Smart mobility and health emergency: towards a new era?
According to the forecasts outlined by the main players in the sector, 2020 should have opened a decade of significant investments aimed at implementing a fast transition from the traditional mobility model — characterized during the entire twentieth century by the tension between the need for an increase in volume and efficiency of vehicular traffic, on the one hand, and critical issues in the management of road accidents and air pollution, on the other — to a new mobility paradigm in which the connection between Highly Automated Vehicles and infrastructures intelligent (Smart Roads) seems to open scenarios in which the driver and the human factor while retaining a relevant role, seems next to experience an era of deep transformations. In such a perspective, highly automated driving would become the panacea capable of reconciling an increase in vehicle circulation and its efficiency with a drastic reduction in accidents generated by human errors, the reduction of atmospheric pollution and a virtuous reorganization of the entire urban layout favored by “predictive driving” systems capable of rationalizing traffic flows and creating a synergy between factors historically characterized by a relationship of antagonism.
The impact of the pandemic: interruption of a path or acceleration of a trend?
The outbreak of the pandemic and the consequent significant loss of the economic resources destined for the implementation process of the connected and highly automated guide may represent a fatal setback in a path already full of obstacles due in part to an innate propensity to resist change (status quo bias) and in part to emerge delicate issues determined by the need to “transfer” the decisions to be taken in order to avoid accidents and sudden dangerous situations — currently entrusted to the instinctive reactions of the driver and returning in the legal category of the “state of necessity” — in an ex-ante programming and planning context marked by apparently unsurpassed ethical dilemmas (so-called trolley problem).
Nonetheless, the same negative situation created as a result of the health emergency can be observed in the same way as a traumatic event capable of giving a decisive acceleration to a trend. The need to authoritatively impose a reduction in vehicular traffic that is unprecedented in the post-war period has given rise to a drastic reduction in accidents and atmospheric pollution, but, at the same time, has definitively demonstrated the impossibility of sustaining for a long time a regime of “limited circulation” without this leading to a substantial paralysis of the entire system in its economic and social articulations. In this perspective, the restrictions resulting from the pandemic have further underlined that vehicular circulation constitutes vital lymph for the entire economic system and that precisely its fundamental relevance makes the need to free it from the negative externalities that historically associate with it.
In this perspective, the automation of driving appears destined to fulfill a dual function: that of improving the efficiency of social and economic activities by eradicating or limiting the negative externalities of an essential activity during the smooth running of activities and that of preparing a “security system” capable of guaranteeing the functioning of a society and an economy even in emergency conditions which, precisely because of their complexity, are more exposed to the vulnus of calamities.
In this sense, several examples from countries more inclined to accelerate the transition to highly automated driving confirm their crucial usefulness where the need to bring services and all kinds of goods to the so-called appears. “Red areas”, to optimize the routes to reach the healthcare facilities and to communicate to them without any further waste of time all the information necessary in order to implement timely interventions and, finally, to allow, more generally, the continued performance of all the logistical activities which constitute the presupposition on which the entire system of social and economic relations rests.
Smart mobility and promotional function of the legislator
In this context, the legislator can certainly play an important promotional function by intervening, first of all, with a discipline capable of promoting experimentation and creating the conditions for Italy to play a leading role in the development of new technologies. The further implementation of the Smart Roads decree should be accompanied by a significant impulse in the creation of “dedicated areas” in which, on the basis of the principles of the Research and Development Law, it is possible to test emerging technologies in a frame of intense interdisciplinary dialogue.
The second line of intervention, the effective relevance of which can only be grasped from the perspective of the diffusion of new technologies on the market, consists in the systematic reorganization of the entire framework of profiles concerning the owner-driver’s civil liability, the responsibility of the manufacturer and the system insurance policy. In this perspective, the preparation of a “legal environment” functional to incentivize investments and therefore “designed” at the end of rigorous economic analysis and in a perspective that, assuming as a minimum dimension that of European Union, aspire to global harmonization. The pursuit of solutions capable of reconciling effective compensation for victims of accidents and a secure incentive for manufacturers called to make considerable investments must necessarily be entrusted to mandatory rules, which, however, can lead to an effective renewal only if integrated by a parallel process of “consumer education” which — internalizing the social value of a transition towards a vehicle circulation paradigm capable of reconciling efficiency, safety, and environmental sustainability — completes that network of relationships between the company and policymakers in which only an effective synergy between all the components involved will generate a virtuous circle capable of imparting a driving force towards the definitive affirmation of a new mobility paradigm.
