Last fall, David Ticoll (who is a research fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto) published a thorough discussion paper called Driving Changes: Automated Vehicles in Toronto. 

If you’re interested in driverless cars, and I know that a lot of you are, then it’s definitely worth a weekend read. It’s fairly long. He gets into the various automation levels, the transition period, the implications for policy makers, the benefits, and so on.

Here’s a quick snippet on the topic of benefits:

“This report provides bottom-up analysis based on Toronto-specific data. The result is a conservative estimate that were AVs to be at a 90% adoption rate in Toronto today, the result would be annual savings of $6 billion, or 4% of the City’s $150 billion gross domestic product. This includes $1.2 billion from reduced collisions, $2.7 billion out of congestion costs, $1.6 billion from insurance, and $0.5 billion from parking fees and fines. AVs will provide other quantifiable social and economic benefits that range from fewer deaths and hospitalizations thanks to lower particle emissions, to productivity gains in many business sectors.”

But of course there’s the question of: when will this happen? Below is a chart from the paper that was assembled using various consultant/analyst predictions. Based on this, we’re still over a decade away from the consumer adoption of automated vehicles.

Last week I called somebody a NIMBY. And though I probably shouldn’t have, it stems from the fact that I make a concerted effort to be the exact opposite: a YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard, as opposed to Not In My Back Yard).

I appreciate that change can be difficult for a lot of people. In fact, behavioral economic theory (specifically Prospect Theory) suggests that when people are faced with probabilistic alternatives involving risk, they tend to put more weight on the potential losses. This means that the potential benefits have to be, not just marginally better, but hugely more beneficial before people will make the change.

Because I know I’m equipped with this bias, I try and constantly remind myself that change and motion are good and that oftentimes the potential losses or negatives aren’t going to be as bad as I might initially think.

However, I also have a counter acting bias. I recently did a personality assessment (called the