The driverless car revolution won't come automatically. That was the message at the Rural Ontario Municipal Association conference in downtown Toronto as panellists discussed the challenging policy questions cities and the province will have to grapple with in order to adapt to the disruptive new technology.

There was general agreement that driverless cars will bring benefits and that they are coming sooner rather than later. But the panellists also agreed that the changes will pose big policy challenges to municipalities all across the province, and that they aren't prepared.

"You're not ready," said lawyer Michael Polowin of Gowling WLG to a room of municipal politicians, staffers and policy experts from across the province.

He added that smaller cities in particular don't have the resources to do the kind of intensive analysis necessary to grapple with driverless vehicles, and so they should work with provincial counterparts.

"You need to go the province and say: 'We need help to adapt to this.' "

Automated cars are rapidly coming to Ontario. In early January, QP Briefing first reported that the government was proposing to allow the testing of automated vehicles without drivers behind the wheel on provincial roads. The province is also investing $80 million over five years on testing automated vehicles in the Stratford area, and has a 10-year pilot project with several tech and auto companies as well as academics.

Despite the bevy of research, Polowin warned that such a fundamental shift to how Ontarians drive won't be entirely smooth.

"We are going to end up with more conflicts with automated vehicles and human-driven vehicles," the lawyer added.

And he speculated that this could mean political pressure to create automated car lanes and people-only lanes. Another potential issue could be the need to rewrite legislation around vehicle infractions – after all, is a passenger in a driverless liable? He added that if there is a technical error in automated vehicles because a municipality failed to update the road-related data sets on which the technology relies, then the municipality could be found liable for an incident too.

Julia Markovich, a transportation policy senior research associate at the Conference Board of Canada, urged municipalities to fully understand what the underlying algorithms mean, and how they affect cities.

"This is a story about how we deal with the data ... what lies are we telling the machine," she said. "Municipalities are much more vulnerable to all these biases that emerge in a data set."

Urbanist Antonio Gómez-Palacio, the principal of Dialog Design, spoke to some of the advantages that automated vehicles will bring. He outlined a future where car ownership will be significantly less than what it currently is – in line with trends that see fewer millennials driving than previous generations – and the transportation efficiences that will come along with it. These changes can help shape land-use planning and other issues, Gómez-Palacio explained.

Municipalities warned about rough road ahead for automated vehicles

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