AV myth buster: Big tech is only for big cities

If you’re looking to take an autonomous vehicle ride, you might think you’ll need to take a trip to a big city near you. That’s because autonomous vehicle (AV) businesses have often captured headlines for deployments in densely populated areas. These big and affluent city deployments may be motivated by the thought that more people equates to more rides, which leads to better revenue generation. Or that large cities such as San Francisco and Phoenix are easy places to set up shop because, in addition to population, sunny skies make it easier to operate AVs. But neither sunny skies nor dense populations are actually requirements, that’s just a myth.

At May Mobility, we’ve realized that the best places to deploy our autonomous vehicle fleets are anywhere there is a need for improved mobility. We believe cutting-edge technology belongs wherever it is most beneficial—from rural communities with just around 10,000 people to suburban neighborhoods to bustling city centers. Here’s why.

Filling transit gaps

It’s not the size of the community that matters. What matters most to us is that we can help your community to develop more equitable transportation solutions. Since our founding in 2017, we’ve deployed AVs in 11 communities (and counting) ranging from 1 to 17 square miles and given more than 335,000 rides in urban, suburban and rural settings. Key to our success has been working with city officials and transit authorities to pinpoint specific pain points and then developing a plan to address them using our autonomous vehicles. And because our focus is on a problem to solve instead of an area to fill, we are willing to go anywhere we are needed.

Does your community have a student population that needs affordable or free transportation to class? We’ve got the capability to cover your university campus. What about a large senior community that needs reliable, on-demand transportation to recreational, shopping and medical centers? We can provide the service to help get them where they need to at the time they want to. Or maybe you need city-wide, accessible transportation for hard-to-reach areas where and when a bus just doesn’t make sense? You can count on our autonomous microtransit solution to help fill in the gaps, big or small.

Turnkey deployments

Bringing in a new high-tech transit system may seem complicated, but we take pride in our ability to make the process seamless. Once the scope of the transit project has been agreed upon, our field autonomy engineers will hit the ground running to map the city streets and plan potential stops around the areas our AVs will be traveling. We then work with one of our transit tech partners to make sure our on-demand service is easily accessible via an app or phone call.

When it comes to vehicle operations and maintenance, we can take care of those logistics too. We will look to hire and train personnel from the local community to support our fleet as it grows. And speaking of community, we make it our mission to engage with and educate them so that everyone understands how to best benefit from our services.

So, the first thing you should be asking yourself is not if your community is big enough but rather, who stands to benefit most from on-demand AV microtransit. Working together, we can create positive change and improve mobility for everybody.

Learn more about our variety of deployments. And if you have any questions or would like to find out how our AVs can best serve your community, reach out and we will respond as soon as we can.

Learn more about our variety of deployments. And if you have any questions or would like to find out how our AVs can best serve your community, reach out and we will respond as soon as we can.