Our sister site UrbanToronto.ca recently sat down with Alex Mereu, Transportation Planner at IBI Group, for an enlightening discussion on a very topical subject: the rise and impact of autonomous vehicles on the urban form. 

Toronto's Yonge Street, image by Flickr user Greg's Southern Ontario

According to Mereu — who recently authored the IBI Group's "A Driverless Future: It's not Just About the Cars" report — the impact of autonomous vehicles on urban spaces will be determined as much by the regulations and policies as the technology itself. "The technology is definitely coming, and much of it already exists," Mereu explains, pointing to innovations like the Google Car and Uber's self-driving pilot project in Pittsburgh as portends of the very near future.

Meanwhile, a number of new technologies have already hit the automotive market in recent years, gradually bringing greater autonomy to vehicles. While some fully driverless cars — more formally known as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) — now function in controlled, closed-loop environments, a number of more limited features are augmenting the user experience. "There are already cars that drive autonomously on the highway, or that can parallel park," Mereu notes. However, he stresses that the most transformative impacts will come from "Connected Autonomous Vehicles" (CAVs) that are both fully independent — even in mixed traffic — and interconnected with surrounding infrastructure and other CAVs, as well as mobile devices. 

You can find the rest of this story on our sister site, UrbanToronto.ca.