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Research on ridesourcing has grown exponentially in recent years. This study details the results of a systematic review of 161 publications on ridesourcing that explore environmental sustainability and equity in North American cities. We identify five main areas of research. First, ridesourcing is associated with two modal shifts: a decline of the taxi industry and a more complicated association with public transit ridership. Second, several studies have documented workers' rights and the challenges of contingent labor. Third, demographic studies show associations between ridesouring and affluent riders, and spatial analyses indicate that ridesourcing may exacerbate existing patterns of inequity in cities. Fourth, ridesourcing has dubious claims to improve environmental sustainability: it has only a small effect on vehicle ownership, but it increases emissions associated with deadheading, and pooled services do not reduce vehicle miles traveled. Fifth, ridesourcing companies also tend to oppose regulatory responses and sharing data with potential regulators. The review concludes with suggestions on areas for future research. 

Abstract One dimension of the emerging politics of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) is the development of public concerns over their societal implications and associated policy issues. This study uses original survey data from the United States to contribute to the anticipation of future policy and political issues for CAVs. Several studies have surveyed the public regarding CAVs; however, there are few studies that highlight the multidimensional public concerns that CAVs will most likely bring. The study breaks down the concept of “public” by showing that the demographic variables of gender, age, race, ethnicity, income, location (rural, suburban, urban), and political ideology (conservative, moderate, liberal) are significantly associated with three of the most salient public concerns to date (safety, privacy, and data security). Furthermore, the effects of demographic variables also vary across the type of policy issue. For example, women tend to be more concerned about safety than their male counterparts, and Hispanics (Latinx) tend to be more concerned about privacy than non-Hispanics. The research shows how the social scientific analysis of the “politics” of CAVs will require attention to the variegated connections between different types of public concern and different demographic variables. 

A salient problem faced by governments and industry alike is how to accelerate energy transitions to enhance affordability, accessibility, and greenhouse-gas reduction. Bringing together acceleration processes and spatial scale dynamics, this study highlights the potential for electricity distribution to play a keystone role in the energy transition. We present and examine survey data of electricity distribution utilities in a region of the U.S. to show how trends in decentralization and digitization are intertwined with decarbonization. These trends rebalance economic value toward distribution networks and away from centralized infrastructure. The survey data show that electricity distribution organizations are deploying local, renewable generation projects that produce electricity for one-third (1/3) less than the cost from a centralized generation-and-transmission entity. We suggest that this change and others are likely to transform distribution operators into more broad-based local power organizations. Although the cost advantage of distributed generation seemingly marks a future of local control and decentralized organizational forms, spatial scale dynamics indicate countervailing centralization trends, including that distribution networks may evolve to dependency on external digital, engineering, and capital providers. The outcome of the resulting conflicts will affect the potential for transition acceleration to be enabled or reduced. 

With the growth of commercial and recreational use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones), there is increasing attention to the need for regulation. A systematic review is conducted using a multiple comparative perspective: across three political jurisdictions (the United States, the European Union, and Japan) and across two areas of societal implication and policy (i.e., privacy and safety), with additional comparisons drawn from regulations for related cyber-physical systems. The multiple comparative analysis conducted in this paper shows that safety is a much more salient concern than privacy. Moreover, safety is focused on technical features of the UAVs, registration and certification, and differentiation by use case. Privacy regulations tend to follow broader digital privacy guidelines. Although there are some privacy rules that are UAV-specific, many of them do not yet directly address privacy challenges that are specific for UAVs. Additional comparisons with safety and privacy policies for automated vehicles and the smart grid reveal areas of potential development for harmonization and policy guidance. The study concludes with ten recommendations for future policy development. 

The design and analysis of multi-agent human cyber-physical systems in safety-critical or industry-critical domains calls for an adequate semantic foundation capable of exhaustively and rigorously describing all emergent effects in the joint dynamic behavior of the agents that are relevant to their safety and well-behavior. We present such a semantic foundation. This framework extends beyond previous approaches by extending the agent-local dynamic state beyond state components under direct control of the agent and belief about other agents (as previously suggested for understanding cooperative as well as rational behavior) to agent-local evidence and belief about the overall cooperative, competitive, or coopetitive game structure. We argue that this extension is necessary for rigorously analyzing systems of human cyber-physical systems because humans are known to employ cognitive replacement models of system dynamics that are both non-stationary and potentially incongruent. These replacement models induce visible and potentially harmful effects on their joint emergent behavior and the interaction with cyber-physical system components. 

As automation increases qualitatively and quantitatively in safety-critical human cyber-physical systems, it is becoming more and more challenging to increase the probability or ensure that human operators still perceive key artifacts and comprehend their roles in the system. In the companion paper, we proposed an abstract reference architecture capable of expressing all classes of system-level interactions in human cyber-physical systems. Here we demonstrate how this reference architecture supports the analysis of levels of communication between agents and helps to identify the potential for misunderstandings and misconceptions. We then develop a metamodel for safe human machine interaction. Therefore, we ask what type of information exchange must be supported on what level so that humans and systems can cooperate as a team, what is the criticality of exchanged information, what are timing requirements for such interactions, and how can we communicate highly critical information in a limited time frame in spite of the many sources of a distorted perception. We highlight shared stumbling blocks and illustrate shared design principles, which rest on established ontologies specific to particular application classes. In order to overcome the partial opacity of internal states of agents, we anticipate a key role of virtual twins of both human and technical cooperation partners for designing a suitable communication. 

Ridesourcing advocates and companies promise many benefits to cities, such as increased accessibility, a solution to the last-mile transit problem, and even reduced need for automobiles. However, an important body of research has indicated that ridesourcing is more heavily used by more privileged consumers and in more affluent and whiter neighborhoods. Questions have also emerged about the effects of ridesourcing on public transportation. This study builds on a mobility disparities perspective by analyzing ridesourcing in the context of urban inequality, including gentrification and displacement. Using a large data set from the Chicago area, this study shows that ridesourcing is associated with areas that have seen rising rents and have become whiter and more educated. The results also show that ridesourcing is more prevalent in areas that are accessible by public transportation. Although the causal relationship between ridesourcing and gentrification is complex, the study suggests a new direction in the literature that embeds the analysis of ridesourcing in the broader frameworks of unequal urban development and neoliberalization. The study also suggests policy approaches that could help to reduce some of the connections between ridesourcing and urban inequity. 

This study contributes to the analysis of civil society and knowledge by examining mobilizations by civil society organizations and grassroots networks in opposition to wireless smart meters in the United States. Three types of mobilizations are reviewed: grassroots anti-smart-meter networks, privacy organizations, and organizations that advocate for reduced exposure to non-ionizing electromagnetic fields. The study shows different relationships to scientific knowledge that include publicizing risks and conducting citizen science, identifying non-controversial areas of future research, and pointing to deeper problems of undone science (a particular type of non-knowledge that emerges when actors mobilize in the public interest and find an absence or low volume of research that could have been used to support their concerns). By comparing different types of knowledge claims made by the civil society organizations and networks, the study examines the conditions under which mobilized civil society generates positive responses from incumbent organizations versus resistance and undone science.