It was once a far-fetched idea, but now the City of Saskatoon is planning for when it becomes a reality: self-driving cars on city streets.
“We’ve made sure that in the bus rapid transit plan, in the design, we’ve factored in and given direction to administration to consider the effects of autonomous vehicles,” Saskatoon Mayor Charlie Clark said.
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The thought of these cars wasn’t always the case.
“In the first few years of development of our growth plan, these weren’t even on the radar and hardly anyone was talking about autonomous vehicles,” Clark said.
“Then just as we came to the final stages of the delivery of it and the planning for it, this phenomenon started to become a factor in the conversation.”
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Although it may seems too early to be thinking of autonomous vehicles as part of everyday life, experts say self-driving vehicles will be here sooner than many people think.
“By 2025 you’re going to see autonomous vehicles on the highways and for sale to the public,” Terry Bergan, president and CEO of International Road Dynamics, said.
One of the challenges facing the city is to plan a system around a type of vehicle that won’t stop moving or take up a parking spot.
“If you end with a lot of cars that are just never parking but just circulating for the next ride, you can end up with a lot of congestion and more demand for over-passes and things like that to deal with intersections,” Clark said.
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However, Bergan believes transit will operate smoother and with increased ridership while sharing the streets with self-driving vehicles because of the process of how people get to and from their bus stops.
“If you can get people to staging areas faster and more efficiently, they’re automatically going to move toward an effective way to use their public transportation,” Bergan said.
Despite Bergan’s belief that this technology will lead to more cars on city streets, he doesn’t believe larger roadways will be needed either due to the efficiency of the autonomous vehicle.
“We have roadways that are, because of peak hours, are operating at three lanes,” Bergan said. “We’re probably not going to need those three lanes; we probably initially need one less lane down to one lane because vehicles are continuously streaming.”
Clark said another challenge is planning around the unknown.
“We cant quite predict what that’s going to look like,” Clark said. “The trick is being able to design a system that has the flexibility to adapt as some of these changes develop.”
There is currently no set timeline in place but Clark said there have been rumblings that Saskatoon could potentially be used as a training ground for self-driving cars in winter conditions.