To the list of issues that have conspicuously not been debated in Toronto’s nearly-complete election campaign (police oversight, provincially-imposed planning changes) we can add another: last week, Alphabet-backed self-driving car company Waymo announced it will be coming to Toronto, with test drives starting next year and paid service starting in 2028. That would put Toronto on the still relatively-short list of global cities with Waymo services, and its arrival would immediately raise a number of questions about how the city will accommodate, at minimum, scores of new vehicles operating primarily in Toronto’s already-congested downtown core.
There will be a number of objections (of wildly differing qualities) raised to Waymo’s entry into Toronto’s transportation market. There’s the generalized anti-AI sentiment of the moment, there will undoubtedly be arguments about displacing rideshare drivers, and perhaps we’ll even work in some antipathy towards a foreign corporate overlord hoovering up even more data in the context of current U.S.-Canada relations. (I am, admittedly, tempted to argue that Ontario should require that Google expunge its idiotic “Lake America” labels before any Waymo cars are allowed on our streets.) But the view of the Ontario government at the moment is that they’re broadly in favour of automated vehicles coming to our cities, so, even if Toronto Council were inclined to object, it’s largely — but not entirely — out of their hands.
There is an objective, good faith argument against Waymo: that there is simply no problem facing Toronto for which the answer is “more cars.” The laws of physics, geometry, and basic mathematics won’t be mocked, and in 2026 it does not matter whether those cars are electric or gasoline-powered, driven by humans or computers.
The problem with this indisputable fact is that it’s totally irrelevant to the current Ontario government, which successfully argued at the Court of Appeal that putting more cars on the road was their policy and that removing bike lanes to do it was within the competence of the legislature.
The province can choose to ignore reality and engage in years-long dogmatic crusades, but Ontario’s cities don’t really have that option. They have actual problems in the real world to solve, and Waymo will pose a real-world problem even if everything goes well. Namely, at a time when Toronto’s road congestion is already a highly-salient issue for Toronto voters, even a small number of Waymo cars on the streets are going to end up being a very visible irritant for drivers. Waymos are programmed to be cautious drivers (Ontario’s automated vehicle pilot requires that Waymo assume full liability for its vehicles) and even as the company tweaks its programming so the cars drive more “assertively,” accounts from other cities are pretty clear that Waymos are more cautious than the median human driver. Precisely because of that caution, plenty of other drivers absolutely hate sharing the road with them.
This isn’t a solvable problem, exactly — see the laws of physics and geometry, above — but it is one that is at least partly addressable. The city could adopt rules to cap the number of vehicles in the most congested-part of the city at the most-congested times (but those are also, by definition, the times of highest demand for Waymo’s service). The city could theoretically, via its power to license ridesharing, impose a congestion charge in all but name on driverless cars, if for no other reason than to prevent fleets of empty cars from creating novel kinds of traffic obstructions.
Whatever we do, this should be something the city starts working on as soon as possible after the election, because this isn’t the kind of situation we want to sleepwalk into. We’ve seen the pattern repeat itself in several cases now with platform tech companies that start small and metastasize into something larger: by the time they become big enough that regulations are being contemplated, they’re also big enough to mobilize their own userbase as a political constituency unto itself. We saw this with Uber back in the day, and more recently even with TikTok in the face of U.S. legislative action. If Toronto wants to impose any kind of controls on Waymo before it gets too big to regulate at all, time isn’t on the city’s side.
Of course, no question of municipal lawmaking in Ontario can be answered without considering whether the Ford government will bigfoot any municipal attempt to regulate the road — as it has with bike lanes and speed limit enforcement. The province is going to face two competing political impulses here, distinct from the ones facing the city. On the one hand, the premier has been nothing if not solicitous to the auto industry, and support for driverless cars in the provincial context is premised on supporting Ontario auto jobs in the broadest sense. On the other hand, the premier has made it clear that he’s immensely sensitive to vocal minorities if those minorities happen to see the world entirely behind a windshield and steering wheel.
The bigger question for Waymo’s future in Toronto may not be whether it can survive the scrutiny of Toronto City Council. It may be, instead, whether Waymo can survive an onslaught of irate motorists who happen to have the premier’s cellphone number.