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Schiphol conducts trial with self-driving buses on airside
- davidkuennen 2y agoI 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.
- ginko 2y agoIt'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.
- firloop 2y agoThe 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).
- bobthepanda 2y agoWhat’s a nice large European airport? I feel like I’ve heard terrible things of all of them, like LHR and CDG.
- ginko 2y agoCopenhagen is quite nice.
- peterpost2 2y agoI 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.
- dcminter 2y agoCopenhagen 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!
- varjag 2y agoOSL is fine too. And it's not like there's a huge number of large hubs in Scandinavia…
- mdturnerphys 2y agoExcept for the incredibly low ceilings in some places.
- Symbiote 2y agoI 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.
- ghaff 2y ago>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.
- rootusrootus 2y agoI 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.
- belter 2y agoFrankfurt is atrocious, but Munich is great.
- Detrytus 2y ago> 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...
- wenc 2y agoSchiphol AMS is my favorite European airport. It’s not as great as SIN, ICN or the once dominant HKG though.
- rf15 2y agoWhenever 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.
- dustincoates 2y agoWeird, 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.
- sfjailbird 2y agoI hate Schiphol, and my family tend to call it by a name that rhymes.
- alamortsubite 2y agoI'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.
- tdudhhu 2y agoSelf 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.
- ironmagma 2y agoWhat makes that possible? Closed course, has to stay on tracks?
- smokel 2y agoMagnets! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ParkShuttle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ParkShuttle
- jessriedel 2y agoYes 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.
- bangkoksbest 2y agoSelf-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.
- belter 2y agoFrom 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...
- IncreasePosts 2y agoThey're made of meat?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- knicholes 2y agoEspecially if the observer is a tiger!
- belter 2y agoTotally: https://youtu.be/T6JFTmQCFHg https://youtu.be/T6JFTmQCFHg
- throw0101c 2y agoOriginally by Terry Bisson, 1991: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They're_Made_Out_of_Meat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They're_Made_Out_of_Meat * https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
- elif 2y agoFrom one comment. Not comments. The rest of the pessimistic comments, like yours, are from a position lacking any experience of this vehicle.
- belter 2y agoDont blame the messenger. Why don't you fill us in on the project status?
- interestica 2y agoI 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_lounge
- 0xcde4c3db 2y agoTom Scott video (because of course he did one): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3OqAN4ISOw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3OqAN4ISOw
- alistairSH 2y agoYep, 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.
- showerst 2y agoThese 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.
- aidenn0 2y agoI 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.
- beardyw 2y agoIs "autonomous ground operation" a valid ambition in and of itself? Surely it needs qualification - which means that ...
- eastbound 2y agoNext 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.
- wantsanagent 2y agoAny 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?
- k8sToGo 2y agoSchipol is quite a famous airport, though.
- wantsanagent 2y agoI 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.
- ghaff 2y agoI'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.
- Sirizarry 2y agoNever 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
- isodev 2y agoIt'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"
- afavour 2y agoI think OP is saying people don't know that. Like, similarly, someone might say "What is JFK?" in your example.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
- sandworm101 2y ago>> 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.
- flemhans 2y agoAvailability 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
- ok_dad 2y agoComplex 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.
- flemhans 2y agoJust seems like a stupid thing for those humans to have to do, unless they really like driving out of leisure
- mschuster91 2y ago> 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.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
- svilen_dobrev 2y agoi 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.
- uebdkdxsndndh 2y agoAs 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