Mobility Pricing and Automated Vehicles Conference

On November 18, Transport Futures (TF) hosted the world’s first conference examining policies related to mobility pricing (MP) and automated vehicles (AV). Although last year’s sold-out forum on The Future of the Car evaluated AV technology and policy in the context of vehicle ownership and sharing, pundits continue to claim that self-driving cars will reduce congestion, accidents and emissions – but our economy and society could be disrupted in the process. While none of this is proven, decades of international MP research and hundreds of successful “on the ground” schemes have demonstrated that comprehensive road tolls and parking fees can address transportation problems while generating new revenue for sustainable infrastructure – without the disruption foreseen with AVs. Yet MP has been very difficult to implement in Ontario and across Canada.

With this in mind, we invited 11 international experts to evaluate MP and AV policy benefits and costs from several perspectives: planning, engineering, infrastructure funding, public opinion, modal choice, demand management, ethics, safety, liability, privacy, data security and regulatory. These issues and many others were thoroughly examined and subsequently discussed at the end of the day using the interesting results from a special survey completed by our 80 delegates.

Over 95% of our delegates gave the conference an excellent rating and provided these comments:

“Very well thought-out program.”
“Well done! Great list of speakers! Learned more in this one day session than at other multi-day conferences. Thank you!”
“Covered many different aspects of the AV and mobility pricing spectrum.”
“Good speakers, interesting topics, good participant engagement.”
“Great day! Thoughtful, insightful and thought provoking.”
“Directly related to my function at work with regards to transportation planning.”
“As usual, an excellent conference. Good mix of good speakers! Informative in all aspects of the subject. One of the best in terms of the quality of the contents which are more and more difficult to see among all the seminars and conferences out there!”

During the event we took the opportunity to thank 407 ETR President José Tamariz for his
incredible TF support during the seven years that he has overseen 407 ETR operations. He is returning to Spain to take on new responsibilities and will be missed. A shout out also goes to our other major sponsors who made this conference possible as well as to our wonderful speakers, delegates and staff. Thanks also to MTO Minister Steven Del Duca for his welcoming letter and to Don Wall who wrote a great article summarizing the event on behalf of Daily Commercial News. He followed up with another article in which he interviewed TF speaker David King from Arizona State University.

The Mobility Pricing and Automated Vehicles Conference was generously sponsored by the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario (Platinum), 407 ETR (Gold), ARUP (Silver) and supported by the Ontario Good Roads Association (Bronze) and e-RegisterNow.