Knack wants city to be a pioneer in the testing of self-driving vehicles

Edmonton might see the testing of automated vehicles early next year.

Ward 1 Coun. Andrew Knack wants the city to lead the way in testing automated vehicles, especially given its snowy weather, he said Tuesday at an urban planning committee meeting.

“I think we have seen testing occur in a number of cities in the U.S. and a little bit in Toronto, but there is really no northern North American city with a climate like ours where we see a lot of snow for testing,” he said. “That’s part of what needs to be worked out.”

Knack also wants to see the province relax the policy, regulation and framework around autonomous testing. He said the rules are so rigid that they don’t make testing viable. The province’s regulation and policy framework for autonomous vehicle testing is to be released in June.

So far, he said the conversation around autonomous vehicles has been focused on smaller, individual vehicles, but there are going to be larger vehicles, sort of mass transit-like vehicles, that will be autonomous as well.

“So that’s part of this future we need to remember,” he said. “That’s going to have a large impact on cities as they go forward.”

Knack’s comments come after a driverless car killed a pedestrian in Arizona on March 18.

Knack said that was an unfortunate accident and hoped it would be the last.

He said there are thousands of deaths on Canadian roads each year. A lot of the research on automated vehicles and technology never suggested it was going to be 100 per cent perfect or accident free, he said, but it was meant to substantially reduce — by 80 to 90 per cent — serious injuries, collisions and fatalities.

“For me, this technology is critically important to do research on because … even if you didn’t want to see it, it’s coming,” Knack said. “And it’s not just personal vehicles … it’s all vehicles.

“And you don’t just do it by watching other cities — we have to test it ourselves, we have to understand how it works on Edmonton roads and we need to use that to inform our policy.”