The Jacksonville Transportation Authority’s latest attempt at the “future of mobility,” took a detour – straight into a light pole.

No one was physically injured. The only casualty? JTA’s creditability.

According to Action News Jax, JTA claimed “an error on the driver’s part” caused a NAVI to hop a curb and slam into a light pole.

That got my attention.

I submitted a public records request for all the juicy details.

Within a few hours, JTA sent over a four-page accident report and a three-page investigation report from Beep Inc. Both seem to suggest America’s first fully autonomous public transit system comes with a driver and a scapegoat.

According to JTA’s report, the driver said he “glanced down briefly at the brake pedal,” while the vehicle was in autonomous mode, and that’s when NAVI hit the curb and grazed two light poles. JTA stated they’d need to check the Automated Driving System (ADS) logs to confirm whether the shuttle was really in autonomous or manual mode during the incident.

Well, they checked and everything’s cool on their end.

Beep’s report assures us its investigation was handled by a “cross-functional team” of executives and attorneys investigating themselves. Their conclusion? Dash cam video, shot from a “forward-facing view” showed the driver was “inattentive and drowsy” while traveling “down the predefined route under autonomous mode,” and “unknowingly disengaged” autonomous mode 7.5 seconds before “the shuttle began to slowly veer to the right curbside of Bay St.”

The driver blames the tech. Tech people blame the driver. And the footage proving their case wasn’t included.

So, I asked for it.

While waiting on the footage, I stumbled across something called drift. Drift causes AVs to veer off their preprogrammed path due to sensor or mapping errors. But don’t worry about that. Remember, everything is cool on JTA’s end.

A few days later, my request for the footage was denied, twice, for “security reasons.”

That rejection seemed odd, since JTA CEO Nat Ford, recently bragged on a local podcast no one has heard of, about his team’s ability “see and listen inside every vehicle” and the “hundreds” of high-def cameras that can “zoom and pan” along NAVI’s route.

Everyone can see and hear everything – except the public.

With the video off limits, the only thing left to go on is Beep’s “timeline of events,” which is riddled with mistakes – even street names are wrong – and timestamps suggest JTA’s control center knew about the crash before the driver called it in. The timeline also reveals the driver navigated the shuttle around a construction zone while switching between autonomous and manual mode, suggesting he was active and alert moments before the incident. Yet somehow, the conclusion still points to human error.

Beep’s half-hour investigation ended with the driver being fired by Transdev right after passing a drug test.

Wait. Who’s Transdev? And why is Beep investigating a crash involving JTA’s shuttle? What in the Lerp is going on here?

Turns out, the future of mobility is layered.

Instead of Ford’s team building our own AV program from scratch, JTA reportedly paid Beep Inc. $36 million to create and run the show. Beep then brought in Oxa for its self-driving software, as well as Transdev to supply drivers. And when something goes wrong, everyone has someone else to blame.

I tried to untangle all of this by requesting JTA’s contract with Beep. Several weeks later, I received a 117-page, heavily redacted document.

Sprinkled throughout Beep’s “Operations and Maintenance Plan,” is the real story: JTA’s fully autonomous fleet are Ford Transit vans “predominantly intended” to drive themselves following “preprogrammed paths,” but come with a shuttle attendant, just in case. Shuttle attendants and command center agents “have the ability to assist the vehicle in navigation,” and each van sends live interior and exterior video, plus telemetry data to the “NAVI Data Lake.”

Tucked away in a single paragraph was juicy nugget I was searching for: Beep is responsible for monitoring “signs of drift” indicating a need to “re-map or re-program” shuttles when they start veering off course.

So yes – drift happens.

Maybe the driver didn’t “unknowingly disengage” anything. Maybe the NAVI drifted, and the system failed to catch it. Either way, the lack of transparency is alarming.

Just as is, all of this occurred during NAVI’s three-month pilot phase. Now that’s over and JTA is charging passengers $1.75 a ride.

As Florida Times-Union’s David Bauerlein recently put it:

“NAVI shuttles in downtown Jacksonville designed to be driverless, but often they’re riderless.”

That stings, especially after JTA doubled our gas tax and spent $65 million on tricked out cargo vans no one wants to ride, even when free.

Bauerlein reported JTA’s ridership numbers show 6,036 people – about 137 a day – rode between June and September.

Wait. What? 6,036 riders? I had my doubts. Then one October morning I woke up to the sound of a former co-worker saying, on Action News Jax morning show, JTA allegedly “recruited” its own staff to boost ridership numbers.

Scandalous!

I couldn’t let that juicy nugget go. I emailed JTA asking for clarification, and requested any documents, emails, marketing, or incentives offered referring to the issue.

Six days later JTA’s director of communications emailed back writing, “The statement in your email is not accurate. Therefore, there are no documents to supply.”

Meanwhile after word got out about NAVI’s unsurprisingly low numbers, Councilman Jimmy Peluso called NAVI a “creepy passenger van” and “pathetic,” and Councilman Rory Diamond asked, “if no one’s riding, can we cancel it?”

Fair question, but there’s no Lerping way.

Mayor Donna Deegan pledged her loyalty to Ford long before her foundation received a $20,000 “sponsorship” from JTA.

When asked on First Coast Connect about NAVI’s empty seats, Deegan doubled down:

“I think this is going to be the transportation mode of the future… I’d hate to say, ‘Oh well, we don’t have the ridership yet, so let’s throw out that idea.”

Deegan insisted ridership will increase after we realize it is “far more convenient” paying $1.75 for a NAVI ride than it is “to try to drive downtown and find a place to park.”

Let’s be real: no one’s ditching their car, walking to a NAVI stop, and paying to ride in a “creepy” cargo van with strangers between 7a.m. and 7 p.m., during the work week, out of “convenience.”

The mayor wrapped up the interview reminding critics, like Yours Truly and Diamond, to remember our place.

“I don’t think we can, uh, pass judgement on how successful it has been so far,” Deegan said, because “to me the folks who are, who seem to be, uh, yelling the loudest about the ridership, seem to be the ones that were never really big fans of this project to begin with.” So, sticks and stones, haters.

Diamond brushed off the mayor’s comments and sent Ford a letter with 17 questions. Ford said he needs until Nov. 3 to figure out his answers.

For now, Ford is over it and ready to move on, telling that obscure podcaster “there has been so much focus on NAVI,” it’s time to “pivot and focus” on other stuff, like “the people.”

Oh no he didn’t!!

Jacksonville’s future of mobility is here – and it still needs someone to take the fall, allegedly of course.