Driverless cars in Toronto could actually make the streets safer — if city hall does the right thing

Toronto Star

06-05-2025

The big number
69,141
the number of reported vehicle collisions in Toronto last year
I am feeling a bit conflicted about the robot uprising.
My struggle stems from a report on the agenda of this week's meeting of Toronto city hall's infrastructure and environment committee. It tells city councillors that the Ontario Ministry of Transportation has given a green light to a pilot project that will see Magna International deploy a fleet of small, three-wheeled self-driving vehicles to neighbourhoods on the west side of downtown.
The robot vehicles in the pilot will be tasked with delivering parcels. During the test phase, the fleet of as many as 20 vehicles will be subject to a bunch of safety limitations.
They'll be limited to speeds of no more than 32 km/h. They won't travel on any streets with speed limits beyond 40 km/h. They'll avoid left turns and won't operate in heavy rain or snow. And they'll be closely followed by cars driven by humans, who will be equipped with a kill switch in case of any glitches, like, presumably, a 'Terminator'-style Skynet situation, where their computers become self-aware and try to wipe out humanity.
I'm kidding about the Skynet thing. But I'm wary about the rest. Self-driving cars have been hyped up for years, perpetually presented as the next big thing right around the corner. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been promising it for more than a decade and keeps missing deadlines. (Tesla also, alarmingly, gave vehicle owners the option to enable an 'assertive' self-driving mode designed to follow other cars more closely and make rolling stops.)
Given the track record of some of the Big Tech companies pushing this big tech forward, it seems entirely reasonable to be skeptical of a move to turn our public streets into a test laboratory for profit-seeking businesses.
But I am not ready to reject the self-driving vehicles outright. Because, despite my misgivings, I am willing to bet these robots will still be better drivers than many of their flesh-and-bone counterparts.
Seriously: How could they not be? It's not like Toronto's human drivers have been covering themselves in glory in recent years. They crash into all kinds of things all the time. There were 69,141 collisions involving automobiles last year, according to Toronto police data, a post-pandemic high. That averages out to about 189 crashes per day, or eight every hour.
And drivers in this city don't just collide with other cars. They also crash into stationary objects, like hydro poles. And houses. (Sometimes repeatedly.) And, very inconveniently, into convenience stores. And transit tunnels with incredibly obvious signage telling drivers not to enter.
And, tragically and too often, they crash into people.
Meanwhile, the data suggests that, even in the early days of the technology, self-driving vehicles tend to crash way less. Especially when it comes to crashes that hurt people. A study from self-driving taxi business Waymo, set to be published in the peer-reviewed Traffic Injury Prevention Journal, found that over more than 91 million kilometres of driving in cities like San Francisco and Phoenix, the vehicles saw 92 per cent fewer crashes with injuries to pedestrians compared to vehicles driven by humans and 82 per cent fewer crashes with injuries to cyclists.
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
That kind of potential for improved road safety is reason enough for Toronto city hall to keep an open mind about autonomous vehicles. Combined with continued investments in cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, they could help council make real progress on the Vision Zero commitment to eliminate traffic deaths and injuries.
Where I think the city might run into trouble, however, is that so far it doesn't seem to matter much what anyone at city hall thinks about letting the robots roll on our roads. The report going to city hall's infrastructure committee this week is clear that this test project is being authorized solely by Premier Doug Ford's provincial government.
'The City of Toronto has no regulatory authority over this pilot,' the report notes. As a result, Mayor Olivia Chow and Toronto council aren't being asked to approve the project. They're just being told it's happening. They'll have no opportunity to establish any rules or standards beyond what the Ministry of Transportation and Magna have worked out. Toronto's transportation department will generally be a passive observer to this experiment.
That strikes me as the wrong approach. City hall should demand more direct oversight. If and how self-driving vehicles operate on our local roads should be a local decision. And the decision should be part of a comprehensive plan for the movement of people and goods in the decades ahead.
Gta
Driverless vehicles to hit Toronto streets — but some would like to park the idea
The province has approved a test program that will see up to 20 automated cars on Toronto's
If self-driving tech is inevitable, how many self-driving vehicles should Toronto have? Should there be limits, to avoid scenarios where our streets are choked with delivery robots? How is tech tested? Who faces penalties when there are malfunctions? Does Toronto want to be a city with thousands of vehicles carrying individual passengers? Or is it better to be a city that encourages more space-efficient self-driving buses?
If city hall does not start tackling these questions now, the danger is that tech companies peddling self-driving vehicles will follow the same basic path as Airbnb and Uber, where much-hyped new services gained a foothold in Toronto before city hall had established firm rules and regulations.
That led to a messy outcome, where municipal bureaucrats and local politicians tried to rush to apply rules to already established industries. It was a costly and frustrating mistake. The rise of these robots could be an opportunity to do things better. And given their very real potential to drive better than Toronto's woeful human drivers, I'm starting to see the appeal.