Legal regulation in the field of automated automobile transport and road tests of autonomous vehicles

Abstract

Increase in demand for transportation services, on the one hand, stimulates development of the road network and construction of new objects of the transport infrastructure providing necessary transport system capacity, on the other hand, it stimulates development of new technologies allowing increase of human mobility, comfort and safety of vehicle driving. In these conditions, a great significance is acquired by development of intelligent transport systems (hereinafter referred to as the ITS) representing, on the one hand, means of connection, control and management built in the vehicles and objects of transport infrastructure, and on the other hand, means of control and fast decision-making based on the information received in real-time mode and available to transport operators and transport service users. ITS development has resulted in emergence of autonomous (driverless) vehicles. Considering the issues that the transport complex faces, it seems that driverless vehicles will be able to provide substantial help in solving them, for example by eliminating the human factor from transportation process. Creation of driverless vehicles is impossible without development of a unified approach to forming a legal and technical framework for their practical implementation. The abovementioned framework may be divided on a provisional basis into regulatory technical and legal ones. In the process of creating driverless vehicles, development testing on public roads is of great importance. Such tests cannot be replaced by research at closed proving grounds where it is impossible to recreate the whole range of rapidly changing driving conditions of the actual use. The existing legal framework in the Russian Federation and in a number of foreign countries allows testing highly automated and fully automated vehicles on public roads.