One week after Jacksonville Transportation Authority asked Beep Inc. if it could help one of Florida’s top hospitals fight the spread of coronavirus, its self-driving vehicles were deployed.

The routes will be isolated from traffic, pedestrians and staff and will be closely monitored.

A long-awaited pilot project launched Monday in Gainesville — but this time there is no pilot. The University of Florida and the Florida Department of Transportation have partnered to bring the first autonomous vehicle to the city of Gainesville. Community members were invited to a Monday morning ribbon-cutting ceremony and an inaugural test ride of the shuttle, running between the Southwest Third Street parking garage to Innovation Square near Southwest Second Avenue.

We’ve heard it for years: driverless cars are the way of the future. But there’s lots of work to be done before self-driving cars rule the road. Students and faculty at Florida Polytechnic University are trying to solve one of the trickiest problems: how to make a machine driver think like a human, but better.

Elected leaders in Florida want to make this state the most aggressive in the nation for welcoming autonomous vehicles. This will require some major changes in road design and regulations. But probably the biggest change will be in our state of mind. There is a reluctance to turn over the wheel to a mechanical brain, yet statistics show that most crashes are caused by human error, not breakdowns in the vehicles.