Hamilton puts autonomous vehicles to the test
Experts debate who is in the driver’s seat of data collected on our streets
Hamilton’s truck, car, bicycle and foot traffic offer excellent conditions for connected and autonomous vehicle research already underway in the city.
About 300 delegates at a conference on the Future of Transportation and Mobility saw live video, audio and other streetlevel activity, all captured from two recently installed sensor devices at McMaster Innovation Park.
Creating a “test bed” network on city streets is an initiative of Hamilton’s Centre for Integrated Transportation and Mobility (CITM), one of the province’s six regional development sites working to advance intelligent infrastructure and pave the way for connected autonomous vehicles, which will eventually talk to each other and the infrastructure around them.
“In this smart city initiative, we’re setting up equipment so that small and medium-sized companies can come in and experiment with their ideas and explore use-cases on this equipment,” said CITM director Chris Omiecinski, at the conference held Wednesday at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum.
CITM is working with the city to install three devices on lamp standards and telephone poles downtown and near Hess Village next month, and by the summer another six of these grey “data acquisition nodes” and accompanying wireless transmitters will beam down on a section of Rymal Road and Stone Church.
“What’s very unique about the Hamilton initiative is in the areas we are implementing this network — we have an urban area we’re putting this in, a residential area, light and heavy duty commercial areas, shopping areas and also construction areas,” he said.
These sensors, which train video on a street corner, can pick up sound and monitor environmental conditions. For example, they can pinpoint the location of gunshots and detect water main breaks, said CITM program director Bram Maharaj, adding that the true promise of the network will be realized once 5G wireless arrives.
And when will the future arrive?
There is a point on the horizon when the breaktaking speed of the coming 5G wireless network will allow consumer products and cars to be connected and “talk” to themselves, unleashing observations in data and a predictive power of artificial intelligence that will allow us to relax in our self-guided vehicles without steering wheels.
That’s the glossy brochure version that some experts challenge.
“We’ve been focusing on ‘the no hands part’ — the hype is disorienting,” Bern Grush, cofounder and chief innovation officer at Harmonize Mobility, bluntly told the conference audience.
“If all that stuff gets automated, we’ll be in trouble,” Grush said, describing that artificial intelligence has gone through ups and downs since it first emerged in the 1950s and that the autonomous car dream might still be 50 years down the road.
The nightmare scenario is more vehicles operating at uneven levels of sophistication in a climate of outdated or conflicting regulations between cities and provinces.
“We don’t want a zombie apocalypse with thousands of autonomous vehicles in Hamilton driving around waiting to pick up their owners,” said Bruce Peever, partner at consulting firm KPMG.
A KPMG study concludes that with 60 per of the world’s population expected to be concentrated in cities by the year 2030, municipalities in southern Ontario are uniquely unprepared for the 3.2 million new residents and commuters.
“Cities will have to get over their fears of private investment in infrastructure,” he said. With $100-billion invested in autonomous technology, “private industry is not going to wait for city councils to discuss the merits of autonomous vehicles.”
With the AV sector set to grow in value to $1 trillion by the year 2036, Peever said cities must begin to monetize data and promote sharing of vehicles in the face of an unstoppable influx of autonomous traffic.
Cyrus Tehrani, Hamilton’s new chief digital officer, said the idea of managing and monetizing data “is so far from where cities are in their day to day service.”
Municipalities are looking for guidance from federal and provincial governments with mandates on fuel among other policies, he said.
Amidst the debate over job responsibilities in the data revolution are dark forces taking advantage of the confusion.
Recent cybersecurity heists in San Diego, Woodstock and Stratford underline just how unprepared municipalities are in relation to the speed of technology innovation, said Edona Vila, senior associate with Borden Ladner Gervais.
Vila cited a study that found 84 per cent Canadian have privacy and security concerns using connected services.
The results reinforce a KMPG autonomous vehicle readiness index that found Canada is trailing the top 10 countries worldwide.
Just a few potholes on the road through risk and reward.