Florida's population recently surpassed 22 million and is growing at the eighth-fastest rate in the country, thanks largely to a flood of Northeasterners and Midwesterners moving south for better weather and lower taxes. This influx is good for the state's economy. But it's also creating tremendous infrastructure challenges -- especially when it comes to transportation. As anyone who has sat in Miami's or Orlando's infamous bumper-to-bumper traffic can attest, the Sunshine State has some of the worst congestion in the country. Fortunately, traffic might not bedevil Floridians much longer. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced sensor technology are poised to make public transit far more convenient and attractive to potential riders currently stuck with the 10th-worst commute times in the United States.

Of all the ways AI is expected to improve modern life, perhaps none is more intriguing than its impact on mass transit. The pandemic will not last forever. So, at some point, people around the world will once again need to move from place to place quickly, efficiently, and at a reasonable cost. In most cities, however, mass transit systems like subways, buses, and planes already struggle to keep up with rider levels, resulting in gridlock, accidents, and dissatisfied consumers. But since these are mostly problems of logistics, and logistics thrive on data analysis, AI stands ready to provide dramatic improvements to our mobility. Park City, Utah, for example, recently became the 500th city to implement a platform called Optibus.

Self-driving cars might spark solo occupancy, rather than increasing the number of occupants per ... [ ] trip. Today's ridesharing via Uber and Lyft is supposed to get more people to share rides and therefore cut down on the number of trips made, along with making more efficient use of cars and roadways, plus saving the earth by knocking down the volume of harmful exhaust emissions. Unfortunately, contemporary ridesharing is more akin to ride-hailing than it is to actual ride sharing. By-and-large, people using present-day ridesharing services are taking trips that encompass just one passenger, themselves. They are hailing a ride that will transport themselves, only, and not sharing the ride with any other passengers (a scant one-fifth of the time they opt for sharing a ride).

People look back at an autonomous self-driving vehicle, as it is tested in a pedestrian zone in Milton Keynes, north of London, on October 11, 2016. Suburbs have largely been dismissed by environmentalists and urban planners as bad for the planet, a form that needed to be eliminated to make way for a bright urban future. Yet, after a few years of demographic stultification amid the Great Recession, Americans are again heading to the suburbs in large numbers, particularly millennials. So rather than fight the tide and treat suburbanization as an evil to be squeezed out, perhaps a better approach would be to modify the suburban form in ways that address its most glaring environmental weakness: dependence on gas-powered automobiles. The rise of ride-sharing, electric cars and ultimately the self-driving automobile seem likely to alter this paradigm.

Technicians analyze data following the trial of an autonomous self-driving vehicle in a pedestrianised zone, during a media event in Milton Keynes, north of London, on October 11, 2016. Suburbs have largely been dismissed by environmentalists and urban planners as bad for the planet, a form that ne...

Bike sharing has a lot going for it. It's mass transit that's ultra-cheap, burns body fat instead of fossil fuels and is adored by venture capitalists. But the business model has hit a major snag: parking. Stringent laws against sidewalk clutter -- and cultural sensibilities that are easily offended -- make the problem more acute in Japanese cities than in places like Munich or Melbourne, where bicycles are piling up outside subway stations or turning up under bridges, sometimes to the dismay of neighbors and city officials. Bike sharing took China by storm in 2016, quickly becoming a novel tech export, and is now facing a backlash even in environmentally friendly places where you'd expect it to be embraced.

Electric bus maker Proterra is moving into the autonomous driving field, with a pilot program starting in Nevada. In an announcement Tuesday, the Burlingame, California, company said it was launching the "industry's first autonomous bus program" in partnership with the University of Nevada, Reno, and its Living Lab Coalition partners. As its basis, the program assumes the dawn of "eventual autonomous mass transit" and is therefore aimed at solutions that will build an image of safety about the future of mass transit. Toward that end, the "autonomous vehicle pilot will deal with real road conditions from the perspective of public transit systems, and emphasize the most challenging aspects related to mass transportation, which include dense and dynamic environments, degraded conditions, and a need for swift emergency response," according to a statement sent to International Business Times. In the first of the pilot's three phases, a Proterra bus operated by the Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe Country in Nevada (one of the Living Lab partners) will run on specific routes to sense and collect data.

In the next five years, experts say that autonomous vehicles will be entrenched in smart cities' infrastructure to include mass transit, traffic lights, other vehicles, gas stations, homes and just about anything that requires connectivity. "Connected and autonomous vehicles will play a significant role in the Smart Cities of the future. These cities will need ways to ease congestion, enable more efficient transportation, and reduce pollution," said Scott Frank, Airbiquity vice president of marketing. "Connected and autonomous vehicles will serve this purpose by enabling new transportation and ownership models that take vehicles off the street and curb, like ride sharing, and their environmental benefit will be further strengthened with continued penetration of hybrid and electric drivetrains." Mass transit in smart cities will help spur autonomous vehicle's growth, but it will all be about cost savings, said Bob Bilbruck, CEO of B2 Group.