Changing land use: preparing for autonomous vehicles

NRU
May 18, 2016
By Leah Wong

The introduction of autonomous vehicles has the potential to change the dynamics of land use planning in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. If it results in a move away from personal vehicle ownership to a transportation system comprising shared driverless vehicles, it could unlock large parcels of land currently being used for parking and warehouses.

Speaking at a Ryerson University City Building Institute event on autonomous vehicles, DIALOG founding partner Antonio Gomez-Palacio said there are land uses, such as parking and goods distribution, which will not be required at the same volume when autonomous vehicles become commonly used.

“The coupling of transportation and land use policies is an absolute necessity,” said Gomez-Palacio. “There will be a couple of areas where we don’t yet know what’s going to happen.”

For example, Gomez-Palacio said taking drivers out of the equation changes how surface and structure parking lots are used. Autonomous vehicles could be parked in different ways and if the vehicles are shared, serving a broad range of people rather than an individual household, they will not be parked during the day.

Ontario Transportation minister Steven Del Duca agrees and suggests that the prevalence of autonomous vehicles would offer the opportunity to change the land use around GO stations. GO Transit presently owns about 72,000 parking spots and Del Duca told participants that keeping up with parking demand continues to be an issue.

“When I talk to people who live in my community [in Vaughan] about getting to the GO station, and many of them live near each other, they don’t even contemplate [carpooling or using] the existing public transit we have in York Region along major arterial roads, because it doesn’t suit their lifestyle,” said Del Duca.

If the shift is towards shared autonomous vehicles, Del Duca said, there is the potential to unlock the land near transit stations for development rather than tying it up in parking lots.

Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence cofounder and executive director Barrie Kirk told participants that the prevalence of autonomous vehicles could alter the need for public transit in some municipalities. Instead of operating infrequent bus service on a fixed route, shared vehicles could serve passengers on-demand and operate door-to-door.

“In big cities like Toronto you have a very unique set of circumstances and I think you will always need traditional transit working in conjunction with driverless taxis,” said Kirk. “Medium cities like Bellville and Kingston, I can see very clearly that driverless taxis could completely supplant the need for public transit.”

Kirk suggests that autonomous vehicles could also improve the quality of life for people with mobility issues, particularly those living in smaller municipalities and with limited access to public transit. Adding shared driverless vehicles creates a new transportation option for residents. As the baby boomer cohort ages this could help seniors to stay in their homes by removing the needing to drive themselves to appointments or on errands.

On the down side there are concerns that people would gain a higher tolerance for long commutes if they are no longer responsible for driving themselves to work. When people realize they can sleep or text during their commute, Gomez-Palacio suggests their tolerance levels for commuting may significantly increase.

“We don’t want that to happen. This is where we can’t just assume a wait-and-see attitude towards driverless cars. We really need to be ahead of the game and create some of that policy,” said Gomez-Palacio. He added that higher tolerance for long commutes could lead to increased sprawl as people are willing to travel further for work.

Del Duca said there are a lot of tools that governments are able to deploy to ensure that policies are aligned to continue to promote the use of public transit and discourage sprawl.

“If we, at this critical moment as the world of transportation is transforming under our feet, are simply reactive as government we run the risk of being in a situation where we haven’t necessarily solved the problems that we could potentially solve with the technology,” said Del Duca.

And Gomez-Palacio suggests that autonomous vehicles are just the beginning of the land use transformation in our communities.

“As soon as we automate the movement component we’re going to figure out how to automate other aspects of the transportation system,” he said. With autonomous technology, vehicles could transfer goods without needing a person to do it or needing to pass through a distribution centre.