Sharing the road: smart transportation infrastructure.

• Author: Glancy, Dorothy J.
• Position: Smart Law for Smart Cities: Regulation, Technology, and the Future of Cities

ABSTRACT

Smart cities require smart transportation. Advanced Intelligent Transportation Systems provide ever-smarter transportation infrastructure for the United States and countries around the world. Among the most advanced forms of ground transportation infrastructure is a group of technologies that connect vehicles invisibly to other vehicles through information exchanges. These advanced transportation technologies are of two types: On the one hand, Connected Vehicle Safety Systems use vehicle-to-vehicle dedicated short range communications technologies. On the other hand, Connected Vehicle Mobility Applications use a much wider variety of mobile wireless technologies. These two types of technologies that connect vehicles will increasingly make existing physical infrastructure safer and more efficient. At the same time, these vehicle-connecting technologies confront a number of legal and policy issues, including the regulatory environment, products liability, insurance, law enforcement access, privacy, and security as discussed in this Article.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction I. Urban Transportation II. Intelligent Transportation Systems III. Connected Vehicle Technologies A. Connected Vehicle Safety Systems (V2V) B. Connected Vehicle Mobility Applications (Mobile Wireless) IV. Legal and Policy Issues Facing Connected Vehicles A. Regulation B. Products Liability C. Insurance D. Law Enforcement E. Privacy F. Security Conclusion INTRODUCTION

If you believe that a city's transportation infrastructure is built only of concrete, asphalt, and steel, think again. In the future, more and more ground transportation infrastructure will rely on information and communications technologies that are, for the most part, invisible and intangible.

Designed to enable ever-increasing numbers of vehicles to share limited roadways, new wireless connectivity to and from personal vehicles is among the most advanced of the smart transportation infrastructure. The new information and communications technologies discussed here help move personal vehicles along roadways as safely, efficiently, and humanely as possible. These new connected vehicle technologies are also used in commercial vehicles, such as trucks and buses. However, the earliest applications are likely to be in passenger vehicles that provide personal mobility for individuals and their families and friends. The central purpose of these new information and communications technologies is to facilitate physical movement of individual people from place to place in their daily lives while avoiding accidents and traffic congestion. A close look at these improvements to personal mobility will help illuminate how we can cooperatively share the road to make room for others.

Personal mobility--to move from one physical place to another physical place---is an important aspect of individual freedom. For the foreseeable future, the ability of an individual to change her or his physical location (1) to go to work, to seek education, to attend cultural events, and to enjoy recreational opportunities will depend primarily on personal mobility through use of a private vehicle on a physical roadway. The new transportation infrastructures discussed here will enhance the ability of a growing number of individuals to do so safely and efficiently.

This Article begins by describing background data provided by dynamic urban transportation modeling and the intelligent transportation systems that have been developed over the past quarter century or so. Then this Article looks at vehicle communications technologies that will connect vehicles in a smart new transportation infrastructure made up of information. Two types of vehicle communications, one vehicle-oriented and the other consumer-oriented, represent different connected vehicle approaches to vehicle cooperation in ways that augment transportation's limited physical infrastructure. These two types of connected vehicle information systems operate differently. Each takes a distinctive approach to shared legal and policy issues such as regulation, liability, privacy, insurance, and other matters. This Article concludes by looking even further into the future at how these and other technologies will contribute to even more advanced transportation technologies such as driverless personal transportation.

1. URBAN TRANSPORTATION

   Cities are not static. Like sharks that require a continuous stream of water through their gills, cities require transportation to carry people and goods through their streets, or they will die. The complex influence of transportation on the dynamic health and resilience of cities is a field shared these days with land and transportation planners, by modelers, mathematicians, and physicists.

   Transportation metrics estimate that 4.8 billion hours are wasted annually in traffic congestion. (2) In 2013 there were 5.7 million police-reported vehicle crashes. (3) The total amount of wasted fuel topped 3.9 billion gallons in 2009 alone. (4) By making transportation infrastructures smarter, much of that environmental and human loss can be prevented. One of the connected vehicle technologies discussed in this Article is expected to avoid eighty percent of vehicle crashes involving non-impaired drivers. (5)

   In their optimistically titled A Unified Theory of Urban Living, Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt created mathematical models to try to understand the deep complexity of modern urban areas. (6) They theorized that, like biological organisms, cities are at once defined and confined by their infrastructure. (7) Part of that infrastructure is, of course, the transportation grid. Using census data, Bettencourt and West determined that when a city increases in size by 100% (i.e., doubles in size), it requires an increase in resources of only about 85%. (8) The 15% bonus reflects what urban economists call "agglomeration economies"---a combination of economies of scale and network effects---that make urban areas so dynamic. (9) On the other hand, there are also "diseconomies of agglomeration," such as traffic congestion, crime, and pollution. (10) As cities grow in size, there appears to be an increase in social problems, such as traffic congestion, crime, noise, and pollution in a roughly proportionate relationship to the growth in productive output and innovation. (11) The smart transportation technologies discussed here seek to ameliorate traffic congestion and prevent vehicle crashes commonly associated with urban transportation.

   In The New Science of Cities, Michael Batty uses urban simulation models to better understand the complex interplay between location in physical space and network flows. Batty's models explore relationships between people and places, as well as between different locations and activities within a city. (12) A geographer by training, Batty emphasizes the importance of the highly complex network flows between and among nodes of particular human activities that characterize cities. (13) Batty suggests that there is an intrinsic order of scale that determines a city's form and how it functions. (14) Despite certain predictable results of scaling up in size, the growth of cities takes the form of nonlinear dynamics. Because the dynamics of city growth change constantly, a growing city is unlikely to reach a static equilibrium. (15) Batty's mathematical urban simulations indicate that the multifaceted nonlinear dynamics of cities keeps urban areas in a constant state of disequilibrium. (16) As a result, the characteristic nonlinear dynamics of urban areas, including their transportation systems, make predicting and controlling cities daunting. (17) One strategy for coping with urban disequilibrium in transportation is the development of better infrastructure such as the new connected vehicle information systems discussed in this Article.

   In a similar vein to Batty's research, Marc Barthelemy and Remi Louf--two French physicists--recently modeled information regarding roughly 9000 United States cities and towns between 1994 and 2010. (18) Their analysis indicates that traffic congestion causes cities to splinter and to generate suburbs (subcenters): "as a city grows and congested roadways make it increasingly difficult to get to the center, subcenters emerge along the outskirts." (19) They explain that:

   While agglomeration economies seem to be the basic process explaining the existence of cities and their spectacular resilience, this study brings evidence that congestion is the driving force that tears them apart. The nontrivial spatial patterns observed in large cities can thus be understood as a result of the interplay between these competing processes. (20) They note that "the number of activity subcenters in urban areas scales sublinearly with their populations. ..." (21) In other words, the growth in the number of suburbs tends to be slower than a city's population growth. Still, many people ultimately move out of the city center, and then they move their businesses or workplaces out to be nearer to where they live. Of course, they make these moves after they have put up with being stuck in traffic for a while. Connected vehicle technologies are designed to make more efficient use of existing roads and highways, and to alleviate traffic congestion that otherwise tends to tear cities apart.

   In imagining future cities, transportation has always played an important role. A well-known example is Le Corbusier's Ville Contemporaine (or Contemporary City), unveiled in 1922. (22) Transportation routes were at the heart of Ville Contemporaine, which was organized around a multimodal transportation hub that interconnected buses, trains, and highways. (23) Around the Ville Contemporaine's transportation hub, Le Corbusier placed his famous sixty-story cruciform skyscrapers, clad in walls of glass and set on rectangular green spaces. (24) In just about any imaginable utopia (25) or dystopia (26) people...