As Rob Atkinson writes for Morning Consult, the Senate should embrace innovation and charge the Department of Transportation with establishing a national road user charging system.
Transportation
January 6, 2020
Autonomous vehicles are the future of transportation, but so far, the United States is unprepared for them. Congress needs to act swiftly to establish consistent industry regulations that allow companies to safely test and deploy these vehicles, or it risks delaying their arrival.
July 26, 2019
As Rob Atkinson writes for Morning Consult, the Senate should embrace innovation and charge the Department of Transportation with establishing a national road user charging system.
July 1, 2019
Trains have traditionally relied on signals from human dispatchers to determine their speed. However, large disparities in the speeds that different trains can travel causes significant inefficiencies in this process. New analysis of Southern California’s rail network has found that new positive train control technology can dramatically improve efficiency.
May 30, 2019
Regulatory reform is difficult to accomplish on a large scale because it requires a detailed examination of specific market factors, which takes time and expertise to accomplish. On each issue, regulators must balance the desire to promote competition and innovation with the need to protect public safety.
May 7, 2019
Rob Atkinson participated in an expert panel discussion on emerging transportation technologies and the future of freight at the RailxTech conference.
April 25, 2019
ITIF released a report—“A Policymaker’s Guide to Road User Charges”—and an expert panel discussed the myths and realities of having a “road user charge” system (RUC) that uses technology to log the mileage of cars and trucks and charge them accordingly.
April 22, 2019
A national “road user charge” system would ensure that everyone who drives on America’s roads contributes their fair share of the infrastructure costs.
February 12, 2019
From Silicon Valley to Detroit, a well-publicized race is on to develop self-driving passenger cars. But properly supervising rapidly developing technology also presents regulators with significant challenges to effectively ensure both safety and robust innovation; especially given the fact that each freight industry answers to a different authority, lawmakers and regulators should carefully consider the knock-on effects of any rules they draft.
January 24, 2019
ITIF signed a coalition letter, led by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, urging Congress to prioritize restoring the longstanding users-pay/users-benefit principle in the Highway Trust Fund.
November 12, 2018
In a book review for the New York Journal of Books, Rob Atkinson writes that "No One at the Wheel" by Sam Schwartz dismisses the most important questions society needs to face as autonomous vehicles (AVs) emerge.