The slow but steady progress of driverless buses in Switzerland

Born in London, Simon is a multimedia journalist who has worked for www.swissinfo.ch since 2006. He speaks French, German and Spanish and covers the United Nations and other international organisations in Geneva, and a wide range of issues mainly in French-speaking Switzerland.

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On a crisp autumn morning in the Geneva countryside, a bright orange-and-white electric bus is winding through the leafy 36-hectare grounds of the Belle-Idée hospital site.

The bus is trundling along a gravel path when suddenly a patient and a nurse step out from behind a tree. The vehicle brakes sharply, a bell rings out, a 'keep your distance' sign flashes at the front and rear. The couple steps back, and the bus continues slowly on its way.

The toy-like shuttle – empty apart from a safety operator and guided by sensors, GPS and radar – is the centrepiece of a unique driverless public transport experiment.

'It's a world first for a public transport service,' says Dimitri Konstantas, director of the Information Science Institute at the University of Geneva, who is helping to coordinate the project. 'Most sites and lines have a fixed route… but here the difference is that there is no route. You can go anywhere.'

This summer, a small team began testing the ten-seater vehicles, mapping out the huge Belle-Idée park and its obstacles. In parallel, a Geneva-based start-up, MobileThinking, has been putting the finishing touches to an app that will be tried out by the first passengers before the end of the year.

Then when the project is up and running in the next couple of years, patients, visitors and staff will be able to get around the sprawling complex by using their smartphone to order one of three buses offering a 24-hour on-demand door-to-door service.

Users will be able to locate a bus via the app, then send a pick-up request. Software will indicate when a bus is available and what the journey time will be. A fleet management system will then adapt the vehicle's route according to other passenger requests.

The idea is to have a completely automated system with a safety operator back at a central depot monitoring the vehicles, says Jeroen Beukers, an autonomous vehicle expert who is running the project for the Geneva public transport authorities (TPG).

'Next week we are installing electric doors on the bus depot. In the future, you'll make a booking on your phone, the depot doors will open automatically, a charged bus will pick you up from A and take you to B and then either return to the depot or continue onwards to pick up someone else,' he says.

The project is not Geneva's first driverless bus trial: TPG has been successfully running an automated shuttle on a fixed circular route in Meyrin since 2018.

The Belle-Idée project was selected as part of a four-year European driverless vehicle initiative known as AVENUE (Autonomous Vehicles to Evolve to a New Urban Experience). The European consortium, funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme, includes pilot schemes in Lyon (France), Luxembourg and Copenhagen (Denmark).

Switzerland has been testing several different kinds of driverless vehicles on its roads over the past five years. An autonomous passenger car was tested in Zurich in 2015, followed by a delivery robot in Bern a year later. These tests have now been completed.

In Sion, canton Valais, a trial using an autonomous Swiss Post bus in the town centre began in summer 2016 and was later adapted and extended. But the project has been suspended due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Swiss Post is planning a follow-up project between Sion and the village of Uvrier.

Regional public transport companies are also testing autonomous shuttles in Marly (canton Fribourg), in Bern, and in Meyrin and Thônex (canton Geneva). Similar trials were done in Neuhausen am Rheinfall (2018-2019) near Schaffhausen, and in Zug (2018-2019).

Over the past five years a growing number of other Swiss cities and transport companies have experimented with driverless vehicles on fixed routes (see infobox). This includes Sion, the capital of canton Valais, which in 2016 became the first Swiss city to launch an autonomous bus service in collaboration with Swiss Post.

Apart from the odd minor accident, the results of these trials have been generally positive, with thousands of passengers now regularly taking driverless shuttles.

The trials have allowed Switzerland 'to position itself as a pioneer' in this field, according to Marina Kaempf, spokesperson for the Federal Roads Office.

In most cases the tests were well accepted by the public, with municipalities and cantons developing 'realistic' projects to show what the vehicles can do, she tells swissinfo.ch.

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