OpenMarket: Automobiles and Roads

The bipartisan AV START Act would create the first national highly automated vehicle regulatory framework in the U.S. This legislation is necessary to speed deployment of lifesaving self-driving cars, which offer the promise of greatly reducing road fatalities by eliminating the driver error and misbehavior that is currently responsible for more than 90 percent of automobile crashes.

Cathy Chase, now the president of the lobby group Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, was previously a strong supporter of the Senate’s bipartisan AV START Act (S. 1885)—before she was against it. The AV START Act is companion legislation to the House’s SELF DRIVE Act (H.R. 3388), which unanimously passed the House by voice vote in September 2017.

In a sweeping effort to change the way Washington regulates both fuels and vehicles, Reps. John Shimkus (R-IL) and Bill Flores (R-TX) of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Environment have released a discussion draft of new legislation entitled the 21st Century Transportation Fuels Act.

Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute submitted comments to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in response to its advance notice of proposed rulemaking on the Pilot Program Collaborative Research on Motor Vehicles with High or Full Driving Automation.

In August 2017, I wrote about the municipal government cronyism and monopoly franchise agreements driving the controversy over unsubsidized dockless bikesharing companies. In the rapidly evolving world of privately financed urban micromobility, electric scooters have now joined dockless bikesharing at the center of the debate. Here, municipal cronyism also appears to have evolved from protecting subsidized monopoly providers into classic shakedown efforts.

Could the 116^th Congress be the perfect storm for mileage-based user fees? With a divided Congress and with the current surface transportation law expiring at the end of September 2020, shoring up the Highway Trust Fund with user fee alternatives to fuel taxes could be a bipartisan affair.

In last year’s omnibus spending package, Congress allocated up to $1.5 million to the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) to conduct a study on the workforce impacts of automated vehicles (AVs). USDOT recently requested comments on the scope of this study and I have submitted comments on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in response.

Axios recently launched a newsletter dedicated to automated vehicles. In the most recent issue, David Friedman attacks bipartisan legislation in Congress aimed at speeding regulatory modernization for highly automated vehicles (HAVs), commonly called self-driving cars. Like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Joan Claybrook before him, Friedman regurgitates debunked talking points in opposition to the Senate’s AV START Act.

During the final days of the Obama administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proposed its “talking car” mandate. This would have required new vehicles to come equipped with radios to communicate information to other vehicles in order to convey hazard warnings to drivers. This was to use a specific communications protocol known as dedicated short-range communications (DSRC). The proposal was deeply flawed in numerous ways, as CEI pointed out at the time.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) released the third iteration of its guidance for automated vehicles, Preparing for the Future of Transportation: Automated Vehicles 3.0 (AV 3.0). Notably, this guidance is the product of a department-wide effort that covers all surface transportation modes, including the interface of maritime infrastructure and trucks at intermodal port facilities.