How to make sense of bus transit automation?

The 2007 US Department of Defense DARPA Urban Grand Challenge demonstrated that highly automated, driverless vehicles were technically feasible to accomplish typical urban driving actions. Since then, a variety of private companies throughout the world have taken the lead in developing automated technology for vehicles. In 2013 companies began on road demonstrations, showcasing technological advancements in the area, as well as intensive investment. Cutting through this hype, in 2018, a highly automated vehicle using a system developed by Uber Technologies struck and killed a pedestrian walking a bicycle across a street in Tempe, Arizona (NTSB 2018). Exposing the continued vulnerabilities of automated vehicle systems, the vehicle’s sensors detected the pedestrian, but did not identify the obstacle as a pedestrian until seconds before the crash (Figure 1). Factory installed emergency braking was disabled for the automation software, and the driver was not actively engaged in controlling the vehicle until a second before the collision.

https://www.cmu.edu/traffic21/research-and-policy-papers/traffic21-policy-brief-22.1—apr-14-002.pdf