Abstract
Local governments play an important role in structuring urban transportation through street design, zoning, and shared jurisdiction over ride-hailing, transit, and road pricing. While cities can harness these powers to steer planning outcomes, there is little research about what local officials think about regulatory changes related to autonomous vehicles (AV). We compile key AV-related policies recommended by scholars but rarely implemented, and conduct a survey of municipal officials throughout the United States, exploring their personal support and perceptions of bureaucratic capacity, legal limits, and political backing for each policy. This paper finds broad personal support for regulations related to right-of-way, equity, and land use, such as for increasing pedestrian space, expanding access for low-income people, and reducing sprawl. However, officials emphasized uncertain bureaucratic and legal capacity for city intervention outside of these areas, reaffirming limited local power in the federal system. Only a minority expected political support for any policy. Greater population size and more liberal resident political ideologies are strongly associated with personal and political support for many policies. Local population growth is correlated with greater capacity to undertake policies. This work contributes to the growing literature on transportation governance in the context of technological uncertainty.
Highlights
Technological developments have the potential to fundamentally shift the nature and use of both urban transportation and city form
To what degree do municipal officials support reforms that would leverage autonomous vehicles (AV) to alter approaches to city planning? Since the policymaking process is more complicated than just enacting regulations that align with the personal opinions of the municipal officials enacting them, we explore how that personal support compares with bureaucratic limitations, legal restrictions, and political obstacles
In order to examine whether local governments are considering AV-related policies, we developed a list of 12 urban-transportation policies that could help shape the rollout of AVs towards more positive outcomes, and which were mentioned by at least two of Sperling [35], NACTO [4], and Regional Plan Association (RPA) [36]
Summary
Technological developments have the potential to fundamentally shift the nature and use of both urban transportation and city form. Examples include the 19th century introduction of the streetcar and the resulting development of “streetcar suburbs”, or the invention of the internal combustion engine and the reconfiguration of land use to accommodate personally-owned vehicles [1,2]. Poignant critique of the 20th century car system suggests the time has come for a new shock—one catalyzed by technological innovation—that transcends today’s “automobility” in favor of more efficient, equitable, and environmentally sustainable urban transportation. The recent development of driverless, autonomous vehicles (AVs) has encouraged hopeful speculation in some quarters as to their potential for transcending the transportation system’s automobile focus. Former New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette
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