One of five autonomous vans now serving the northern Minnesota community of Grand Rapids. The vans are part of a program called “goMARTI,” which stands for Minnesota Autonomous Rural Transportation Initiative. (Tony Leys/KFF Health News)
GRAND RAPIDS, Minn. — Myrna Peterson predicts that autonomous vehicles will be a ticket out of isolation and loneliness for people like her, who live outside big cities and have disabilities that prevent them from driving.
Peterson, who suffers from quadriplegia, is enthusiastically participating in an unusual test of autonomous vehicles in this corner of northern Minnesota. He helped attract government funding to bring five self-driving vans to Grand Rapids, a city of 11,000 in a region of pine and birch forests along the Mississippi River.
The project’s autonomous vans always have a human operator in the driver’s seat, ready to take control in complicated situations. But computers are in control about 90% of the time and have made 5,000 trips since 2022 without any accidents, organizers say.
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“It’s been fun. I’m really sold on it,” said Peterson, who used to rely on his electric wheelchair to travel around town, even in the winter.
Autonomous vehicles, which can drive themselves at least part of the time, are making headlines in urban areas, such as San Francisco, where extensive testing of the technology is underway.
Rural experiments have been launched in some other states, including Iowa and Ohio. Peterson hopes the pilot projects will help bring about the day when fully autonomous cars and trucks will help the estimated 25 million Americans whose travel is limited by disabilities.
Fully independent vehicles remain far from everyday options, as tech companies and automakers struggle to perfect the technology. Recently, for example, General Motors retired all its self-driving cars after one ran over and dragged a pedestrian who had been hit by another vehicle.
But Waymo, a Google family company, is moving forward with fully autonomous taxi rides in several cities.
Peterson is among those who believe that autonomous vehicles will one day be safer than human-driven models.
“Look how many times the light bulb failed before it worked,” he said.
Unlike many smaller cities, Grand Rapids has public buses and taxi service. But Peterson said those options don’t always work well, especially for people with disabilities. The autonomous vehicle program, known as goMARTI, which stands for Minnesota Autonomous Rural Transportation Initiative, offers a flexible alternative, he said. She hopes it will eventually alleviate a national driver shortagewhich tends to be especially serious in rural regions.
The project is funded through spring 2027 with more than $13 million from federal, state and local sources, much of which comes from the 2021 federal infrastructure bill.
The project’s distinctive Toyota minivans are equipped by a Michigan company, May Mobility, which is backed by the Japanese auto giant and other investors. Slogans painted on the side invite the public to “Experience autonomous driving in the Minnesota wilderness.” The vans are packed with technology, including cameras, radar, GPS and laser sensors. Their computer systems constantly monitor the environment and learn from the situations they encounter, said Jon Dege, who helps manage the May Mobility project.
Users request free rides through a smartphone application or through the 211 social service telephone number.
On a recent cold afternoon, a goMARTI van pulled up near Peterson’s home. She soon emerged, wrapped in a bright purple parka in honor of her beloved Minnesota Vikings football team. He wheeled his electric wheelchair to the van, walked up a ramp and into the back. Van operator Mark Haase helped secure the wheelchair and then climbed into the driver’s seat for a demonstration.
As the truck pulled onto the street, the steering wheel seemed to shake, reflecting small adjustments the computer made. Haase kept his foot close to the brake pedal and his hands around the steering wheel, ready to take control if a complication arose. After moments of him needing to take control of the vehicle, he pressed a button that told the computer system to resume command. “It was strange at first, but it didn’t take me long to get used to it and trust the system,” Haase said.
The Minnesota Department of Transportation helped direct federal money toward the Grand Rapids project, which followed a similar effort in the southern Minnesota city of Rochester. Tara Olds, the department’s director of connected and automated vehicles, said her agency was looking for smaller communities that wanted to give autonomous vehicles a chance.
No type of driver will be perfect, Olds said. “You know, humans make mistakes and computers make mistakes,” he said. But it’s understandable that the public would react differently if a fatal accident were caused by an autonomous vehicle rather than a human being, he said.
Frank Douma, a researcher at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies, has analyzed the Grand Rapids project and other autonomous vehicle programs. He said executing such projects in smaller cities is not necessarily more difficult than doing so in urban areas. “It’s just different.”
For the foreseeable future, such services will likely have to operate on predetermined routes, with regular stops, he said. It would be more complicated for autonomous vehicles to travel on demand to unknown addresses in the countryside.
Developers will have to overcome significant challenges before autonomous vehicles can become a regular part of rural life, he said. “But it’s no longer something that can be dismissed as impossible.”
TO 2022 report of the National Institute on Disability predicted that autonomous vehicles could help many people with disabilities leave their homes and find work.
Tom Foley, the group’s executive director, said a lack of transportation often leads to isolation, which can lead to mental health problems. “There is an epidemic of loneliness, especially among older people and especially among people with disabilities,” he said.
Foley, who is blind, has tested fully autonomous vehicles in San Francisco. He believes they will one day become a safe and practical alternative to human drivers, even in rural areas. “They don’t text. They don’t drink. They don’t get distracted,” he said.
For now, most passengers who use wheelchairs need attendants to secure them inside a van before it starts moving. But researchers are looking for ways to automate that task so that people who use wheelchairs can take advantage of fully autonomous vehicles.
The Grand Rapids project covers 35 miles of highway, with 71 stops. Initially, the routes avoided parking lots, where human drivers often make unexpected decisions, Dege said. But organizers acknowledged that curbside stops could be a challenge for many people, especially if they are among the 10% of goMARTI users who use wheelchairs. Autonomous vans now enter some parking lots to pick up passengers at the door.
During the recent demo ride with Peterson and Haase, the van pulled into a clinic parking lot. A lady in an orange car crossed the parking lot and headed toward the front of the van. The computer driving the truck hit the brakes. A split second later, Haase did the same. The driver of the orange car smiled and waved friendly to the Midwesterner as he drove by.
Self-driving vans have been out in almost all types of weather, which can be a challenge in northern Minnesota. Grand Rapids received more than 7 feet of snow last winter.
“There were only three or four times where it snowed so much that we had to stop it,” Dege said. Autonomous driving systems can handle snowflakes in the air and ice on the pavement, he said. However, they tend to be confused with snowdrifts. Human operators step in to help in those situations while computers learn to master them.
Robot drivers can also be hindered by roundabouts, also known as roundabouts. These configurations are touted as safer than four-way stops, but they can also confuse human drivers.
Haase took control every time the van approached a roundabout. He also took the wheel when the truck encountered a man riding a bicycle on the right side of the road. “Prevention is better than cure,” Haase said. Once the truck was a few feet beyond the bike, he pressed a button that signaled the robot to take back control.
Peterson takes the vans to stores, restaurants, community gatherings, hockey games, “and to church, of course, every Sunday and Wednesday,” he said.
He said the project has brought Grand Rapids residents together to imagine a more inclusive future. “It’s not just a fancy car,” she said.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism on health issues and is one of the main operating programs of KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.
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