It’s 7:20 a.m. on a Monday in the not-too-distant future. You wake up, and realize you’ve overslept. It’s a two-hour commute to work, so you call your boss and tell her you’ll start working on the way.
A quick shower and what hardly qualifies as breakfast and you’re out the door.
There’s no car in your driveway. You realize you forgot to order one.
A quick tap on your phone, and two minutes later an empty car drives up. You get in and pull out your laptop. For the next two hours, you’re immersed in work as your car takes you to the office. Once you arrive, you’ll order another car to pick up your kids — who’ve hopefully woken up by now — and drive them to school. Another car will pick them up and drive them home in time to have dinner with you.
This is a day in a very possible future in Toronto. The technology that will get us there — driverless cars — is already starting to change how we live.
Very soon, cars will be smart enough to drive on their own, without drivers. Some in Ontario are already doing that.
It will be one of the single biggest technological shifts of the century and completely reshape how we think about cars and the cities we drive in, according to David Ticoll of the Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.
“I don’t think driverless cars will be quite as big as the arrival of the actual motor vehicle in Toronto, but it’s going to come pretty close,” he said.
Ticoll authored a 67-page report commissioned by the City of Toronto on what Toronto needs to do to prepare for what Ticoll considers the upcoming revolution in transportation.
He believes Toronto will save $6 billion a year once driverless cars become commonplace.
“It’s a big deal. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a very significant contribution (to the economy),” he said. It represents about four per cent of Toronto’s GDP, Ticoll said, which he estimated at $150 billion in his report. According to the city, Toronto’s GDP was $157 billion in 2013, about 10 per cent of Canada’s total.
The largest part of the $6-billion savings will come from reduced congestion costs, which Ticoll estimates at $2.7 billion, while $1.6 billion more will be saved in insurance and $1.2 billion in reduced collisions. The last half-billion will be saved in parking fees.
Though there are hundreds of areas where driverless cars will have an impact, Ticoll says the biggest everyday effects will be felt in five areas: safety, ownership, infrastructure, transit and jobs.
Safety, he says, is obvious: self-driving cars, with their sensors and computers that analyze the road situation many times a second, will make safer decisions than humans ever could.
“These cars will be smart, they will be road-aware, and they will be extremely careful,” he said.
With drivers no longer a must, car ownership could change radically, Ticoll said.
On-demand service, with people ordering self-driving cars when needed, might become the norm. People could opt for low-cost convenience over vehicle ownership, Ticoll said. Of course, there's no guarantee people will give up their cars.
“There’s no second amendment for vehicle ownership. But a lot of people probably think vehicle ownership as a basic human right,” he said.
Another obvious impact will be transit. In essence, every car will let us do what public transit has for years — sit back while someone else drives. There are a dozen possibilities as to how transit will look in the driverless future. Buses and subways might continue to exist, while people continue owning cars, only now all of those won’t require drivers.
Driverless cars can be used much more efficiently because, theoretically, they don’t need to be parked. And if cars don’t need to be parked, parking lots become obsolete.
“You can use them for bike lanes. You can turn some of them into green space,” Ticoll said.
Jobs will change. Many of those who currently have jobs as drivers could see their occupations disappear overnight, but Ticoll said more than just driving jobs will be affected.
“(For example) if you nearly eliminate traffic accidents, you dramatically reduce the cost of insurance. That has an impact on people who work in the insurance industry,” he said.
Knowing the effects is one thing, but Ticoll stresses the changes are going to happen fast, and we need to prepare for them now.
“The tech sector … establishes a reality on the ground before governments and even ordinary citizens even have an opportunity to understand these issues, let alone figure out how they want to deal with them,” he said.
Ticoll said the city can’t afford to take the same pace when dealing with driverless cars that it has taken with other issues such as the Uber-taxi debate.
“The president of Ford Canada — and Ford Canada is not by any means the leader in this space — predicts they will be selling autonomous vehicles in this country by 2020. And so does everybody else,” he said.
Decision-makers at the City of Toronto are aware things are moving fast, and they’ve tasked Stephen Buckley, general manager of transportation services, with figuring it out.
Buckley admits it’s a huge problem to tackle.
“At this point, we’re trying to wrap our heads around the issue. To be fair, we’re not alone,” he said.
The aim right now is to get the city to agree on positions, such as whether to push for less car ownership and encourage more car-sharing services, Buckley said.
“We’re not at a point where we can come forward with a position, but we’re having those conversations,” he said.
Ticoll says that if governments tackle the issues now, there’s a chance Canadians can harness these technologies to maximize the benefits and minimize the downside.
“If governments today begin to adopt a holistic approach and really think about the big-picture questions … then we still have time,” Ticoll said.
“But we don’t have a lot.”
Humans are bad drivers. That’s a well-documented fact. In 2013, Canadians had more than 122,000 motor vehicle collisions, which killed almost 2,000 people and injured 165,000 more.
Driverless cars will do better than that. There are a few early statistics to back that up. Google publishes monthly reports on the state of its autonomous vehicles. As of March 31, 2016, Google’s self-driving cars had driven a combined 1.5 million miles in autonomous mode, since 2009. The first incident in which a Google car was responsible came in February 2016.
The Google car had been hugging the right curb in preparation for a turn, when it noticed some sandbags near a storm drain. They were blocking its path, so it started angling toward the centre lane. A bus had been driving on the lane, and the car thought it would yield, but it didn’t, so the two lightly hit each other. The car had been going about 3 km/h, the bus about 25 km/h. Nobody was injured.
There are unresolved questions on security in driverless cars, especially when an accident becomes unavoidable and the car itself has to make an ethical decision. Does it protect its occupant at all costs? Or does it weigh the life of the occupant against that of others at risk? But Steve Waslander, director of the University of Waterloo’s Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory (WAVElab) says that’s not going to be as much of an issue as we think, because humans are already making the same decisions.
“The current state is we rely on a human’s hunch. What they think in the instant, what they’ve perceived, and in fact, we know that’s a flawed process. And we know for a million people there’s going to be a million different answers,” he said.
We don’t use our cars efficiently now.
Studies have estimated the average car spends anywhere between 80 and 95 per cent of its life parked.
But picture this scenario: your car drives you to work, then drives itself home. It drives your kids to school, picks them up after and drives them home, then comes and picks you up to drive you home.
What if you could share your car with other people? You have the car only when you need it and let other people use it when they need it. Suddenly, we need a lot fewer cars. Waslander thinks this will have a profound impact on vehicle ownership.
“If the same car can serve 20 people, suddenly the market gets a lot smaller,” he said.
When cars are always driving, the spaces they occupy will shift radically.
Spaces usually occupied by cars are suddenly not. And conversely, when cars are always on roads, it means roads will always be full of cars.
But with roads full of cars, Waslander said, he expects congestion will go up. It won’t be as painful as traffic jams are now, because people won’t have to focus on driving and will be able to do other things while stuck in traffic.
In a weird sort of devil’s circle, making congestion more bearable will probably mean more congestion, Waslander said.
“When you relieve the pain of congestion by allowing people to work in their self-driving cars, suddenly congestion is going to escalate. People are going to live in the country. They’ll drive in for a meeting when they need to be there, and they’ll just work the whole way there,” he said.
