Skip to main content

Autonomous shuttle passenger injured following sudden stop

A 76-year-old passenger travelling on an autonomous shuttle has been injured after the vehicle came to an unexpected stop, says KUTV. Gene Petrie, an employee at the Utah State Tax Commission, was thrown from his seat and hit the handrail near the door, resulting in bruising and black eyes. Charlie Roberts, spokesman for the Utah State Tax Commission, is quoted saying: “Out of the clear blue, it suddenly stopped, and it wasn’t a slow-down stop. It was a sudden stop.” Petrie went to the hospital f
August 6, 2019 Read time: 2 mins

A 76-year-old passenger travelling on an autonomous shuttle has been injured after the vehicle came to an unexpected stop, says %$Linker: 2 External <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><dictionary /> 0 0 0 link-external KUTV false https://kutv.com/news/local/first-injury-on-utahs-driverless-shuttle-during-unexpected-stop false false%>.

Gene Petrie, an employee at the Utah State Tax Commission, was thrown from his seat and hit the handrail near the door, resulting in bruising and black eyes.

Charlie Roberts, spokesman for the Utah State Tax Commission, is quoted saying: “Out of the clear blue, it suddenly stopped, and it wasn’t a slow-down stop. It was a sudden stop.”

Petrie went to the hospital for treatment and returned to work the next day. He is a state worker travelling on the shuttle near the Multi Agency State Office Building while the 1904 Utah Department of Transportation (UDoT) is testing the technology.

John Gleason, UDoT spokesman, says: “As soon as this happened, we took the shuttle out of service immediately for about 24 hours and ran a bunch of tests on it, ran through the emergency stops, looked at the software, looked at the sensors.”

The cause of the sudden stop is unknown as no one noticed a pedestrian or obstacle that may have tripped a sensor.

“You hate to see an incident like that, but we’re confident in the overall safety of the shuttle and we’ve taken a lot of precautions to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again,” Gleason adds.

The UDoT has reduced the shuttle’s speed from 12 miles per hour to 9. The operator is now more frequently warning people that abrupt stops are possible.

Related Content

  • September 26, 2019
    Lyft app gets bike lanes to encourage safer cycling
    Lyft is adding protected bike lanes and bike-friendly routes to its app to encourage more people to use two-wheeled transportation. The Verge reports that the protected bike lanes will appear as dark green lines in the app while bike-friendly routes that are less protected will be represented as dotted green lines. The feature is available for Lyft bikes and scooter-sharing services on iOS devices, with Android to follow soon. Lyft’s head of micromobility policy, Caroline Samponaro, says: “Each ride
  • May 31, 2013
    Connected cones make for safer sites
    David Crawford welcomes new lives for old road safety products. Traffic cones and barrels have traditionally been on the bottom shelf of the road construction and maintenance industry, typically forming visible soft safety barriers for temporary works at a lower cost than concrete alternatives. On both sides of the Atlantic, however, they are fast gaining new roles as instrumented components in advanced construction safety arrays. The EC-sponsored €1 million (US$1.31 million) Safelane collaborative innovati
  • February 13, 2019
    Zero-emission transport at centre of Democrat ‘Green New Deal’
    Clean and affordable transportation and zero-emission vehicle infrastructure are at the heart of the US Democrats’ ‘Green New Deal’ package. The proposals seek to move the US away from fossil fuels and other sources of emissions that cause global warming within the next decade. The package says these goals can be reached by reached by a ten-year “national mobilisation” which include an overhaul in transportation systems to eliminate pollution and greenhouse as much as technologically feasible, repai
  • October 29, 2019
    LG U+ uses app to summon AV at South Korea demo
    LG U+ demonstrated how a smartphone app can be used to summon an autonomous vehicle (AV) at the LG Science Park in Seoul, South Korea. A report by Korea Joongang Daily says an LG U+ employee summoned the AV connected to the carrier’s 5G network from a nearby car park and was able to monitor the car’s location through the app. Once inside the AV, the employee used the app to initiate a 2.5km journey around the park while a safety driver remained in the front seat. During the trial, a manually operated