With an ever-changing urban landscape, Las Vegas is taking the unique approach to mobility with pilots and implementations of alternative mobility to better serve its riders. In December of 2018, the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada (RTC) was awarded a $5.3 million Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (BUILD) grant for an autonomous vehicle pilot to run through a high traffic area of the city.
The RTC also received a second federal grant of $300,000 for a transit oriented development (TOD) in a separate corridor.
“We call [our BUILD grant project] GoMed, because it’s really focused in our medical district and connecting some of our real vulnerable users, elderly [or] disabled; those who need additional transit in that area,” said general manager of the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, Tina Quigley. “The scope of the grant is connectivity between our downtown transit hub and the medical district, which is in the same area as our downtown transit hub.”
The grant includes funding for four autonomous vehicles and enhanced pedestrian and shelter amenities.
“[We’re enhancing] our existing bus shelters and our transit shelters with WiFi [and] real-time data information for those users,” said Quigley.
When it comes to pedestrian safety, Quigley explains that RTC will be implementing connected infrastructure. The agency will be working with pedestrian safety devices and connected technologies, such as Lidar.
RTC has seen the benefits of exploring different methods of alternative mobility to see what is the most successful for the city.
“The goal really is to give an opportunity to promote innovative solutions for improving the quality of life through transit and also through that demonstration program,” explained Quigley. “We kind of learn what works and what doesn’t work and how best to deploy these autonomous shuttles and enhance connected infrastructure and vehicle enhanced connectivity in a demonstration area.”
Selecting the right partnership
RTC gained previous experience with autonomous vehicles from a past pilot. The agency worked with the city of Las Vegas, AAA and Keolis to operate a pilot program that ran for a year throughout downtown. The shuttle operated in a loop that only made right hand turns.
“[The loop] was only about half a mile, but it was around a couple blocks,” said Quigley. “It was a very simple deployment, but it gave us insight as to how to test and deploy and how to work with the public in messaging the program. We were really happy that the Feds recognized that there was value in our past experience and were willing to work with us in doing this demonstration program and being able to share our lessons learned within not only our community, but also on a national level.”
Keolis has been involved in both autonomous pilots and explains that the first demonstration was to show how the vehicle would operate in a city setting.
“That morphed into the kick off of a year-long pilot project in November of 2017. [It was] the first open road autonomous shuttle program to operate on city streets with other traffic – personal vehicles, transit vehicles, pedestrians and bicycles. The idea was to see how it would perform and to see how people would adapt to riding on the shuttle. A year after the pilot, there were 35,000 riders on the shuttle service. It was a .6-mile loop that was in the downtown part of Las Vegas,” said Chris Barker, Keolis vice president of vehicle mobility.
Barker continued, “The city of Las Vegas had created an innovation district, an area where they wanted to test new technologies, particularly new transportation options. In working with the city of Las Vegas and the Southern Nevada Regional Transportation Commission, we identified a route in an area of the city where they wanted to demonstrate the shuttle operation and really enable both residents and visitors to ride the shuttle that connects to other retail stores and other transit hubs as a last-mile connector service for people in the community.”
Barker said that the pilot became popular with tourists, many who hadn’t ridden on an autonomous vehicle before and sought out the experience.
“The shuttle ran six days a week from 11 in the morning to roughly 7 in the evening. We did slightly modify the operating hours in the summer because of the heat. Generally speaking, it was running a full day cycle. It picked up by the Freemont District that was close to a bus stop,” said Barker.
He noted that the addition of autonomous vehicles to the Keolis operated RTC landscape is an indication as to how the agency continues the TOD in the city of Las Vegas.
After the first pilot, RTC continued to look into ways to expand its reach to new sports arenas, medical areas, the airport and the convention center.
“The city of Las Vegas and RTC are looking to expand autonomous and microtransit to different areas of the city. What we’re looking at now is how we can take the lessons learned in the downtown circulator that we had established and expand that to other parts of the city,” said Barker. “There are discussions going on right now as to what the expansion is going to look like and how many shuttles [would operate].”
Targeting a high traffic area
The area for the GoMed pilot was selected as it was an area that there had not previously been easy access for all riders.
“We have four hospitals in that area, so this shuttle will be able to give a direct circulator to all these medical facilities in this area. Our university is also constructing a new medical school in the area. The other thing is that we just have such a density of residents and riders in that area, that it made a lot of sense,” said Quigley. “We have density of residents, we have density of employment and it is just a destination in and of itself being that [it’s a] medical district and having so many medical facilities. We did it in an area where there are pedestrian safety areas, we’re really focusing on creating a safe pedestrian environment with this grant.”
One such benefit of the autonomous pilot was safety.
“Sometimes it can be very difficult to manage the speeds of vehicles in medical and hospital areas because we can’t have speed bumps for the sake of emergency vehicles. The infrastructure itself doesn’t always give us the ability to slow cars down,” explained Quigley. “Heightened awareness about being able to communicate with cars, vehicles and pedestrians in this area is something that we’re going to be working towards.”
The RTC pilot was a chance to further explore and develop the deployment of autonomous vehicles.
“We already deployed the dedicated short range communication (DSRC) type technology and all of the infrastructure technology for the safe operation of the autonomous vehicles. Now what we want to do is supersize that a little bit. There is that connectivity, not only with the autonomous vehicles, but also with other vehicles [such as] connected cars, our connected fleets and emergency response vehicles,” said Quigley. “It really is a demonstration of the autonomous vehicle technology. A lot of times people are worried that there won’t be a human driver on board, when in face that’s not so. We will always have an ambassador on board or an overseer operator on board.”
Making a smart city
The second grant that RTC received was aimed at TOD in an area with high residential traffic.
“It’s a pilot program grant, as well, for $300,000 and it is our Maryland Parkway Corridor, which is a north/south corridor, but it ends right at the Medical District area. There’s a lot of activity going on in that Maryland Parkway, downtown, Medical District area,” said Quigley.
Quigley explained that the agency has just gone out for public comment on a possible light-rail project along the city’s Mayland Parkway.
“We’ve already been through the preliminary engineering and the NEPA effort, so now we’re out with public comment and our board will be making an alternative decision probably in April or May of this year [2019],” said Quigley.
Having the grant for the area spanned a gap in the offering of the transit agency’s reach.
“The Maryland Parkway Corridor is important to us. If we didn’t have the Resort Corridor, this alignment – the Maryland Parkway – would have been the corridor that our community would have focused on. It’s got over 35,000 vehicles a day driving along it, we currently have about 9,000 riders a day on the service, about 90,000 residents within a mile of the corridor, the University of Nevada Las Vegas in that corridor and our airport is the southern boundary of that corridor,” said Quigley. “There are a lot of destinations and connectivity. We recognize that really being responsible urban planners and transportation planners, we need to focus on tying development with our transit plan and that’s where this grant comes in and allows us to maximize opportunities that high-capacity transit like light rail or BRT, if that’s where our community decides to go with, can potentially bring to this corridor.”
The future of RTC’s alternative mobility
Las Vegas is working towards a further integrated transit future, which will be the focus of 2019.
“I think that, first and foremost, the state of Nevada has been very progressive in encouraging new advancements across the state. It is one of the first states to do autonomous semi-truck testing and now, of course, they’re look at autonomous transit testing to benefit multiple riders at the same time. The state is very business friendly and encouraging adaptations to service,” said Barker.
He adds that one of the unique elements in working with an agency such as the RTC is the level of people that visit the city.
“It’s like hosting the Super Bowl every weekend in Las Vegas. There’s a lot of tourist traffic and residential traffic,” said Barker.
He noted that along with the idea of moving high levels of crowds in Vegas, they also want to look to sustainability. Implementing the autonomous vehicles offer a quiet and all-electric mode that can operate in areas where traffic is high.
“Much of 2019 will be focused on these projects, we take that GoMed grant very seriously. This is one where it is going to require a lot of collaboration through the RTC, the city of Las Vegas, the Medical District and private sector vendors who will help us in building out this system,” said Quigley. “That one we will be putting a lot of effort into. I think that it’s really important that we execute [this project] well and execute [it in a timely way].”
