Analysis of the Current Status of Enacted Legislation on Autonomous Vehicles in the United States

Abstract

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have the potential to increase efficiency, safety, environmental benefits, and equity in the transportation area. However, these benefits are not guaranteed until design, planning, policy, and implementation frameworks play their roles in bringing these benefits to the community. This paper presents a bibliometric and systematic review of the legislation on AVs in the U.S. to analyze the definition, evolution, and enacted legislation to help understand the current status of this research area and provide the future research direction. Investigation of existing legislation mainly focuses on 33 states in the U.S. that have enacted legislation, and the information from 2012 to 2022 was collected. Then, the collected information was categorized into seven categories for further analysis. From this study, the authors found out that state rules primarily govern testing rather than its general use. Even though testing is currently the top priority, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) anticipates AV legislation to evolve rapidly and desires to issue new regulations annually in preparation for deployment. There is a trend in going through the state governments implementing AV legislation by evaluating current laws and regulations to address unnecessary impediments to testing and deployment. This trend should have cooperated with all states to avoid a patchwork of inconsistent state laws. This study shows that the states have been moving toward passing legislation to test and enact policies to be ready to implement AVs on the highways.