Earlier this week, Arny Wise offered TransLink a glimpse of what he believes to be its future. It may not be the future TransLink has in mind.

In an email to transit executives, he wrote: “We would like to formally offer to TransLink a road trial and demonstration of a driverless electric shuttle minibus, at no cost to TransLink.”

Wise was writing on behalf of CAVCOE — the Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence, a non-profit advisory group based in Ottawa — of which he is a senior associate. The minibus is owned by Transdev, a French transport company and client of CAVCOE. Transdev has offered to fly the bus to B.C. at no cost to TransLink.

“The use of these shuttle buses can provide low-cost transportation without the cost of a driver,” Wise wrote. “Because they are battery-powered, they are green, virtually silent, and can be used indoors or out.”

Wise is a proponent of driverless vehicles. A retired Toronto urban planner and founder of PodCar Vehicle Systems Inc., an autonomous vehicle research firm, he lives in Vancouver. Before last week, the only contact I had had with him was second-hand and of a scolding nature: Of a column in which I mourned the defeat of the transit referendum, a referendum in which he voted No. Wise wrote me to say I should “get over it ... and stop belly-aching.”

Wise believes that autonomous, driverless vehicles will so revolutionize our roads and transit systems that they will lessen the need for, or change altogether, the kind of expensive, big-ticket public transit projects governments now spend billions building.

He isn’t alone in this belief: In a paper entitled Automated Vehicles: The Next Disruptive Technology, the Conference Board of Canada suggested that any government that doesn’t take the soon-to-be-felt impact of automated vehicles into its future plans could be wasting its money.

“When designing infrastructure projects,” the paper warned, “there is a tendency to assume that the future is simply an extension of the past. AVs are a truly disruptive technology and we cannot forecast the future by simply extrapolating from the past. (AVs) will change the forecasts for standard infrastructure and major infrastructure projects, tolling systems, revenue, etc.

“Because major infrastructure projects that are being designed and built now will last for 30 to 50 years or more, i.e., well into the AV era, we recommend that all transportation-related infrastructure projects, especially major ones, include a detailed AV impact assessment study.”

The popular image of AVs is one of Jetson-like ease — the commuter reading the newspaper while his or her programmed AV takes them into work. But Wise believes their effect will go well beyond mere convenience.

“Driverless cars will reduce congestion, because they allow the smooth flow of traffic, by eliminating driver error and will reduce collisions by 80 per cent, because they obey all the rules of the road and because 90 per cent of collisions are caused by human error.”

Because of automated breaking, they need less space between vehicles, further reducing congestion. And if AVs become a major component of the shared economy — as was suggested by a 2015 report on AVs by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — taxi fleets of AVs operated by companies like Uber, Car2Go and GoogleCar could not only remove 80 per cent of the car traffic but the need for owning a car, period. The change AVs will bring will affect car manufacturers, the insurance companies, taxi fleets, the trucking industry ... and public transit.