Will Utah pursue autonomous transit? Here's what UTA says could be in the future

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Transit Authority's executive director says the organization has been looking into autonomous vehicles for several years.

However, he said Tuesday that they have no foreseeable plans to emulate Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. with fully automated trains.

"An autonomous FrontRunner, I don't think that's anywhere near around the corner," Jay Fox said. "Same thing, there's no autonomous vehicles I know that are manufacturing in the United States that are 40-foot buses."

Fox spoke with KSL on Tuesday to correct some things that had been said by another UTA official.

"There was actually testing that was done by UDOT and UTA on the technology; I think it was back in 2019," he said.

Fox said they have been working "to gather more information about implementation of AV vehicle network" and recently completed a request for information "to get a better understanding of what connected and autonomous and automated transit solutions there are in the marketplace."

Fox said UTA has been working most with the Jacksonville Transit Authority, which is already "operating an autonomous system."

The Jacksonville agency's Neighborhood Autonomous Vehicle Innovation uses self-driving vans to move people "along their waterfront, servicing a bit of the entertainment district there, the football stadium, the minor league baseball stadium," Fox said.

"Our current long-range transit plan identifies what are known as innovative mobility zones," Fox said, "that could be connected by automated vehicles that would work as the technology matures."

Many FrontRunner stations connect to the mobility zones, and he said the zones are a place where technology could be used.

Fox added that they're "about to deploy ... over the next couple of years, new light rail vehicles. These are high-tech vehicles of the future that have collision avoidance systems."

"There's FrontRunner 2X, which will modernize our FrontRunner system and give us 15-minute service, which will improve our service all around. We've added bus rapid transit," he continued. "The Utah Transit Authority and Utah stakeholders see autonomous vehicles as a piece of that transportation design as we look to the Olympics and beyond. ... We want to show the world a wonderful face in 2034 and move them well. But at the end, that world will move on, and we want to make sure the people who live here are moving well at the same time."

One way they're trying to do that is through the UTA Moves 2055 long-range transit plan. Fox said they want people to review the plan and then comment on the plans so they have a good idea of what people, lawmakers, and shareholders want to see.