The first thing we need to do is ask what the purpose is. Again, I'm focusing back on transit. Why do we have transit? What are our goals and reasons for it? It's not about how we go about it and how we did it before and how we can tune it, but why do we have it in the first place? If we don't understand why we have it, we're not going to be able to defend it in the face of the technology changes that are coming. That's the very first layer.
If we are clear, for example, on whether we agree or not that it's about social equity, whether we agree or not that it's about moving a large mass of people through a dense space.... If we agree that we're going to densify cities—and I'm not saying we should or shouldn't—then we need to ask how we're going to keep transit in that environment.
A very specific example is that it is absolutely certain that the robotic shuttles and taxis and so forth will threaten our municipal bus systems. There are a couple of thousand cities in Canada, and only a couple of hundred of them have transit systems. Many of those are threatened by these robot taxis and so forth now. What happens is that in those five or six larger cities that have subways, for example, these technologies are going to take away buses first, and that will take away some of the funnel into your light rail and urban rail systems. Those would then be the second systems under threat. How do we keep all of those people on those rail systems in spite of the convenience of coming out of their doors, getting into robotic taxis, and taking those taxis all the way to work, all 20 or 30 kilometres? I think that's the huge threat. How do we preserve our rail systems?
We're still investing in rail now in many cities. How do we think about preserving that value in spite of these robotic taxis?