How Cities Should be Preparing for the Onset of Autonomous Vehicles

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April 19th, 2017

Last year, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released its autonomous vehicle guidelines, the document helped lay out a strategy for how the government will adopt self-driving vehicles. NHTSA suggested that the vehicle itself should be certified safe as a part of its federal motor vehicle safety standards and that states should remain responsible for the licensing and registration of the vehicle.

What remained ambiguous, according to the National League of Cities (NLC) however, was the official role cities were to play in this transportation revolution.

The guidelines are written in a very “state-centric” way, explained one of the report’s authors, Nicole DuPuis, senior associate with NLC. The federal guidelines, which number more than 100 pages, are “not super accessible for cities.”