Self-driving cars, electric vehicles may reshape city
Two Calgary councillors recently travelled down Glenmore Trail in a self-driving car and marvelled as the vehicle switched lanes with the press of a button.
Evan Woolley and Peter Demong took a Tesla for a spin from the Chinook Centre dealership to Highway 8 a couple of weeks ago — an experience that offered a small taste of what’s to come on city streets.
“It’s a new feeling,” said Woolley. “When you’re in the car, it feels like the future.”
Councillors were shown a clip from the trip on Wednesday, as they learned about advancing technologies that could reshape Calgary within the next 25 years, including self-driving cars and buses, delivery drones and electric vehicles and bikes.
“The world of personal mobility and goods movement is going through the most fundamental transformation that we’ve experienced in the last century,” Mac Logan, the city’s general manager of transportation, said at a transportation and transit committee meeting Wednesday.
“Not since the introduction of the private automobile has transportation changed to the degree that we’re seeing at the moment. The city needs to understand how these changes are going to impact and influence our city.”
The committee heard those changes could include an erosion of existing funding sources, including fuel tax, fewer car crashes, more vehicles on the road, a possible shift in Calgary Transit’s role, and opportunities to diversify the job market in Calgary.
At Wednesday’s meeting, councillors heaped praise on the 120page Future of Transportation in Calgary report that was written in response to a notice of motion from councillors Demong and Woolley last spring.
The elected officials asked for a study on advanced transportation technologies, and the finished report was designed to spark discussion, not to serve as an infrastructure plan requiring funding.
“My grandmother went from the horse and buggy to putting men on the moon,” committee chair Shane Keating told reporters. “The future changes dramatically, and we have to accept that. That’s what we’re looking at here.”
“If we don’t take into account many of the possibilities for the future, we could be planning incorrectly today,” said the Ward 12 councillor.
The committee eventually approved a recommendation to support a driverless vehicle pilot project that will shuttle guests between the Calgary Zoo LRT station and Telus Spark next year, an initiative that will go to council for final approval.
Several members of the public addressed councillors about future transportation across the city, including Peter McCaffrey, director of research at the Manning Centre.
McCaffrey said rapid shifts in technology could turn massive infrastructure projects like the Green Line LRT into “fossils” and cause the value of parking companies, such as the city-owned Calgary Parking Authority, to plummet.
“Council is planning to build a $4.6-billion LRT line that, by the time it’s built, no one will want to use,” McCaffrey said
While the Future of Transportation in Calgary report acknowledged that driverless vehicles could take ridership from Calgary Transit, Keating said he believes transit is going to be extremely viable long into the future.
“When we get vehicles flying in the air, then we probably won’t need things like the Green Line,” Keating said.
“I don’t think (technology will) change fast enough and conveniently enough to be able to look at rendering any LRT, or even mass transit, obsolete in the very near future.”
When you’re in the car, it feels like the future.