GRAND RAPIDS (Minn.) — Myrna Pattison believes that self-driving cars will help people who are disabled and live outside of big cities to escape loneliness and isolation.
Peterson, who has quadriplegia, has been a willing participant in experimenting with autonomous vehicles. This test was conducted in a remote corner of northern Minnesota. She was instrumental in getting government funding for five self-driving cars to be brought to Grand Rapids. This city of 11,000 is located along the Mississippi River amidst pine and birch forests.
In the project’s self-driving vans, a human driver is always in the passenger seat. This person can take control in difficult situations. The computers take control 90% of the time and have given 5,000 rides without an accident since 2022, according to organizers.
It’s been a lot of fun. “I’m really sold,” said Peterson. She used to depend on her power chair to get around the city, even in the winter.
In urban areas such as San Francisco, where the technology is being tested extensively, autonomous vehicles that can drive themselves are a hot topic.
In a few states, such as Iowa or Ohio, rural experiments have also been conducted. Peterson hopes that the pilot projects will help to bring about a time when fully autonomous vans and cars can assist the estimated 25,000,000 Americans who are limited in their travel by disabilities.
As automakers and tech companies struggle to perfect this technology, fully autonomous vehicles are still a long way off. General Motors, for instance, recalled its self-driving vehicles recently after one of them hit and dragged an injured pedestrian.
Waymo is a Google-affiliated company that has been able to launch fully autonomous taxis in several cities successfully.
Peterson believes that autonomous vehicles will one day be safer than those driven by humans.
She said, “Look how many times it failed before the lightbulb worked.”
Grand Rapids, unlike many smaller towns in the United States, has a public bus system and a taxi company. Peterson, however, said that these options are not always effective for everyone. She said that the autonomous vehicle program known as goMARTI (which stands for Minnesota’s Autonomous Rural Transit Initiative) offers a flexible option. She hopes that it will eventually ease a nationwide shortage of drivers, which is especially acute in rural areas.
The project will be funded until spring 2027, with over $13 million coming from federal, state, and local sources.
The unique Toyota minivans for the project are outfitted by May Mobility in Michigan, which Japanese auto giant Toyota and other investors have backed. Slogans on the van’s side invite people to “Experience self-driving in Minnesota’s Nature.” They are packed with technology, including cameras, radars, GPS, and laser sensors. Jon Dege, a May Mobility project manager, says that their computer systems are constantly monitoring the environment and learning from what they see.
Users can arrange for free rides using a smartphone application or by calling the 211 telephone service.
A goMARTI van stopped near Peterson’s home on a recent cold afternoon. She emerged shortly after, wearing a purple parka in honor of her favorite Minnesota Vikings football club. She then rolled her wheelchair up the ramp and into the van. Mark Haase, the van operator, helped secure the wheelchair and then climbed into the driver’s chair to demonstrate.
The steering wheel shook as the van pulled out onto the road, as if the computer had made tiny adjustments. Haase held his foot near the brake and his hands around the steering, ready to take control if there was a problem. He pressed the button to tell the computer to resume control after a few moments. Haase says that at first, it was strange, but it wasn’t long before he became accustomed to the system and began to trust it.
The Minnesota Department of Transportation directed federal funds to the Grand Rapids Project, following a similar project in Rochester in southern Minnesota. Tara Olds is the director of connected and autonomous vehicles at the Minnesota Department of Transportation. She said that her agency was looking for smaller communities who were interested in trying out autonomous cars.
Olds stated that neither type of driver is perfect. She said, “Humans make mistakes and computers make errors.” She said that the public would react differently if an autonomous vehicle caused a fatal accident instead of a person.
Frank Douma is a research scholar with the University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies. He has studied the Grand Rapids Project and other autonomous vehicle programs. He said that running projects in smaller towns was not necessarily more difficult than in urban areas. It’s different.
He said that in the near future, these services will probably need to follow predetermined routes with regular stops. It would be difficult to send autonomous vehicles to unknown addresses in the country.
