See the video of NAVI: the nation’s first autonomous vehicle service
The Jacksonville Transportation Authority held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the launch Monday of passengers being able to ride in the nation’s first autonomous vehicle service called NAVI, which is short for Neighborhood Autonomous Vehicle Innovation.
- Jacksonville, Florida, is the first U.S. city to integrate driverless autonomous vehicles into its public transit system.
- The Jacksonville Transportation Authority (JTA) launch of the NAVI shuttle service will offer free rides through Sept. 30th.
- The NAVI system utilizes a network of sensors and cameras for navigation.
- JTA plans to replace the current fleet with purpose-built Holon autonomous shuttles in 2027.
The self-driving transit shuttles the Jacksonville Transportation Authority has been conceptualizing, designing, testing, engineering and building over the past seven years will finally hit the streets for passengers to ride them on an everyday basis in downtown Jacksonville.
JTA will start offering rides on the Bay Street corridor at 7 a.m. June 30, making Jacksonville the first city in the nation where rubber-tired autonomous vehicles, which don’t need onboard drivers to operate them, are a regular part of the mass transit system.
JTA eventually will charge a $1.75 fare per trip on the shuttles. But riding them will be free through Sept. 30 as the agency encourages people to check out the shuttles running between the office tower district of downtown and the sports complex via Bay Street.
“We really want them to come out and experience it and give us the feedback,” JTA CEO Nat Ford said. “We need to design it with their expectations in mind.”
At a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the service on June 27, Ford called the roll-out of the service both revolutionary for its first-in-the-nation status among public transit agencies and also evolutionary for how JTA will make adjustments over time. He compared it to the way advances in the Internet rapidly transformed cell phones and other technology.
The results in Jacksonville will play a role in whether other transit agencies move in the same direction of embracing autonomous shuttles.
JTA is among the agencies across the nation that have brought in autonomous shuttles for short-term trials. The difference this time is JTA is all-in on the service being a permanent part of its transit network.
The U.S. Department of Transportation and the state Department of Transportation both awarded grants to JTA for the Bay Street service and will be assessing its performance. Officials from Denver, Salt Lake City, Atlanta and Greensboro, N.C. have talked to JTA and in some cases visited Jacksonville.
“The spotlight is on our city,” Ford said at the ceremony that cut a ribbon at the stop next to VyStar Ballpark. “Let’s shine.”
Technology like “virtual rails” guiding autonomous shuttles
In a city where mass transit has long taken a backseat to the automobile, the most crucial assessment will come from residents and visitors deciding whether they will use NAVI, which is short for Neighborhood Autonomous Vehicle Innovation.
NAVI, which is pronounced like “navigation” and rhymes with “savvy,” will run from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday on a 3.5 mile route that JTA calls the Bay Street Innovation Corridor. The system will have 12 covered stations where the electric-powered NAVI shuttle will arrive every seven minutes.
JTA spent $65 million to create the initial leg of the system, including the construction of a new command center on West Bay Street and 14 electric-powered vehicles that have NAVI brightly painted on their sides.
JTA awarded a five-year contract for up to $36.3 million with Orlando-based Beep, Inc. for handling operations and maintenance of NAVI on the Bay Street service.
The vehicles have gone through months of testing at test tracks and then on a precisely mapped route in downtown Jacksonville “down to inches” for the vehicles to travel, said Joe Moye, vice chairman of Beep.
“Imagine it as virtual rails,” he said.
Each vehicle is equipped with 10 cameras, four lidar sensors, seven radars, and multiple dedicated satellite receivers. That technology constantly communicates with similarly high-tech equipment embedded along the route.
“That’s the equivalent of 10 sets of eyes that are constantly surveying the area and responding to and ultimately directing the vehicle, whether it needs to slow, stop, avoid an incident,” Moye said. “It’s substantially more visibility than a human will ever have in a vehicle.”
JTA will have a human operator on board to take control of the vehicle as needed during the initial months of running the service. But eventually, the only people in the NAVI shuttles will be the passengers themselves.
The route will act as an extension of the Skyway, the elevated monorail that runs through downtown and was conceived decades ago as a larger system that would include an extension to the sports complex.
Instead of expanding the Skway monorail, JTA plans to convert the elevated structure so the NAVI shuttles can operate on it and connect to surface-level streets by using ramps. Future plans would extend NAVI on streets to surrounding neighborhoods such as San Marco, Springfield, Brooklyn and Riverside.
NAVI ridership will hinge on growth of downtown
NAVI’s ability to draw riders will be closely tied to the development of downtown.
Mayor Donna Deegan noted JTA cut the ribbon for NAVI three days after City Council approved an agreement for the University of Florida to build a new graduate campus along West Bay Street in the LaVilla section of downtown where the Skway runs.
She said that will give downtown the UF campus on one end of Bay Street and the sports and entertainment complex — home to the arena, baseball park, football stadium, and amphitheater — on the other end “with so much to do in between.”
She talked about how a UF student finishing a long day of classes could hop on a NAVI shuttle for a trip down to Manifest Distilling or Intitution Ale Works at the sports complex and then get on NAVI again to catch a concert at Decca Live on Bay Street.
Or a family could go for few hours to the new Museum of Science and History that will be built off Bay Street near the sports complex, then go to Riverfront Plaza for its playground and cafe, and finish the outing with a nighttime performance at the symphony.
“I cannot wait to take a ride and create my own adventure, and I’m sure a lot of you feel the same way,” she said. “Today’s announcement has been years in the making, and it would not be possible without bold vision.”
At least in the short term, those adventures connected to NAVI will take place between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. weekdays. That will be shorter than the Skyway’s schedule of 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday. Unlike regular JTA buses that run seven days a week, NAVI won’t have weekend service.
That means NAVI won’t operate on nights and weekends when the sports and entertainment district is busiest with concerts and games at its venues, or when The Elbow entertainment district anchored by the Florida Theatre draws its biggest crowds to blocks of nightclubs and restaurants along the Bay Street corridor.
Ford said JTA will put NAVI into service for special events outside the regular service as it has done with the Skway. He said the agency will look to expand the regular operating hours as more development comes into the area of the sports complex such as completion of the Four Seasons Hotel & Residences Jacksonville and future construction of a new Museum of Science and History.
“This is just the beginning,” he said. “As we grow the fleet and actually expand the system, we can see it frankly at a very cost-effective manner operating much greater than 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.”
NAVI will switch in a couple of years to Holon shuttles
Ford said the benefit of using autonomous shuttles, as opposed to building a far more costly system using streetcars, is JTA can customize the service by adding shuttles to meet ridership demand. Those shuttles carry fewer passengers than a standard bus does, but JTA can increase and decrease the number of shuttles on the route depending on how many people use the service.
“It’s not so much the size of the vehicles,” he said. “It’s a combination of the size of the vehicles and frequency and what could be provided because of the autonomy.”
The type of vehicles in the NAVI system also will change in the coming years.
The $12.5 million federal grant awarded to JTA in 2020 requires the use of of made-in-America vehicles, a mandate that prevented the purchase of foreign-built autonomous shuttles built specifically for transit.
JTA instead bought electric powered Ford cargo vans and retrofitted them for passenger uses. German-based Holon plans to build a manufacturing plant in Jacksonville for rolling out shuttles that will be purpose-built for the NAVI system. When those become available around 2027, JTA will switch over to them.
In the meantime, JTA will be using the current fleet to adjust the balance between safety and performance.
When the technology detects an upcoming conflict, whether it might be a slower-moving vehicle ahead or someone opening a car door while parked along Bay Street, the NAVI vehicle quickly reacts. That translates to some abrupt stops that passengers wouldn’t encounter if a human driver was in control.
“We want it to have the safest system at the initial launch,,” Ford said.
He said as JTA gathers more data from operating the system in the specific conditions of the Bay Street route, it can make adjustments that maintain the safety while smoothing out the reaction of the autonomous vehicles.
He said that’s where JTA will be seeking feedback from passengers about their experiences.
“It’s important for us to convey that this is one of the first deployments of this type of technology on a permanent basis in the United States, which is remarkable in and of itself,” he said. “Does it need some fine-tuning? Yes. And we’ll evolve and continue to fine-tune it.”