A company working with Google is now running autonomous trucks on highways in Texas, and transportation planners say several other companies with operations in the area are introducing new options.
"It's a whole new world out there," said Tarrant County Commissioner Gary Fickes -- a past chairman of the Tarrant Regional Transportation Coalition.
Fickes said companies with operations in Tarrant County, including Bell and BNSF Railway, are working with the public sector to modernize transportation.
"They're working on some very innovative things," Fickes said. "You could just go on and on."
Bell is designing an "air taxi" and drones that could make deliveries and move people quicker than on roads.
"BNSF Railway, the things they're doing across the nation, in Canada and Mexico, the seamless delivery of products that come in on a boat from anywhere in the world, get put autonomously onto a train, and they're shipped to an intermodal facility across the country," Fickes said. "From that point, they're autonomously put onto a truck, and in many cases, that truck is making a delivery in another facility. It's just amazing what's happening."
Shipping logistics firm C.H. Robinson is working with Google on a project to use autonomous trucks to move cargo between Dallas and Houston on Interstate 45.
"You would never have thought they would have autonomous trucks going between here and Houston every day," Fickes said. "Every day there are trucks going up and down I-45."
Fickes said the public and private sectors will need to work together to plan for advances in transportation, saying the state and local communities cannot afford to keep adding lane miles as the population grows. He said the state will also need to look at other options to fund transportation as more people use electric vehicles, and the state makes less money from the gas tax.
"Transit is becoming a more important element of moving people and goods," he said. "It's just natural you're going to see some additional dollars flow into that."
Fickes said public transportation has benefitted North Texas, citing the $105 million mixed-use project built near the TEXRail station in Grapevine. He said TEXRail has led to development around the station and also brought more customers to existing small businesses in Downtown Grapevine.
"On TEXRail, who's the biggest winner? Grapevine! Because they were ready for that to happen," Fickes said. "They had the retail, office, restaurant infrastructure in place."
In turn, he said he expected growth around other stations similar to growth in Downtown Grapevine and near DART light rail stations like SMU/Mockingbird.
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