Smart Cities and Transportation: Governance and Institutional Frameworks

This chapter examines the institutional environment in which new transportation technologies are being introduced within the United States. We focus on four broad technology categories: Shared mobility, integrated mobility, priced mobility, and autonomous mobility to illustrate the potential transformations to the transportation system and the institutional obstacles to adoption at scale. We identify two overarching themes to conceptualize how transportation innovations interact with the existing technology. First, the omnipresence of transportation in the public sphere and in people’s daily lives sets transportation technologies apart from other areas of rapid innovation that are more clearly in the private or public sector. Second, transportation technologies have the potential to significantly reshape land use, which greatly expands the scope of change to how cities function and develop. We use these themes to synthesize the literature and formulate a set of recommendations to steer innovations in the direction of equitably distributed benefits.