Mark Garrett

TRANSPORTATION PLANNING ON TRIAL: THE CLEAN AIR ACT AND TRAVEL FORECASTING

Urban planning does not and cannot exist in isolation. A large number of external factors impact a planners work, including politics and the planning commission, environmental impact studies, and national, state, and local legislation. Focusing on the interrelations between federal legislation, the judicial process, and transportation planning, this book examines the interaction between regional transportation planning and environmental concerns, particularly air quality. This volume is designed to help urban planners understand the legal restrictions and requirements that directly impact how they operate. It considers two recent federal legislation pieces - the Clean Air Act of 1990 and the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 - that mark a decade-long shift of emphasis in regional transportation planning.

Assessing the California Fuel Tax Swap of 2010

In 2010, California replaced its state sales tax on gasoline with an annually adjusted per gallon excise tax designed to produce as much revenue each year as the sales tax did previously. This gas tax swap was intended to (a) relieve the state’s general fund during a period of fiscal emergency by circumventing the narrowly defined transportation purposes for which gasoline sales tax revenues could be legally spent and (b) protect the existing revenue streams for transportation purposes. Experience to date reveals that this experiment has not met its objectives because of unanticipated volatility in the revenue stream resulting from dramatic fuel price fluctuations. Although the new revenues are protected from diversion to nontransportation uses, the unpredictability of such revenue presents many challenges for state transportation planning and programming. Other states considering similar shifts to price-based transportation taxes to address the continuing decline in purchasing power from fixed-rate fuel excise taxes may draw valuable lessons from the California experience.

A private matter: the implications of privacy regulations for intelligent transportation systems

ABSTRACT The rapid development and deployment of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that utilize data on the movement of vehicles can greatly benefit transportation network operations and safety, but may test the limits of personal privacy. In this paper we survey the current state of legal and industry-led privacy protections related to ITS and find that the lack of existing standards, rules, and laws governing the collection, storage, and use of such information could both raise troubling privacy questions and potentially hinder implementation of useful ITS technologies. We then offer practical recommendations for addressing ITS-related privacy concerns though both privacy-by-design solutions (that build privacy protections into data collection systems), and privacy-by-policy solutions (that provide guidelines for data collection and treatment) including limiting the scope of data collection and use, assuring confidentially of data storage, and other ways to build trust and foster consumer consent.

Fault-y Reasoning Navigating the Liability Terrain in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) hold great promise to improve personal and commercial travel, but intelligently linking vehicles and travelers via increasingly interconnected real-time data systems creates a host of new and largely untested liability questions when things go wrong. In this article, we examine current policies, laws, and administrative codes guiding ITS liability by reviewing the scholarly literature and case law in the United States. We find (a) a patchwork of industry self-regulation, (b) a modicum of tort case law precedent that varies substantially across states, (c) many unresolved questions, and (d) little prospect of guiding federal legislation on the horizon. While the liability questions raised by driverless cars have received much attention, we conclude that ITS liability standards are likely to be settled incrementally in the near term on decidedly narrow grounds via case law on navigation and collision-avoidance systems, long before fully automated vehicles are deployed.