RI tested autonomous vehicles five years ago. Here’s how it turned out.

PROVIDENCE – Little Roady, a six-seat self-driving shuttle bus, began making rounds from the Providence railroad station to Olneyville and back in 2019, as part of a one-year pilot program to test out their suitability as a transit alternative for Rhode Island.

After testing the vehicle out for three months on less busy roads in Quonset Point, the Rhode Island Department of Transportation offered the service free to riders on the Providence route beginning in May. Less sophisticated than driverless vehicles today, Little Roady stuck to a fixed route, mapped out for it.

The service got around the legal prohibition of autonomous vehicles on Rhode Island roads because it wasn’t fully autonomous; a human attendant sat in the driver’s seat and took control when the self-driving vehicle couldn’t handle a situation.

In the first nine months of the pilot, Little Roady gave more than 33,000 rides. During that period, the shuttles were involved in 11 “incidents” with other vehicles or objects, according to the DOT. All of those happened when a human attendant was operating the vehicle, and none involved injuries.

Although there had been talk of extending the pilot for a second year, the program came to an end in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and wasn’t renewed.

“What it taught us is the technology was not ready for the roads,” DOT spokesman Charles St. Martin told The Journal last month. The attendant had to take the wheel too often for left turns, he said.

The pilot program, operated by May Mobility, was paid for with $500,000 in Volkswagen emissions scandal settlement money, $580,000 in federal research funds and $145,000 in state dollars.