I want to open with a few words.
Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to comment regarding impacts of vehicle automation on cities and public transportation systems. My name is Bern Grush. My background encompasses human factors, human attention, artificial intelligence, and systems design engineering out of the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo.
I'm a founder of Grush Nile Strategic, a think tank focused on finding ways to deploy automated vehicles to promote environmental sustainability, social equity, and urban livability with regard to human transport.
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I would like to make two additional observations about vehicle automation specifically for moving people. First, the future of automobility will include two markets, market one for selling and buying personal or family-owned vehicles and market two for selling and buying rides hired only for the duration of a single trip.
Today market two includes all forms of for-hire vehicles, such as taxis, ride hailing, and car share, and includes all forms of transit. This is critical, because these two markets give us two distinct worlds for urban planning. AVs will sustain the 125-year-old competition between public and private modes. Both markets will be very large and will continue to challenge planners to accommodate large numbers of personal vehicles while concurrently seeking ways to harness massive fleets of shared vehicles to benefit urban populations.
Planners, concerned with efficiency and environment, are biased toward fleets of shared vehicles, but the revealed preference of the majority of travellers is biased toward private automobile ownership. Current assertions that this will change significantly are based on wishful thinking and are without reliable evidence. A shift to shared-vehicle mode will occur only if we take strategic and proactive policy decisions.
I recommend three things: that government begin an immediate migration to regulations that require AVs to be zero-emission vehicles, impose distance-based road user fees, and implement demand-based parking fees in all public, commercial, and employee spaces.
My second point is that during their early decades, AVs will not achieve full SAE level 5 automation. Market one personal vehicles will retain user controls, allowing them to be driven anywhere. These vehicles will increase average trip distance and frequency. They will increase sprawl by reducing the discomfort of driving in congestion.
This will encourage more families to acquire these vehicles, further worsening congestion. These vehicles will continue to demand an average of four parking spots each, since they will still be parked a majority of the time and will still tend to remain near their owners.
At the same time that this is happening, market two driverless for-hire vehicles will be geofenced—i.e., constrained to carefully mapped roads. These will be robotic taxi and shuttle systems that will appeal first to travellers who are already using taxis, ride-hailing, or using transit. Such fleets will recruit heavily from existing public systems, disrupting transit just as ride-hailing disrupted our taxis. Without government oversight, this will threaten social equity.
I recommend incentives for today's commercial ride providers to encourage rides from and to transit hubs, to increase average vehicle occupancy, and to add transport for disabled travellers and for people from transit deserts, all in a way that accelerates the process of reducing the number of urban trips in personal vehicles in order to prepare ourselves for the AV robotaxis that are coming.
Thank you.