The ride-sharing giant Uber has deployed on the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania this month the single largest fleet of driverless vehicles. The vehicles, guided by a combination of GPS and radar to adapt to dynamic conditions, are staffed by specially trained safety drivers or engineers.
The eventual plan, though, is to strip the driver entirely from the controls. The audacious plan has set the ride-sharing giant on a course fraught with public policy imperatives. As Dentons’ Eric Tanenblatt wrote last week in Recode, not since the early 19th century has automotive technology sped so far afield of government regulation than today with driverless cars:
Driverless cars represent the true Wild West of public policy, a regulatory bedlam where the hand of the law is neither felt nor seen and only those exceedingly brave or possibly a little foolish venture out. …
What awaits Uber and other driverless pioneers is a daunting public policy campaign to align existing, outmoded law and regulation with the faster-than-expected reality of robotic rides: Pittsburgh, like 41 other states and the federal government, lacks any regulation governing the operation of driverless vehicles.
In the absence of a cohesive local, state and federal regulatory framework, serious questions remain unanswered on driverless ride-sharing, including passenger safety and insurance liability and interstate travel.
How regulators and technologists navigate these hurdles, he continues, will impact not only transportation in the 21st century but the very nature of modern cities:
Every car-sharing vehicle, according to a study by the University of California at Berkeley, removes between nine and 13 vehicles from the road. But imagine now if that same car-sharing vehicle ran in constant operation. Parking decks would vanish as urban green spaces sprouted. City streets would unclog as bike routes swelled.
Read the entire column at Recode and subscribe to stay up to speed on autonomous vehicle advancements–and regulatory hiccups–as Uber’s driverless experiment unfolds.
