Schiphol conducts trial with self-driving buses on airside | Hacker News Reader

Schiphol conducts trial with self-driving buses on airside

news.schiphol.com

66 pointsriezebos72 comments

From YouTube comments, it seems was an experiment of 2023 with video only uploaded now. It also looks like was not that successful, as they were too slow, and ended up causing problems for the meat based drivers...

They're made of meat?

Especially if the observer is a tiger!

Totally: https://youtu.be/T6JFTmQCFHg

Originally by Terry Bisson, 1991:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They're_Made_Out_of_Meat

* https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

From one comment. Not comments. The rest of the pessimistic comments, like yours, are from a position lacking any experience of this vehicle.

Dont blame the messenger. Why don't you fill us in on the project status?

I don't comment on things where I don't have a qualified opinion.

I will say, like the anonymous commenter you are paraphrasing, I have encountered many "meat-based" drivers who are frustrated with how the autonomous vehicle under my supervision is travelling at the posted speed limit, rather than illegally enabling them to save neurotic seconds on their drive.

>> to investigate what the advantages of autonomous transport can be and what employees think of it.

Lets not kid ourselves. The only real "advantage" would have been one less driver earning a paycheck.

I've been on the airside passenger busses at Schipol. They move faster than the average bus. I cannot see this tiny thing ever competing with those pro drivers.

Availability outside hours where it's not currently feasible to have a driver.

Immunity to strikes, illness, and all those pesky complexities with meat and flesh

Complex human flesh is the point of all this stuff we make and do, maybe we shouldn’t put all that meat out of a job for no good economic reason? Busses, trains, ships, etc don’t need to be automated, one or a few professional humans can operate those cheaper and safer than an advanced AI system.

Just seems like a stupid thing for those humans to have to do, unless they really like driving out of leisure

> Lets not kid ourselves. The only real "advantage" would have been one less driver earning a paycheck.

Given that all modern, developed countries have to fight with a population decrease, this is actually a good thing. We have to prepare for a future where there will be barely anyone left to do relatively low-skill jobs, and the earlier we begin to automate them, the better - otherwise, we'll be in quite the bind in a decade or two, once the last boomers that work high into their 80s just to survive are finally dead.

Yes they are among the fastest buses I've ever been on. They drive like they are on a race track.

Self driving is a bit of a stretch here. There are already a lot locations around the world where autonomous vehicles are driving, even in the Nederlands.

For example in the Netherlands there is a container terminal that has been using autonomous trucks for decades. And since 1999 there have been autonomous busses in Rotterdam.

Yes they are self driving, but not as smart as self driving means today.

What makes that possible? Closed course, has to stay on tracks?

Magnets!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ParkShuttle

Yes there doesn’t seem to be anything interesting here. They obviously aren’t developing anything remotely like the Waymo/Cruise tech, and no reason to think they’ve developed anything useful even within some highly constrained setting. I’d guess it’s a corporate feel-good project that will be wound down after the press release.

Self-driving in ports is a vastly simpler problem though because the environment can be closed and controlled and devoid of any UX concerns, making it basically a simple robotics problem.

Any chance we can get the title modified to read "Schiphol airport ..." as many won't know if this is a company, a town, or what until paragraph 4 of the press release?

Schipol is quite a famous airport, though.

I'd be quite confident that the vast majority of people who don't live in or travel to Europe a lot have never heard of it.

I only learned about it last week because I was considering a trip to Amsterdam. But I'm also happy to have "airport" added to "JFK" "ORD" or "SFO" which strike me as obviously airports.

Never heard of schipol. I’m sure there are many things I think are very famous that you’ve never heard of as well. World is big yadda yadda I think two words to explain what a schipol was would be nice is all

It's literally Amsterdam Airport? I don't think it needs clarification. It's like saying "JFK/Heathrow/LAX conducts trial with self-driving buses on airside"

I think OP is saying people don't know that. Like, similarly, someone might say "What is JFK?" in your example.

Hum... I don't automatically read any of those names as airports. The title is a bit clear because of the "airside", but people that don't have lots of experiency in airports won't recognize that word either.

I have no idea where JFK or Heathrow airports are. Next time please include a location in your message too. ;)

Half of people I know wouldnt recognize LAX just casually mentioned, you may realize 95% of human population doesnt live in US and folks from many backgrounds come here.

I for example know the name only due to flying to/from it during work & travel stint during university times, otherwise nope. Simply not that famous in Europe, even JFK as an airport name aint guaranteed to be recognized here (but more than LAX).

It's a pretty big global airport, isn't it? Maybe for freight more than passangers, but I definitely know the name and I've never been to the Netherlands.

A quick look on wikipedia says it has about the same passenger and freight numbers as JFK, though I guess that's more well known because of all the sitcoms set in New York.

> many won't know if this is a company, a town, or what until paragraph 4 of the press release?

The word "airside" in the title already gives a pretty enormous clue !

I think there's enough uncertainty in the post where assuming it's an airport would have a significant chance of being wrong. Nobody enjoys being corrected on a mistaken "obvious" assumption.

I'm with you! I thought it was a town for most of the release. I didn't know what "airside" meant either, pardon my ignorance. I've never encountered that word in American English.

Seconded

I was at Dulles/DC and the air-side transportation was interesting: the jetbridge was also a bus. It's a "mobile lounge" and I guess a few airports have them. There's definitely something interesting when transit isn't seen as transit...but just mobile public spaces?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_lounge

Tom Scott video (because of course he did one):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3OqAN4ISOw

Yep, Dulles opened just as jet bridges became common. They were originally used for embarkation/disembarkation as well.

These days, they're mostly used to transport international arrivals from the gates (which have jet bridges) to the terminal that contains immigration control. Non-international have an option to use the lounges or a subway (usually depending on which gate you're at and where you need to go - sometime the lounge is faster than the train).

A bit of an anachronism today. But, having grown up in the DC area, they're definitely have a nostalgia factor.

These things have a high 'what might have been' future factor, but man they are annoying in practice. Because you have to wait for everyone to cram inside, it feels much slower than a train or moving walkway. They're very frustrating after a long flight when you just want to get to customs and get home.

I grew up near Dulles. Everybody seems to hate on the mobile lounges, but I've never not beaten my luggage to the baggage claim, and I haven't found it any quicker to get from my gate to the exit at other similarly large airports. In any event they are being retired in favor of below-ground trains.

Partly, that's because the luggage processing is very slow on international flights at Dulles. You have to go through immigration, which can be time consuming (though the automated ones are better of late). There's no reason you should get to baggage claim ahead of the baggage.

Aside from that, though... I think it's just that it feels like an additional step. You want to get going -- especially if you're the sort of person who moves quickly through airports -- and now you're just waiting as the lounge fills up. After a long international flight, you don't want to be sitting and waiting.

I won't be sorry to see the mobile lounges go. They were a clever idea at the time, but they're hardly "lounges" these days. They're just buses, at a time when you really, really don't want to be taking a bus.

> Partly, that's because the luggage processing is very slow on international flights at Dulles. You have to go through immigration, which can be time consuming (though the automated ones are better of late). There's no reason you should get to baggage claim ahead of the baggage.

Somewhat OT, but I just realized I've never flown internationally from Dulles. I've flown internationally a fair amount, and I've flown from Dulles a lot, but never the two together.

Less OT, everything I wrote was for domestic flights.

IAD is the only airport I've been to where I've spent an hour at immigration and then walked through to the luggage claims hall to find that my airline's ground handler still hadn't loaded bags from my flight on the carousel (note this was a full hour at least after arrival) so I had to wait even longer there! Every other port I've had long immigration processing, the good thing was my bags were usually already on the carousel. Interestingly, LAX on the other hand was a breeze, my bags was already on the carousel just as I walked in the hall. A brisk walk to intercept my bag as it rolled around and I was outside within minuites. YMMV but IAD is not an airport I'm keen to use anytime soon! :)

Immigration at Dulles is faster than it used to be, at least for Americans. They're expanding the automated system, with a lot of kiosks. (I'm not entirely sure how that's different from GlobalEntry.)

Which just gives you more time to wait for your bags, I'm afraid. They're building a lot of new infrastructure which might help eventually.

> They were a clever idea at the time, but they're hardly "lounges" these days. They're just buses, at a time when you really, really don't want to be taking a bus.

Yeah they're definitely just buses that can open on each end at this point. They aspired to be lounges and they kind of convey (ha) what could have been. An actual automated mobile lounge isn't that crazy, right? Automation+batter power does make it more appealing.

You don't really want to be in a lounge at all after getting off, you just want to get where you're going. That's why most airports have lounges in departures but not in arrivals. A lounge that you could wait in until boarding time and have it pull up to your plane then might be nice, but with today's "security" procedures you'd need to have all of that built into the mobile section as well, which seems difficult.

Care for an extra dollop of motion sickness after your long flight? Welcome aboard the IAD people movers!

I was flying to Schiphol on Monday and use that airport as my favorite for long-haul flights, even though I'm from Germany. It's a really nice airport.

It's one of my least favorite airports in Europe. The number of times my luggage got lost there alone is enough for me to avoid whenever possible. The shops and restaurants are also extremely bland.

The needed context seems to be that the person you are replying to is German. I don't love Schiphol either, but it beats any German airport (looking at Frankfurt in particular).

What’s a nice large European airport? I feel like I’ve heard terrible things of all of them, like LHR and CDG.

Copenhagen is quite nice.

I would argue that's the only nice airport in Scandinavia even! Would say the worst layout on an airport i've ever seen is Stockholm Arlanda.

Copenhagen airport is my favourite too - note however that Arlanda T5 is being expanded at the moment and it seems like it will be a lot nicer when they're finished. The security stuff is already much better: no need to unpack laptops etc. from hand luggage when going through the new section. T2 is still quite sucky though!

OSL is fine too. And it's not like there's a huge number of large hubs in Scandinavia…

Except for the incredibly low ceilings in some places.

I like Heathrow when travelling to or from London. It's huge, but there's public transport to each terminal, a reasonable selection of restaurants and generally somewhere to sit. It's fairly quiet.

Changing between terminals at Heathrow is much less fun.

CDG I find confusing.

>Changing between terminals at Heathrow is much less fun.

I decided to stay at a Heathrow airport hotel a while back. Turned out I had to change terminals and I'm pretty sure it took me at least as long as getting a shuttle bus to one of the hotels would have taken.

You often have to walk quite a ways too.

Overall though Heathrow is pretty good among the large European airports.

I actually kinda enjoy the distance between terminals. After a long international flight, I deliberately take the tunnel, and skip the moving walkways. As long as I'm not rushing to make a connection, the walk is really nice.

Frankfurt is atrocious, but Munich is great.

> The shops and restaurants are also extremely bland.

Worse than Frankfurt? It seems like the only food you can get there is a hot-dog...

Schiphol AMS is my favorite European airport.

It’s not as great as SIN, ICN or the once dominant HKG though.

Whenever I travel in a group through Shiphol, at least one piece of luggage gets missing every time. Yes, they manage to get it back to you eventually (although I did lose an expensive pair of running shoes there), but the amount of hoops you have to jump through at times is complete madness. After ten years of going over Shiphol 1-2 per year, I'm now at a point where I just try to find a route around it.

Weird, Schiphol is my least favorite major airport. Poor dining options, for one, but the worst is how narrow the pathways are. If you're trying to pass a gate that's within twenty minutes of the boarding time, you've got to push through a crowd. (And I can't blame the crowd, as there's not nearly enough seating.)

This is when flying Air France/KLM within Europe. Maybe it's better in other terminals.

I hate Schiphol, and my family tend to call it by a name that rhymes.

I've several times made it from a hotel room in town to my gate at Schiphol in under an hour. Without trying, and walking/taking the train from central.

As people already mention positive aspects about Schiphol. The new hand luggage scanners allow you to finally take liquids of any volume with you, forget max 100ml sized containers. One of the few airports that has them afaik

Is "autonomous ground operation" a valid ambition in and of itself? Surely it needs qualification

- which means that ...

Next step: Going down from your plane, your Apple Video Bus strolls around the tarmac, passes through a giant Xray scanner, checks your passport (embedded on your seat), suggests a thousand duty-free products and makes you wear a luxury watch for about 8 seconds just for marketing, rolls straight onto the highway and drops you off at the hotel. No airport facilities.

i don't know about self-driveing..

what would be far-better and far-easier, is just to use electrical buses instead of those diesel never-ever-turned-off 24/7 smoke-producers-on-wheels. in all airports. poor or Rich..

but no.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com