Smart Urban Mobility

New mobility services, enabled by developments in digital technology, could be the making of sustainability in urban mobility. Alternatively, they could act to increase car dependence and so worsen what are already severe sustainability problems. Governance of new mobility services needs to steer implementation towards sustainability, and this chapter explores what that governance might look like. The stakes are high because of the extent of sustainability impacts of transport, especially the increasingly urgent need to decarbonise the sector. There is evidence that reductions in car dependence are required to address many of the pressing social, environmental and economic transport problems, including carbon dioxide emissions. Uncertainties about the sustainability implications of new mobility services present challenges for governance. Those governance challenges are heightened by the complex landscape of actors, with new developers and service providers joining an already complicated multi-level system. I argue that collaborative and reflexive governance provides a basis for meeting these challenges of uncertainty and complexity. However, its implementation should involve reframing the relationships between transport authorities and developers of mobility services such that innovation is rewarded, but priority is given to responding to evidence on sustainability impacts as they emerge.

This volume discusses the impact of technology on urban mobility and its regulation within the EU. In turn, this chapter explores the interaction of the developing smart urban mobility agenda with EU environmental law and policy. At the moment, EU action on urban mobility mostly takes the form of policy, not law. Conversely, there is a rich body of EU environmental law, much of which sets goals and obligations that directly affect urban mobility. This chapter provides an overview of the most important existing initiatives regarding urban mobility. It then considers how technology may affect these initiatives, both positively and negatively. It identifies areas of overlap with EU environmental law and offers suggestions for the future alignment and integration of environmental and mobility goals.

Smart mobility aims to provide efficient, sustainable and connected mobility solutions to congested urban centers. It is often assumed that smart mobility will benefit cities’ residents and improve overall accessibility. Nevertheless, smart mobility strategies presuppose that transport users are digitally literate, autonomous and capable of affording either public or private transportation. For the millions of citizens throughout the world who are affected by transport poverty, this is not the case. Transport poverty is a multidimensional phenomenon which is often overlooked in the legal literature. Yet this specific type of poverty can limit individuals’ upward mobility and impede their ability to exercise social and economic rights. This paper explores the phenomenon of transport poverty and delves into the possibility of designing smart mobility policies that address this type of poverty. It discusses existing or proposed policies of free public transit and explains why inclusive mobility should be regarded as a concretization of the right to equal treatment. This paper contributes to the existing scholarship on smart cities, smart mobility and fundamental rights with a novel interdisciplinary analysis of urban mobility. Furthermore, it draws attention to the need to design connected transport systems that are inclusive.

The indisputable need for new urban mobility policies, which has already been recognised in numerous international, European and national legal instruments, undoubtedly requires a local role in the redefinition of these policies. This action must be carried out in a regulatory context that does not always provide local authorities with all the legal instruments to do so. In this contribution, the primary measures being used to achieve greater sustainability of urban mobility are outlined, as well as a description of the effective room for manoeuvre local authorities normally have, analysing the current limitations they face for a more ambitious deployment and possible models of alternative regulation.

This chapter explores three of the challenges that public buyers face when designing public tenders to support smart urban mobility initiatives and when supervising the execution of the relevant contracts. First, the chapter covers emerging issues around access and re-use of transport data that may be hindering ‘outside of the box’ thinking and the deployment of artificial intelligence in this area. Second, it discusses some well-known ‘inside the box’ regulatory issues around the exercise of discretion in the choice of sustainable technological solutions, the constraints surrounding certain types of complex and collaborative procurement, and the difficulties in monitoring contract compliance clauses. Third, the chapter arrives at the realisation that the main challenges in delivering and supporting smart urban mobility through procurement relate to the higher-level or cross-cutting challenges of the professionalisation of the procurement workforce and the need to bridge significant (and growing) knowledge gaps. It thus explores existing policy interventions aimed at the professionalisation and networking of procurement officials. The chapter concludes with some overall reflections, and a call for a more active role to be taken by the new Von der Leyen Commission.

Autonomous vehicles may be understood to govern the spaces around them through their technological composites. This understanding of governance, or control, diverges from established perspectives in intellectual property and competition law according to which technological control is assessed in relation to societal, or market, effects. This chapter bypasses such questions by exploring how autonomous vehicles can be understood to interact with their surrounding environment, whether urban or not, and how this in itself can be considered a new form of control.

To arrive at a visualization of this type of governance, a theory of spatial property is here deployed and developed. In short, this theory implies that property can be understood as something that holds up bodies in, and as, space. The aim of pursuing such a perspective is to show that governance occurs through different interfaces between autonomous vehicles and space. In sum, this chapter suggests a threefold understanding of governance in terms of how autonomous vehicles could govern smart spaces: through data commodification, through control over the surrounding space’s materialities and through control over the interpretation of space.

Not all innovative processes rely on IP exclusive rights to incentivize and protect their content. While strategic considerations on the costs and convenience of IP enforcement generally play an important role, in specific sectors alternative norms and practices have proven more effective than exclusive rights in fostering progress by turning inclusivity into benefits, thus challenging IP protection at its core. At a first glance, the wide-ranging sector of digital data-driven innovations presents a twofold nature: on the one hand, they require remarkable investments, which likely call for a strict approach to IP rights; and on the other hand, they make interoperability and follow-up creations key factors of technological progress, thus valuing inclusivity in the enhancement of resource allocation and services.

Against this background, the paper aims to investigate the role and incentivizing potential of IP rights in the smart urban mobility context, which represents an innovative sector of remarkable social impact and is rapidly on the rise. By applying the conceptual framework of legal and economic theories exploring the so-called ‘IP negative spaces’, this study highlights strengths and weaknesses of the exclusive rights paradigm in the promotion and management of innovative ideas for advancing urban planning and life in European cities.

This chapter will discuss smart urban mobility within the context of the sharing economy. After a brief introduction on the history of urban mobility, it will look at the application of sharing economy models to smart urban mobility, such as ride-sharing, car- and bike-sharing programs and e-hailing services. The discussion will contextualize the evolution of peer mass production dynamics into Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS). My focus is the fundamental data ownership and protection issues that will arise from mobility solutions consumed as services through centralized gateways and platforms. I criticize the neo-liberalist perspective that has gradually changed the sharing economy into the platform economy and argue that it brought about unfulfilled expectations and increasing inequalities. After moving this critique, I plead for the application of Ostrom’s approach to commons to smart urban mobility and, in particular to MaaS. In conclusion, I argue that smart urban mobility should develop upon what I call a 3C model: commons, collaboration and crowdsourcing.

In smart urban settings, all devices and service providers monitor, collect and exchange data whilst device producers and service providers store, distribute, analyse and re-use data on a grand scale. If firms would like to combine such data, they need to give each other access by sharing, trading or pooling the data. On the one hand, the industry-wide pooling of data could increase the efficiency of certain services and contribute to the innovation of other services, e.g. whole transport networks that are available on one platform, or Mobility as a Service (MaaS). On the other hand, firms that pool business data may use the data not to advance their services or products but to collude, to exclude competitors or to abuse their market position. Indeed, by combining their data and collaborating they can gain market power and hence the ability to violate competition law. Platforms can also hoard data and design the data architecture so as to become system leaders in vertical value chains, exclusively obtaining all data from various sources and creating a silo or ecosystem. This chapter will discuss a new platform configuration regarding transport services. The platform is being developed and discussed according to the notion of MaaS. MaaS is a new transport paradigm that integrates existing and new mobility services as well as public and private transport services into one single digital platform, providing customised door-to-door transport and offering personalised trip planning and payment options. The development of integrated multimodal information systems and integrated payment solutions has enabled the MaaS concept to unfold. We will analyse the MaaS concept from a competition law perspective, asking whether the concept might be in violation of EU Competition Law, specifically Arts. 101 and 102 TFEU.

The development of smart mobility faces two main issues: data sharing and technological interoperability, which can be summed up by the expression ‘semantic interoperability’. This chapter focuses on technological interoperability, using the antitrust experience as a benchmark to identify guidelines for possible interventions of public authorities in the market. To do so, the chapter addresses both the different characterisations that antitrust law gives to incompatibility (predatory innovation, refusal to share interoperability codes, technical tying) and the main tool that firms can employ to create incompatibility: standard setting organisations (SSOs).

The Internet of Things is increasingly delivering high-precision mobility data. This makes it possible to fine-tune the use of scarce mobility goods and services and thus achieve higher system efficiency. In the future, it will be feasible to put a price tag on even the smallest traffic areas and auction them off to the highest bidder. This will enable congestion-free driving, search-free parking, and a trouble-free switching from road to rail and vice versa. Many contractual decisions will be made automatically on the basis of previously determined preferences, without the individual noticing anything. At the same time, the increase in data created in this system will also lead to new manipulation potential. The intelligent legislator will try to make the opportunities of the Internet of Things possible while at the same time limiting the associated risks.

This chapter analyses recent developments in the area of digital consumer law in the EU while focusing on the ‘data as counter-performance’ quandary and its application to location data. The immense technological and economic significance of location data in smart urban spaces renders them a relevant subject for inquiry in the context of ongoing legal efforts to protect consumers who grant permission to use their location data in exchange for digital goods and services.

This contribution departs from a theoretical question regarding the similarities and differences between informed consent as a concept of contract law on the one hand and as a concept of privacy and data protection on the other hand. As a lot of private urban mobility initiatives (e.g. Uber public transportation) focus on tracking and profiling users for the purpose of data analyses that lie at the core of their business models, informed consent plays a fundamental role in the transactions through which this data is acquired.

This chapter aims to explore the urban mobility context in order to identify and discuss legal issues linked to the tensions between the two legal frameworks shaped by contract law as well as privacy and data protection law. In order to showcase the roots of consent in contract law and follow its clash with an equivalent concept arising from mandatory data protection rules aimed to curtail freedom of contract for protective purposes, it examines the contract as the transactional regime underpinning the legitimacy and legal validity of an agreement between two parties, and looks into models of contract formation and information duties comparatively in contract and data protection scholarship.

Rating and review systems are a self-regulatory mechanism widely used by online platforms, especially in the smart mobility sector. Such systems have already been analysed in empirical studies and legal contributions, in particular in the fields of consumer law and labour law.

This chapter aims to make an original contribution to the current debate from a relatively underinvestigated perspective: how rating and review systems interact with the European data protection framework. As a case study, the chapter will focus on the rating system adopted by Uber, one of the largest shared mobility platforms worldwide.

Pervasive, always-on wireless networks increasingly surround citizens. These systems bridge physical spaces and the virtual world to deliver greater efficiencies in urban mobility. Efforts to develop transportation and mobility infrastructure are subjecting populations to the influence of technologies that monitor individuals and group movements within our communities—and to determine interactions, associations and transactions at an increasingly finer degree of granularity. A concern is whether existing assessments of established technologies and their human rights impacts are apt to be applied to these novel technological innovations relating to mobility data: does the degree of originality these new advancements represent indeed require that we adopt a fundamentally different approach to their appraisal? Locational privacy constitutes a specific facet of privacy and has recently acquired prominence in discussions regarding urban mobility stemming from developments in ICT. As citizens, our own individual movements are aiding the development of more granular, sophisticated registers of activities linked to our mobility through the collection and processing of personal data. Crucially, there has been little examination to date, especially within Europe, as to why locational privacy is especially relevant to the safeguard of the right to privacy in urban settings.