Are BC's municipalities ready for driverless cars?

The biggest technological revolution of our lifetime is just around the corner as we start to get ready for the advent of driverless cars.

Toyota and Tesla will have fully autonomous vehicles on the road by 2022, with all the other auto manufacturers following by 2025.

The shift promises virtually no deaths due to traffic accidents, drastically reduced commute times and emissions as most of these cars will be electric.

Are our governments doing enough about the fact that there are going to be so many of these driverless cars on the road?

Less than half of the people who currently own a car today will own one in 12 years - there won't be any need to.

With driverless cars, commuters will be able to order a ride to their door using a mobile app, and customize their trip with personal music, movies and more.

The costs of owning versus operating will be dramatic. If you own, it will cost more than twice as much than if you just order a vehicle every time you want a ride.

There will be a massive change in the need for public transit, public transportation and interconnectivity with driverless cars.

Municipalities will have to completely rethink the way they do their planning.

Right now cities are dealing with signage, curbs, lanes, signals, traffic interestions and parking. That's all going to change because none of that is going to be necessary.

The car will operate by lidar, radar and cameras... so the cars talk to each other, but they also have to talk to the infrastructure.

With the technology being used there will also be a need for strong IT protections.

What will happen when you have 40,000 cars on the road during rush hour and all of a sudden Surrey's system goes down, or Burnaby's system goes down. We are going to have to deal with ransomware and hacking and freezes and all the stuff that each of us deals with when we are trying to put together a word document.

There won't be any need for gas stations, parkades and there won't be any on-site parking issues.

But as of now, we are totally unprepared.  When are we going to come up with new stategies?  We have to plan ahead. We have to do a 5 year financial plan and each community will have to do their regional growth stategy and Official Community Plan in the next 2 years to deal with what's coming in the next 4 years. Is this going to happen?