Singapore to pilot self-driving buses, but crash puts focus on safety

Singapore's Land Transport Authority (LTA) says it will be piloting the use of self-driving buses as well as conducting research to improve real-tine monitoring of the national rail system. It signed an agreement to partner the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) on joint research initiatives to improve the country's rail networks, with plans to develop a real-time monitoring prototype to identify early signs of defects. The transport authority said this would involve the use of fault diagnostic capabilities that could be tapped anytime without any disruption to train operations. LTA and NTU also would be running pilots involving two driverless 12-metre buses, LTA said in a statement Wednesday. The two projects would be led by the LTA-NTU Transport Research Centre, which was set up in November 2015 to run research and technical trials using advanced technologies in the local industry.