more to enable FlixBus’ rapid growth over the past 5 years.

Markus Dietmannsberger spoke about how Hamburger Hochbahn is going to move to an all-electric bus fleet by 2030 and what standards and protocols will be crucial for disposition and pre-conditioning, load management, charging, and secure communication. Shenzen Bus Group is the first and only fully electric bus operator in the world with an impressive fleet of 6000 buses, and several Autonomous Driving pilots underway. Hallie Liao explained that total lifecycle cost between electric and ICE buses are very similar. While procurement cost for an electric bus is higher and lifetime is two years shorter than for an ICE bus (8 years rather than 10), operations cost for electric buses are much lower and will turn into a financially positive case in the future.

Jan Luedtke presented how ViaVan has provided more than 60 million trips through their On-Demand Transport services around the globe, by ‘building a better bus [service], not a better taxi’. His examples demonstrated how On-Demand Transport can greatly complement traditional Public Transport and what wait times are acceptable for customers in cities (4-6 min) vs. in rural areas (15 min).

A lot more has been presented and discussed, including using Design Thinking for designing mobility services, how AI can be used to improve transport operations in real-time, customer’s views and requirements on Autonomous Vehicles, or how passenger and vehicles will interact.

Overall, this has been an awesome and very interactive conference due to the high-caliber speakers and the enthusiastic participants. Thank you to all of you! There will be another Future of Buses conference next year and we are looking forward to welcoming your there.

Independently from the conference and starting from February 2020, Cindy Hadri and I (Steffen Schaefer) will be running our workshop ‘Designing On-Demand Transport services’ in which participants will learn how to apply Design Thinking to build successful Mobility services.

We would love to see you there!