>>1712215Absolutely, the ones I have seen / ridden are 100% separated.
These days though I see other things like automatic crosswalk flashers that can use smart cameras to detect when a person walks or bikes up to them, differentiate between pedestrians bikes, horses, motorcycles and cars, and make the flashers work without pressing a crosswalk button.
Busses on major routes with a lot of stops are lucky to average out to 20mph-25mph. we are not talking about a tesla doing 65 through moderate traffic on an unpredictable route
I feel like smart tech could be leveraged for some (not all) of these public transit applications. Since the bus is going so slow and it knows it's route it gains extra reaction time, it also has the benefit of utilizing the route itself for extra sensors, if you have smart cameras at fixed positions feeding info into the same system, the trolley could know exactly where any other vehicle or person that it could potentially need to interact with currently is and likely will be when they intersect the trolley's route.
This could be backed up by a live person at a control center with automatic threat assessment provided by a computer tracking all of these people and vehicles, from both static smart cameras along the route and on vehicle smart cameras for up close work, and a real live person who can monitor high risk scenarios and step in to take manual control if necessary.
More of a mostly automated ecosystem, rather than a fully automated vehicle.
