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Beyond Congestion Pricing
After years of political and legal efforts to block it, congestion pricing finally went into effect in New York City in January 2025. Early indications are positive, though threats to its continuation from the Trump administration and others remain. But its journey to this point has already made…Regulatory Frameworks for Smart Mobility: Current U.S. Regulation of Connected and Automated Vehicles And The Road Ahead
Survey of current federal and state legislative and regulatory frameworks aimed at advancing the deployment of connected and autonomous vehicles.
Keep the Driver in Driverless Cars
Let’s take a few cues from the aviation industry. As a law professor who studies mobility, I spend many waking hours thinking about fully automated vehicles, those cars that drive themselves without any need for a human operator. As a true believer in this technology, I think the…
Infrastructure Finance for the Public Good: How Asset Recycling Can Untangle the New York MTA’s $50 Billion Debt Load
Systematic infrastructure underinvestment – a $2.6 trillion ‘gap’ – and accelerating climate change have become facts of life in the United States. Though typically attributed to politics, this Article posits the circumstances as a market disequilibrium rooted in an interplay between unique dimensions of infrastructure and distinctive features of…How Might We Reimagine Transportation Technology to Combat Forced Labor: Conference Explanations and Recommendations From the Law and Mobility Program’s Annual Conference 2023
The LAMP Annual Conference 2023 considered how we might reimagine transportation technology in a way that combats the systemic vulnerabilities...A Comparative Look at Various Countries’ Legal Regimes Governing Automated Vehicles
News and commentary about automated vehicles (AVs) focus on how they look and appear to operate, along with the companies developing and testing them. Behind the scenes are legal regimes—laws, regulations, and implementing bodies of different kinds—that literally and figuratively provide the rules of the road for AVs. Legal regimes matter because public welfare hinges on aspects of AV design and operation. Legal regimes can provide gatekeeping for AV developers and operators seeking to use public roads, and they can allocate liability when something goes wrong. Guiding and complementing legal regimes is public policy. Policy documents such as articulations of national strategies are sometimes used to address issues related to legal regimes and to demonstrate a jurisdiction’s support for AV development. Building on its long history analyzing AV policy issues, RAND (with support of its Institute for Civil Justice) collaborated with the University of Michigan Law School’s Law and Mobility Program to study the nature of different AV legal regimes around the world. It selected countries known to be active in this domain. The research team reviewed and shared scholarly and gray literature (which is a type of scholarship produced by an entity in which commercial publications are not the primary focus, such as white papers from a government agency), and it also consulted experts in these regimes from the public and private sectors. Under the supervision of the Law and Mobility Fellow (a lawyer), law students collected and studied materials associated with country-specific legal regimes and drafted summaries guided by RAND’s enumeration of key factors. Availability of information about legal regimes varies—access to documentation, especially in English, is uneven, even for officials in different countries working collaboratively on these issues. That constrained availability is reflected in published legal comparisons, and it motivated the research team’s systematic research, which drew from materials in English and other languages. This article summarizes the makeup of AV legal regimes of Australia, China, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. It highlights some key contrasts, which will be developed further as the project continues. It focuses on law and policy relating to highly to fully automated vehicles (SAE Levels 4 and 5). Although guided by a common set of topics for each country, each profile reflects the material available and the factors that differentiate national approaches. The remainder of this article introduces the legal regimes of the covered countries in turn. It then provides an overview of key points of comparison and outlines future work.Preemptive Federal Legislation for EV Manufacturers to Sell Direct to Customers
This article advocates for federal legislation to implement a nationwide EV licensing system that would allow both EV manufacturers and dealers to sell and service their vehicles directly to consumers nationwide. This prospective legislation would preempt dealer franchise laws that prohibit or limit manufacturers from selling their vehicles directly to consumers. This article does not argue that direct distribution is the superior method of distribution; instead, this article argues that manufacturers should have the freedom to pursue direct distribution. As more EV companies enter the market, EV manufacturers need to have the flexibility to use a variety of distribution systems that best suit their business needs. Part II of this article provides background information on the history of dealer franchise laws and the current status of dealer franchise laws. Part III addresses the problems associated with the current car buying process and why some manufacturers prefer to sell their cars directly to consumers. Part III also addresses counterarguments from the dealer lobby. Part IV introduces potential federal legislative reform to preempt state dealer franchise laws to allow EV manufacturers to directly sell their vehicles to consumers.Data Governance Frameworks for Smart Cities: Key Considerations for Data Management and Use
The proliferation of “smart technologies” has created significant opportunities to leverage data to improve everyday life across sectors. In cities around the world, local governments and private enterprises, often partnering together, have launched projects that integrate smart technologies with Internet of Things (“IoT”) capabilities into public spaces in order to promote efficiency, safety, mobility, and innovation. At the same time, smart cities must balance the need for robust data in order to achieve these benefits with public concerns regarding privacy and data use. This paper examines the key attributes of smart cities, the essential role that data plays in fueling smart cities, and the importance of establishing appropriate guidelines to govern the management and use of the massive amounts of data that smart cities generate. This paper refers to such guidelines as “data governance” frameworks. Drawing on case studies from cities in both the U.S. and other countries, the paper discusses trends and challenges in data governance that are impacting the success of smart cities projects. Based on this analysis, the paper outlines key considerations that should be taken into account to develop data governance frameworks that will promote the success of smart cities and the benefits that they bring.Privacy Frameworks for Smart Cities
This paper identifies some of the core privacy considerations raised by smart cities – government surveillance and data security in Part I. Then, Part II proposes a set of core principles for smart cities to consider in the development and deployment of smart cities to address privacy concerns. These principles include: (A) human-centric approaches to smart cities design and implementation, (B) transparency for city residents, (C) privacy by design, (D) anonymization and deidentification, (E) data minimization and purpose specification, (F) trusted data sharing, and (G) cybersecurity resilience.Setting the Agenda: The Legal and Historical Context to Best Understand How Transportation Technology Might Be Regulated to Combat Forced Labor
Transportation is a piece of all human activity. As individuals and as a society, the logistics of getting people and goods from one place to another is a question we answer countless times a day. Just today, billions of people drove to work, took the bus to school, used a rideshare to get to the store, or took the train into the city to enjoy an evening out on the town. This list does not even consider all the items people have ordered online which will be shipped and delivered to homes. Even more exciting is the innovation that inspired all the aforementioned modes of transportation; transportation technology has the amazing potential to make our lives easier, more efficient, and more equitable. But implementing all this technology requires labor, and the technology can only benefit those who have access to it. Most of us have never truly considered whose labor makes mobility possible. Relatedly, it is hard to imagine life without access to transportation if you are a person who has always known how they will get to work. This article will provide a framework to better understand one type of labor within the industry, exploited labor, also known as forced labor. Forced labor is part of the transportation industry and is also impacted by a lack of transportation. Without reliable and safe transportation individuals are at a higher risk of forced labor in other industries. The bottom line is twofold: considering the impacts that an increased demand for new technology will have on people who work in mines, in the supply chain, and in transportation as a service, as well as considering legal tools to maximize access to transportation for historically underserved communities in light of new technology. All this to say that this article will consider how society might reimagine the regulation of emerging transportation technology in a way that combats the systemic vulnerability that leaves people at risk of forced labor. This will include both the labor being performed to manufacture and operate the technology, as well as the impact on access to transportation of the user and nonuser. Though this article will largely analyze the role of automated vehicles, other innovations including reconfigured public transportation and electrification will also be considered. Transportation is at the heart of everything humanity does and yet this article will only scratch the surface of these issues.