Cities get ball rolling on self-drive cars

CONFERENCE

because there are going to be regulations and rules … and if we don’t get the right ones and the right timing it’s going to hold everyone back,” Wilkinson said.

She said many provinces do not allow driverless vehicle testing, while Ontario requires permits.

Because the technology already exists, it is crucial for government officials to develop regulation as soon as possible, Wilkinson said.

“I think the government, certainly in Ontario, they have moved quite rapidly forward on this and they’re open to it,” she said.

In last month’s federal budget, the government allocated $76.7 million over five years toward developing more modern transportation, including regulation and pilot projects surrounding autonomous vehicles.

BlackBerry QNX will begin testing autonomous vehicle technology in Ottawa this summer, Wilkinson said. Stratford and Waterloo have also been on the forefront in developing autonomous vehicle technology.

Other cities have been more reluctant.

Matt Allard, a city councillor in Winnipeg, said he presented a motion to his council calling for the city to discuss regulations surrounding autonomous vehicles, but it was rejected.

“The reasoning presented was that it was too early to tell what the impacts will be, we should wait to see what other cities are doing,” he said. “I disagree — I think the impacts of this technology will be what we make of them.”

Transport Minister Marc Garneau said the Senate’s Standing Committee on Transport and Communications has begun studying automated vehicles.

“Disruptive technologies present huge challenges for the industries affected, the businesses displaced and the governments that need to regulate them,” he said in a keynote speech at Wednesday’s conference. “The change they bring is massive, often unforeseen and can be pretty frightening as well as exciting.”

Garneau added that we need to think about the consequences that come with the introduction of automated vehicles.

“In 1900 nobody could have predicted the enormous changes that the automobile would bring to our world, it brought us an unprecedented amount of freedom, comfort and convenience. But it also brought pollution, traffic jams, urban sprawl and accidents. Now a century later, we are talking about a whole new generation of automobiles.”

Jennifer Keesmaat, the chief planner for the City of Toronto echoed these concerns by saying it’s important to design our cities for people and not cars — a mistake made before.

“The implications have been extreme from a cost perspective, from a quality of life perspective, from a health perspective,” she said.

“We actually designed activity out of our cities.”

The concerns surrounding driverless vehicles are endless, but Keesmaat said if we don’t address their emergence we could end up in the same place we were before.

“There’s a risk, that we get a bit too excited about a shiny new thing and we think it’s about the shiny new thing as opposed to being about the city we want to create.”