Roadside Enforcement Powers and Automated Vehicles: Policy and Governance in the EU

For more than a century the global paradigm of motorised transport has been human driven vehicles. With roadside enforcement, authorised officers could give directions to stop a vehicle to the driver. As the level of automation in road-going vehicles increases the regulatory space around the ‘driver’ becomes more problematic. This is because, at higher levels of automation, legacy definitions of who is in control of a motor vehicle are disrupted. This ‘driver dilemma’ manifests as the level of automation increases and provides challenges for governance, policy, and regulatory development around the world. Many jurisdictions have as a threshold requirement a driver, and the commission or potential commission of some wrong by the driver, to enliven enforcement powers that enable authorised officers to stop vehicles. Examples of this include, defective vehicles, speeding, drink driving testing, or stopping as part of broader criminal investigations. However, roadside enforcement grounded on another paradigm can be seen in some of the roadside enforcement powers in relation to passenger transport and heavy vehicles. In these contexts, the enforcement power is expressed as directed towards the vehicle. This is how the roadside enforcement powers are expressed in Australian passenger transport laws, and in these situations, there is no requirement for a wrong to enliven stopping powers. This paper argues that the EU responses to autonomous or highly automated vehicles could benefit from the application of a vehicle centric model of roadside enforcement, one that does not require a human driver committing some wrong, to enliven stopping powers. It compares roadside enforcement powers in the UK, the EU, North America, and Australia, and argues that non-human centric enforcement powers will better serve road users and road going automated mass transit in future.