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Neighborliness vs. Car Culture: Traffic Violence, Pedestrian Deaths in Philadelphia, and Vision Zero’s Concept of Equity
Vision Zero’s goal of traffic violence abolition and greater traffic safety for pedestrians and other non-driving users of the transportation system will require not only engineering fixes, but also empowered community engagement and participation.
Smartphones on Wheels in Southeast Asia: A Crossroads for Data Governance
While the transformation of automobiles into data-generating “smartphones on wheels” has revolutionized mobility, it has also raised critical concerns over data privacy and sovereignty. Equipped with sensors and connected technologies, smart vehicles collect vast amounts of data, including personal information, driving patterns, and biometric identifiers. While auto-exporting jurisdictions…
Human Masters/Robot Servants: Highly Automated Vehicle Design, Intoxicated Drivers & Vicarious Liability
A traditional engineering role is to design a safe product. Safety engineering is an exercise in harm avoidance ex ante. In contrast, liability attribution is an exercise to compensate for loss post hoc—traditionally viewed as a legal matter. We observe that, when a natural person incurs liability for a loss…
Lunar Refueling: Legal Issues and Suggested Solutions
Lunar refueling is expected to empower the lunar economy and transform the Moon into a gateway for deep-space missions, facilitating exploration of destinations like Mars and asteroids, it also raises legal and environmental concerns.
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.