Accessibility Features in Autonomous Shuttle Services

11 Ms Denise Phua Lay Peng asked the Acting Minister for Transport what accessibility and inclusion features will be incorporated into autonomous shuttle services to support wheelchair users, users who are not proficient in English, families with strollers, blind users and deaf persons.

The Senior Minister of State for Transport (Ms Sun Xueling) (for the Acting Minister for Transport): In the initial pilot phase of the deployment, a safety operator, who will be on board the autonomous vehicle (AV) shuttle, can assist passengers. Ambassadors will also be on the ground to assist with boarding, alighting and journey planning. Only larger AVs like the eight-seater Robobus autonomous shuttle will be able to accommodate folded wheelchairs and strollers at the moment, but in time there will be more of such vehicles.

Safety is our key priority. We will work with the AV operators to consider the accessibility and inclusivity of AV rides for commuters with different mobility needs.

Mr Speaker: Ms Phua.

Ms Denise Phua Lay Peng (Jalan Besar): I thank the Senior Minister of State. My supplementary question is this: whether the Ministry and other Government agencies as well would seriously adopt the principle of universal design in the designing of services and their products and other offerings as well? The old model of design is really to accommodate, which is to design, for example, a standard vehicle, for average, then, after the pilot, add on as an afterthought, features for special groups, which can be costly and also can be clumsy.

The universal design mindset really suggests that from day one, designers, policy-makers and operators actually consider a larger audience, the overall users and then add in features – accessibility and inclusivity features – that will benefit, in this case, not just the disabled and the elderly, but also users with baby prams, heavy luggage or even trolleys. So, my supplementary question is therefore, would agencies, including Ministry of Transport, SMRT already does quite a bit of that, adopt this mindset and philosophy of universal design?

Ms Sun Xueling: I thank the Member for her supplementary question, as well as her feedback. Indeed, we would like to do more for our commuters with different needs.

I would just like to add that for the AV shuttles, because at the current moment we are buying vehicles from the market and they are of a smaller size. Most of them now are five-seaters and, as a result of that, these very small number of vehicles – there are about 10 of them right now in this pilot phase – do not fully include all the design parameters that we would like to have to be able to serve as diverse a spectrum of needs of commuters as possible.

So, what we would like to do moving forward is that we will share this feedback that the Member has with the manufacturers of these AV shuttles and look at how to incorporate this right from the onset, rather than have to add on subsequently, which would add on cost, just as the Member has shared.

Separately, where we are able to do so, in terms of the infrastructure on the ground, whether it is at the pick-up and drop-off points or the bus stops, when we scale up the AV shuttles to a larger scale, with more vehicles and more AV shuttles on the roads, we will definitely adopt a universal design philosophy so that we do not have to add on subsequently, which would incur costs in terms of infrastructure.