The Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon, in partnership with the Shared-Use Mobility Center, researched more than 80 requests for proposals, city ordinances, guidance documents and other pieces of policy across American cities. Their aim was to understand how mobility systems like shared micromobility, ride-hailing, autonomous vehicle (AV) operations and other emerging transportation networks are regulated, by whom — and some of the larger policy goals guiding that regulation.
The regulations were categorized by type and theme, and were compared across modes, Miriam Pinski, research lead at the Shared-Use Mobility Center, said. Ultimately, the partners produced Shared Mobility Regulations: Balancing Policy Goals With Operating Costs, released in April.
The study focused on the regulations around “new shared mobility,” and how easily or costly it would be to comply with regulations. Regulations around fees and liability seemed to be the most far-ranging, Pinski said.
“In practice, agencies use transportation regulations to pursue a wide range of policies,” Pinski said during an Urbanism Next webinar Monday to examine the research. Those policies can often reach into areas including promoting economic mobility.
In a similar vein, some cities use mobility regulations as a form of “wish list of what they would love a new service to offer,” Pinski said, “even if they don’t expect the same outcomes from existing transportation options, or without much thought to what the cost might be, or how it might limit competition.”
For example, a number of cities have written scooter or delivery robot regulations with “equity zones” in mind, where officials require operators to place devices in disadvantaged neighborhoods as a way to offer the same mobility options citywide.
However, these policies, Vladimir Gallegos, supervisor transportation planner with the Los Angeles Transportation Department, said, do not always take into consideration the geography of the neighborhood, or the condition of infrastructure like sidewalks.
“What we’re seeing is that some models that we did for micromobility are not the same models that we have for robot delivery,” Gallegos said during the panel. “These are just complexities of policy that we’re realizing. Scooters are not robots. Robots are not autonomous vehicles, and they’re not taxis. But they all kind of share a little bit of something.”
The more the mobility option tends to look different from what’s already on streets, the more likely cities are to write complex sets of regulations around it, Pinski said, offering microtransit as an example. Microtransit, which uses small van-like vehicles to provide nearly door-to-door service, is not unlike paratransit, a scheduled and more individualized transit service that has long been available for mostly elderly or disabled riders.
In this case, the microtransit regulations generally follow the existing regulations around paratransit services, while AVs and micromobility tend to not “fit as well into existing regulatory frameworks,” Pinski said.
AVs and robotaxis may be one of the largest disruptions to urban mobility to emerge in recent years, all while cities — along with states and to some degree the federal government — are considering the various issues surrounding robotaxis and their place in the transportation ecosystem. AV regulations are being developed at all levels of government, Pinski said, with those at the state and federal levels leaning toward being more uniform.
Earlier this year, at the National AV Safety Forum, organized by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called for a “Goldilocks” approach to developing federal AV regulations.
“We have to get our regulations just right, making sure that our innovators have the right regulatory structure to safely move forward with the new technology,” Duffy said. “We can’t have 50 rules, 50 states, and try to think that our companies can scale with all of these different rules. We should have one American standard.”
