The 2021 Law and Mobility Conference opened with a panel, moderated by Emily Frascaroli, that set out to begin answering three questions: What are emerging transportation technologies? What is the legal landscape surrounding these technologies? What are some challenges that these technologies face, in terms of both gaining…

Last week, Claire wrote about how Fourth Amendment precedents and facial recognition technologies could allow law enforcement to use AVs and other camera-equipped transportation technologies as a means of surveillance. In that post she mentioned the case of Robert Julian-Borchak Williams, who last year was arrested by the…

I previously blogged on automated emergency braking (AEB) standardization taking place at the World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations (also known as WP.29), a UN working group tasked with managing a few international conventions on the topic, including the 1958 Agreement on wheeled vehicles standards. It turns…

In light of the 2021 Law and Mobility Conference’s focus on equity, the Journal of Law & Mobility Blog will publish a series of blog posts surveying the civil rights issues with connected and autonomous vehicle development in the U.S. This is the fourth and final part of the…

For the past several months, this blog has primarily focused on new legal questions that will be raised by connected and automated vehicles. This new transportation technology will undoubtedly raise novel concerns around tort liability, traffic stops, and city design. Along with raising novel problems, CAVs will…

For many people, syncing their phone to their car is a convenience – allowing them to make hands-free calls or connect to media on their phone through the car’s infotainment system. But doing so can leave a lot of data on the car’s hardware, even after a user believes they…

City design has long been shaped by modes of transportation. The transition is easy to spot as you move westward across America. Relatively compact eastern cities initially grew up in the 18th and 19th centuries, when people traveled by foot or by horse. Scattered across the plains, and particularly throughout…

Troves of transportation data can be, and are, produced by smart infrastructure. Municipalities collect various kinds of transportation data, including traffic information such as accidents, flows, and volumes; bicycle information such as bike counts; pedestrian information such as pedestrian counts; smart bus stop information; street mapping information; location information for traffic signals; mapping details such as the miles of city streets; and information on roadwork and infrastructure planning such as construction or road closures expected to affect traffic. Governments, educational institutions, non-profit enterprises, and businesses find transportation data useful for purposes such as improving infrastructure, reducing traffic congestion, improving vehicle and pedestrian safety, providing public security and emergency services, making transportation services more accessible, improving civic planning and design, research and development of new mobility products and services (including machine learning), and researching other potential uses for the data. Wider availability and sharing of transportation data would help to facilitate the development, testing, and adoption of smart infrastructure and connected and automated modes of transportation (collectively, “smart mobility products and services”). However, there are barriers to the accessibility of transportation data for these purposes. One is that there is a lack of standardization and clarity in the permissions granted when transportation data is made available, and another is that privacy and other concerns prevent much of the data that could be useful from being made available; an example of the latter is the discontinuation of a smart streetlights project in San Diego due to concerns about the potential use of transportation data for surveillance purposes. This paper explores license provisions and contracting tools that data providers can consider using when making transportation data publicly available. Part II describes the kinds of provisions that data providers typically include in the licenses or other terms and conditions that they apply to transportation data. Part III examines the agreements under which specific municipalities in four states (Michigan, California, Pennsylvania, and Arizona) make transportation data publicly available, including pursuant to template agreements. Part IV identifies additional template agreements that are available for use by data providers when making data publicly available. Finally, Part V sets out key considerations for data providers in choosing the terms under which they make their transportation data available.

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.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post outlining the fledgling legal efforts to address the increasingly urgent privacy concerns related to automated vehicles. While Europe’s General Data Privacy Regulation and California’s Consumer Privacy Act set a few standards to limit data sharing, the US as a whole has…