Wake up honey, a new transit mode just dropped: Build Canada's goofy transportation memo

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, Build Canada launched with several extremely self-serving policy memos from business execs wanting to enrich themselves via the public purse.

The most flagrantly self-serving of these is Build Here, Not There: Winning the Transportation Race. When I read the title I thought to myself "oh, wow, a policy memo about the issues with how Canada proposes and procures transportation infrastructure? That's a real problem, maybe I am being too hard on these folks." Alas, then I saw the byline: Stewart Lyons, CEO of Bird. Now, I confess that I thought Bird was 1) an American company, and 2) a bankrupt one. It turns out that both of these things are true, but Stewart is Canadian and one of the co-CEOs of the restructured post-Chapter 11 business. His 'builder' credentials instead stem from the telecom industry in the 2000s.

Rather than engaging with the myriad issues that plague large scale transportation infrastructure projects in Canada, Stewart's memo is about solving the real issue: that Toronto and Montreal have both banned e-scooters and untested self-driving vehicles! Yes, the 'transportation race' is not about developing transit infrastructure that can connect cities, reduce emissions, or even just alleviate downtown Toronto congestion, it's about having Transport Canada consolidate authority for what is permitted on all roads so that "we could allow self-driving robots [ed note: and e-scooters] to be anywhere in Canada, allowing companies to innovate and experiment without worry of some smaller governing authority blocking them."

Stewart tries to obfuscate the glaring conflict of interest here by shifting focus to non-e-scooter technology, but the reality is that there aren't any other real use cases that are being impacted so we end up talking about, I kid you not, FLYING CARS.

Drones that can deliver life-saving medical supplies in minutes, autonomous vehicles that will reduce traffic accidents, and even flying cars that can cut commute times in half. This isn’t science fiction—these things are already being built.

Lest you think that maybe you missed some huge technological leap that was announced, don't worry, you didn't. Enumerating the logistical hurdles between where we are now and flying cars that can cut commute times in half being real is too lengthy to handle as a diversion here, but this is grade A bullshit that conflates the technological challenges of developing a vehicle (where there has been very impressive work done!) with the logistical challenges of actually having large fleets of those vehicles operating simultaneously (of which the past few weeks have provided us ample demonstration).

The general thrust of the memo is that 1) regulation for both roadway and sidewalk vehicles should be centralized in Transport Canada, overriding local control, and 2) Transport Canada should be maximally permissive in regulating novel transportation technology. I am sympathetic to first point, because I live in Toronto and I'm regularly frustrated by the roadblocks to progress that local control can create. I am less sympathetic to the second point, because I have worked in the tech industry for a decade and a half and don't trust these companies so far as I can throw them.

I also think the memo is shortsighted, because it imagines that a single national regulatory body will in practice be permissive. In the name of 'simple, streamlined' regulations, Stewart suggests that 'If we don’t yet have a clear set of rules for a technology a company can ask for a review and receive a clear answer on whether they can operate within three months.' I genuinely cannot imagine that Stewart sincerely believes that a single national regulator can, as a matter of course, decide whether any given novel technology can be deployed nationwide within 3 months of a request while performing any sort of rigorous analysis.

It's frustrating, because the memo is skirting around the edges of some very real issues only to get mired in the self-serving goals of the author. Patchwork regulatory structures across the country are a real problem, contributing to interprovincial trade barriers and general waste. Rather than reckon with those real economy-wide costs however, the memo is concerned that Montreal has a municipally-operated bike share program that "could also be delivered by the private sector".

What's more frustrating though is that, far from being bold and fresh ideas, the implicit viewpoint of this memo is the same bog-standard "everyone has their own individual vehicle to ferry them hither and yon" paradigm that gave us the congestion-clogged arterial roads we've already got. When we look to China, we are only looking to their deployment of a passenger-sized drone, and not to the incredible network of high-speed rail that has been developed in less time than we can even finish a report on "high-frequency" rail along the Quebec City-Windsor corridor. When we look to Japan, it's for their nationalized regulatory framework (while ignoring that Japan is a unitary state), and not Tokyo's 12% private motor vehicle modal share.

A different world is possible. It would be nice if our "builders" were able to imagine one.