As JTA’s Ultimate Urban Circulator faces growing scrutiny from Jacksonville City Council members, it’s worth turning our gaze westward to Tucson, Arizona, a smaller, less dense city that’s managed to do what Jacksonville has not: build a thriving modern streetcar network, the Sun Link.
The NAVI experiment: Big price, small returns
Jacksonville’s latest mobility experiment, the NAVI autonomous vehicle network, launched with great fanfare on June 30, 2025. Hailed as the nation’s first public transit system to rely entirely on self-driving Ford transit vans, the project connects Downtown Jacksonville to the Sports & Entertainment District along Bay Street. The $66 million system costs an additional $7.3 million a year to operate and maintain.
Despite the hype, the initial results have been disappointing, something The Jaxson has predicted for several years. The autonomous technology remains unproven, requiring human drivers to take control for safety. Riders have shown little interest in slow-moving vans operating along a limited corridor with few meaningful destinations. On event nights and weekends, when convenient transportation is needed most, NAVI service is often suspended and lacks the capacity to serve large crowds.
Between June and October 2025, the service averaged just 76 passengers per day. Many of those, insiders admit, were JTA employees riding on the taxpayers’ dime to inflate numbers. Now, software issues threaten to sideline NAVI’s self-driving features for half a year, a costly setback for an experiment that has yet to prove its worth.
Tucson’s Sun Link: A proven success
While NAVI will continue to fail at attracting riders, it’s important that an experiment featuring Ford Transit vans should not be taken as an indictment on tried and true mass transit technologies or proof that Jacksonville doesn’t have density to support various forms of fixed mass transit at an equal or lower cost to local taxpayers…