Transport Committee on March 28th, 2018

[Bern Grush]

But we have to say how it's going to integrate. We can't wait for Tesla or Uber to tell us. We have to decide how it's going to integrate.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Right.

[Bern Grush]

Then we have to put the regulations and motivations in place for it to happen that way, right? They'll build what you ask if that channel has been narrowed to that solution.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Mark, would you comment?

[Mark Aruja]

There are a couple of facets to this. One is—and I agree with Bern, in terms of the urban environment, for sure—that we have a lot of converging pieces to this puzzle. I would recommend this committee also talk to the Nokias, the Ericssons, the Teluses, and the AI industry to get a bit of a picture. They are driving a big part of this puzzle

I'll go back to the agriculture example. The advisory committee on economic growth recommended we set a policy of moving from fifth to second globally in the exporting of agricultural products. That is a really straightforward policy statement that will absolutely drive innovation that is connected directly to these systems.

I'll give you a really simple example of what you could do tomorrow—not next week, but literally tomorrow morning. You could say that the federal government will partner with any province that wishes to step up to test the driving of automated tractors on public roads. These tractors are all automated, but they can't go from field to field on a rural road. There's no technological barrier whatsoever to that, so it would be a very simple case study that would provide societal input in a very economic outcome-driven piece, if you will. The societal acceptance in that community would feed part of what Bern is talking about. Not everything is centred around Toronto and how they view things. There might be a different view in Lethbridge.

That would be an example of picking your battle, if you will. I think the advisory group has done a good job of that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you.

Mr. Aubin, the floor is yours.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Gentlemen, thank you for being here and for your patience.

I was born in 1960. In my youth, we thought that, by the year 2000, people would retire at 55, that the work week would be four days and that there would be flying cars. Here too, we are looking 40 years into the future.

I tend to believe that technological change over the next four decades could lead to what you are describing. However, when I look at the other line that marks the decline in personal cars, it seems to me that the analysis needs to change. Somehow, you have to get rid of the pleasure of driving and the pleasure of owning a car.

How will it be possible to have those two lines cross, that is to say that the technology allows the development of autonomous cars, but also that consumers are willing to give up their cars?

What I'm seeing now, and it will probably be the trend for the next few years, is that clean cars, electric cars, are attracting a lot of interest. We can see it in Tesla's success, for example.

What will motivate people to opt for autonomous cars and lead them to lose the pleasure of driving?

The question arises all the more because, right now, we are not able to develop public transportation between major urban centres. This means that people are going to drive between Montreal and Toronto or between Quebec City and Montreal anyway. Why, once there, would they really have a blast driving an autonomous vehicle?

[Bern Grush]

Thank you.

That is a huge problem. The solution is not to make it miserable to own your car; the solution is to make it wonderful to use a shared vehicle.

There's a natural aversion to the sense of losing your car. I have a car, and I think from your question you have a car. There is a loss. You feel like there might be a loss of something. We're averse to that kind of loss. In order to have someone change something, the thing that they're going to change to has to be almost twice as good as the thing they're leaving. That's the challenge.

To make the activity of using a vehicle and not owning attractive is a much larger challenge than the actual technology challenge of making a vehicle run by itself. Your question is so far unanswered. When you hear people say that no one is going to need to own a car, that's true rationally, but it's not true behaviourally and economically. From a behavioural economics perspective, everything that you're saying is true. Many people prefer to keep their car, and that's a huge problem.

I wish I had the answer. If I had the answer, I would be very wealthy.

Here's what's worse. Right now in Canada, fewer than 10% of all trips are taken in a non-family vehicle. If we get 75% of all trips in a non-owned vehicle 30 years from now, the whole world population of cars will still be the same as now, because our demand for trips will increase, and our wealth increases. That's one of the reasons we demand more trips. A small change of moving from 8% to 18% won't make any difference at all. Our congestion problems are far bigger than a few people shifting to robotaxis. It's a very big problem.

Thank you for that question.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you.

Mr. Aruja, you highlighted the importance of the roadmap.

Mr. McCalla, you talked about the importance of Transport Canada being transparent with the whole process that will be implemented over the next few years.

Could you tell us more specifically what you expect from Transport Canada to better align the industry's wishes with the government's ability to support those technological changes?

[Mark Aruja]

Thank you very much.

In 2007, we had an agreed joint plan developed, which had four phases. We are almost finished phase one, which is the initial regulatory release we're expecting with CG2 this summer. Phase two is kind of halfway, and phases three and four are about beyond visual line of sight—for example, how do we do sections of land, and how does Jeremy get to do hundreds of kilometres of line survey?

We know the industry–government working group relationship is fabulous. It's a great working relationship, but we're totally stopped. There's no visioning. We need something. It's not as if we don't know what we need to do, but it is not written down, it is not transparent, and there's no senior-level oversight, managerially or politically, to make this thing happen.

There are great aspirations. We want to grow our sector of agriculture from 6.7% of GDP to something north of that, but we have these sticky wickets in the way.

It irks me no end that the United States had no road map at all three years ago, but I can go on their website—and I know they're going to be updating their website in a couple of weeks—and I will have full transparency into that, and I will have that transparency for many other jurisdictions.

We need to not have folks just trying to addle their way through every day to what they think industry needs. Let's sort this out. We're not going to have a perfect plan, but let's get your one, two, three sorted out, because we have to deal with the technological change. It is unbelievably rapid, but we can't afford to have regulations drafted that don't reflect reality.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

We'll go on to Mr. Hardie.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair. It's a fascinating discussion today.

Mr. Grush, I'll probably spend most of my time with you because you've said some fairly provocative things. Let's put it that way. I suppose that's what you wanted to do, right?

Let's go forward to the time when most vehicles are automated, autonomous, etc. What do you predict the average speed to be on roadways?

[Bern Grush]

I'm actually going to answer that even though I have no idea. That's not been studied in the sense that I could provide a reliable answer, but I will say that when you say “most”, we're talking about the point where our highways, for example, in Ontario—

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

I would appreciate a short answer, if you could, please, sir.

[Bern Grush]

We're going to be very fast on highways and we are going to have to be much slower in cities. Just for pedestrian and bicycle safety, I would say in cities we'll probably be slower than we are now.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Okay.

One of the attributes of some mass transit systems is that they can move more quickly than the surrounding traffic if they're grade-separated. Has that kind of approach to mass transit factored into some of your strategy?

[Bern Grush]

No. I haven't really thought much about speeds, and the reason is that I'm just thinking mostly about social equity. My answer about slow is for safety.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Okay, but average speed will mean something to people who are interested in getting to where they need to go in a reasonable time frame.

Talk about the built environment. We have streets, curbs, cutouts for pedestrians, and a lot of other things. Will the built environment at street level need to change substantially for autonomous vehicles?

[Bern Grush]

At the very least, we need to do massive amounts of changes to our curbs. I would hope—and this is just a hope—that we would be removing street parking by then, “then” being 2040 or 2050, when a majority of vehicles will be automated. There would be no need for street parking. There would be a lot of need for cars to pull over and let passengers in and out, but we wouldn't need parking. Our curbs in our cities need to change dramatically.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

It was interesting to hear you speculate that the number of vehicles on the road would not go down, and in fact might go up, which suggests that the land space we dedicate to roadways and parking will be not the same but even larger than we allocate right now. However, at the same time we're seeing a shift to the shared economy in a number of areas. We have shared ride services right now—we have shared cars, Uber, and a lot of things. Have you factored that proclivity toward more sharing of assets, as opposed to owning, into your estimates and strategies with respect to the onset of automated vehicles?

[Bern Grush]

When I talk about more congestion, I'm talking about more cars on the road. What would be absent would be parking. The expectation that I've drawn from my research is that parking would go up a little bit for a little while, plateau at some point, and then go down, but the actual number of cars on the road would go up and keep going up.

The reason the traffic is going up is that there are more people travelling further. Sprawl means more congestion. Sprawl means the average trip is longer. If the robotic services are inexpensive, it's far easier to hop into a vehicle. In other words, there would be more cars on the road, but almost none of them would be parking during peak hours.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

If we have vehicles that are autonomous, that are in the Internet of things, that are well connected, that co-exist quite well with each other, will we come to the point where we will not be allowed to have hands-on driving anymore?

[Bern Grush]

I think so, at some point, in the same sense that I can't take a bicycle onto a highway or that I can't take a horse on most streets. I know it's kind of a silly example, but it is the case that there was a 40-year period in which horses and cars were mixed. I'm expecting about a 30-year or 40-year period in which driven vehicles and driverless vehicles will be sharing roadways in some way. They may be somewhat grade separated, but there is no way we can afford grade separation everywhere, so there is going to be mixed traffic at some point.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Mark, I want to build on your comments about the spread of high-speed broadband. Is that necessary for the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles?

[Mark Aruja]

That's a great question, and the answer is no.