It has the initial feel and setup of a video game, but Kitsap Transit executive director John Clauson hopes his agency’s newest training tool will offer so much more in reality for present and future bus drivers.
Located at KT’s Gateway Center is a new virtual bus simulator. KT launched the product with a goal to offer its current and tentative driving force with a fully immersive learning opportunity while also allowing for a safer space to do so.
“It’s as realistic as you can get it,” Clauson said. “A person can get more familiar with the movements of a larger vehicle. It’s never going to replace the actual driving out on the road, but it does help.”
The process to train incoming drivers includes a large reliance on the basic classroom setting before new recruits ever set foot behind the wheel of a bus in a closed-course route. With close to $1 million in technology now at the hands of Clauson and Mike Adams, an operator trainer, the classroom will now include the opportunity for students to learn behind the wheel of the simulator and spectators to learn from their peers’ maneuvers.
“When this unit is in and connected, then they’re actually driving a 35- or 40-foot bus,” Clauson said, “and they can set the machine up so that the bus would respond as either of those or as an electric or diesel bus. They can train folks in any type of vehicle.”
Adams added: “We took our first group through it, and we’ve got another group coming in January. At some point next year, we’ll start getting our more senior operators through it too.”
The simulator allows for training on both the agency’s routed and ACCESS fleets. Each cab, which takes up to three people to transfer and hook up into the system, acts as an exact replica of each dash that drivers would find in the real buses.
“Ironically, this (set-up) is one of our old buses,” Clauson said about the simulator. “We had a bus that was involved in an accident that we were able to cut off the front and send it off. They were able to adapt it to one of these modules.”
Climbing into the ACCESS cab, the driver is immersed into “Safety City,” surrounded on all sides by a series of screens depicting the roads, the interior passenger seating and rearview mirrors. The acclimation program starts as a clear roadway with a series of lines for the driver to approach and stop, getting a feel for the simulated gas and brake pedals.
The driver is then given a guide, a supervisor vehicle seen approaching from first one, then the other rearview mirror. As the day turns to night, it then stops briefly in front of the bus and then acts as a guide for a roughly mile stretch of otherwise clear road.
With both vehicles stopped, the simulation ends with a command from Adams to “floor it.” With that encouragement, the driver is led to crash the bus into the car.
“It’s just so they get that out of their system, and now it’s real,” Adams said. “If you hit it hard enough, you’ll hear crashing and crunching of metal, but they get to have a little bit of fun with it to start.”
From there, the scenarios and programs to take drivers through are seemingly limitless in real-world circumstances. “We can put them in whatever kind of scenario with passengers yelling at you or not or driving on snowy roads,” Clauson said. “Rainy, foggy and all those kinds of scenarios gives them a little more comfort in being able to continue on with the training.”
Sure, it’s never going to live up to the real deal, but Adams hopes the real movements and reactions learned from the simulator will further help a fleet in need of more drivers. “You get behind the wheel, and the more you drive the bus, it actually feels like a bus. It actually turns like a bus. It challenges you,” he said.
