Missouri's Autonomous Vehicle Future
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Date
2019-05
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Abstract
In Missouri, existing laws prohibit the registration, testing, and deployment of autonomous vehicles. The absence of action on this issue creates three levels of problems for the state, which are: the state is missing out on opportunities to attract innovative developers and economic investment, the state is neglecting an impending public safety problem, and the state is putting itself at a policymaking time horizon disadvantage. Before offering a possible solution to the problem, the following report outlines the history of autonomous vehicle development and how states are attempting to responsibly bring autonomous vehicles (AVs) to market, including an analysis of AV policymaking in Arizona, California and Ohio. After explaining various approaches to state AV policy and looking at previous attempts to solve the problem in Missouri, the Show Me Safety Plan is proposed. The plan blends legislative and executive action, which would be implemented by the Missouri Departments of Revenue and Transportation, and to a lesser extent, other state agencies, to remove existing regulatory barriers to AV testing, establish a registration and reporting system, and prescribe vehicle operator requirements. The explicit goals of the plan are to attract more than $20 million in economic investment and create more than 200 jobs in the state while preventing an AV-related fatality throughout the duration of the proposal. Following the description of the policy proposal, analysis of the policy and political tradeoffs of the proposal is conducted in order to make a recommendation to Missouri Governor Mike Parson on whether or not to pursue the Show Me Safety Plan in advance of his 2020 gubernatorial re-election race. The report concludes by recommending the Show Me Safety Plan be proposed by Governor Parson in order to garner a significant legislative achievement in a low-risk way that allows autonomous vehicles developers to invest in Missouri and test their technologies while establishing safety policymaking guardrails to protect members of the motoring public.
Advised by Paul Weinstein.
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autonomous vehicles, Missouri, economic development, transportation