This article was first published by TorontoToday, a Village Media publication.
Toronto city councillors have raised concerns about the privacy and safety of a recently-announced self-driving car pilot under the province's control.
At a Wednesday meeting of the city’s infrastructure and environment committee, councillors also expressed concern that they did not yet have access to the province’s permit rules for the program, which will see up to 20 self-driving delivery vehicles operating in the city’s west end, at the end of 2026.
Councillor Dianne Saxe said that the self-driving vehicles would block traffic when making deliveries, have unclear legal status if they broke traffic laws, and may send facial images of passerby to databases in the United States outside the reach of Canadian privacy law.
“We don’t have the legal authority to prevent this abuse, but we can protest, we can object, we can demand better information,” she said.
The automated vehicles will be operated by Magna, an auto parts maker.
The recently-approved program comes under the provincial transport ministry, so the city has no authority over it.
“Basically, we can’t say no and we don’t have a choice here,” grumbled councillor Mike Colle.
Saxe said she had not yet seen the provincially issued permit, which outlines the conditions Magna must follow, but councillors would be allowed to read it on a confidential basis.
“We haven’t had time to read the secret permit that the public isn’t going to be allowed to know about,” she said.
The committee was set on Wednesday to debate a motion asking staff to report on the program, but Saxe moved that debate be delayed until June’s meeting, when they would have had a chance to read it, which was approved.
“What we’re faced with is something that is bad for the city, bad for privacy, bad for safety, bad for congestion.”
Magna did not send a representative to the meeting, Saxe said.
The province has a record of being secretive about the permits it issues for self-driving car experiments, and has in the past told people who wanted to see them to file freedom-of-information requests.
Autonomous vehicle experiments in Ontario have included a bus on the University of Waterloo campus, a grocery delivery truck in Peel Region, and a shuttle serving the area around the Whitby GO station. In several cases, humans have supervised them, ready to step in if needed.
How will Toronto’s self-driving vehicle pilot work?
Magna’s Last Mile Delivery Devices have three wheels, and are about the size of a large cargo bike. They won’t go faster than 32 kilometres an hour and won’t be allowed to make left turns, a city report on the program said.
They will operate in an area very roughly bounded by Eglinton Avenue West,, Avenue Road, College Street and King Street West, and Parkside Drive and Keele Street, beginning in the second quarter of this year.
Toronto was chosen because of the city’s high number of roads with speed limits of 40 kilometres an hour or less, the report said.
This is the second provincially authorized experiment with self-driving cars to happen in Toronto. The first was an experimental shuttle linking the Rouge Hill GO station to the surrounding neighbourhood. It was never fully autonomous, being supervised by a human attendant, and never carried passengers before the program was discontinued.
In late 2021, Toronto banned sidewalk delivery robots, which disability advocates said presented a hazard.
The robots then appeared in Ottawa, crowding icy, narrow sidewalks, until councillors there determined that they were already illegal.
Ran into this guy #intheGlebe today. My dog was not impressed 😂 #myOttawa pic.twitter.com/k0Xry9r3cF
— Line Lønnum (@Lonnum) January 26, 2022
—With files from Daniel Ramos
