Transportation Law Commons^™

Effect Of Amended Claim On A Warrant Of Arrest In An Admiralty Action In Rem, Ming En Tor

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Suppose I have filed my statement of claim endorsing the writ in rem, and the Registrar has issued a warrant of arrest reflecting this claim. I then proceed to execute a warrant of arrest to arrest a vessel. Now, suppose, however, I later discover that the original claim stated in the warrant of arrest does not exist. I then substitute the original claim with a completely different claim altogether. Can the warrant of arrest be upheld based on the amended claim and/or cause of action, even if it was not so pleaded initially when the action in rem commenced? This …

Testing Automated Driving Systems By Breaking Many Laws Efficiently, Xiaodong Zhang, Wei Zhao, Yang Sun, Jun Sun, Yulong Shen, Xuewen Dong, Zijiang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An automated driving system (ADS), as the brain of an autonomous vehicle (AV), should be tested thoroughly ahead of deployment. ADS must satisfy a complex set of rules to ensure road safety, e.g., the existing traffic laws and possibly future laws that are dedicated to AVs. To comprehensively test an ADS, we would like to systematically discover diverse scenarios in which certain traffic law is violated. The challenge is that (1) there are many traffic laws (e.g., 13 testable articles in Chinese traffic laws and 16 testable articles in Singapore traffic laws, with 81 and 43 violation situations respectively); and …

Driving-Decision Making Of Autonomous Vehicle According To Queensland Overtaking Traffic Rules, Hanif Bhuiyan, Guido Governatori, Avishkar Mahajan, Andry Rakotonirainy, Meng Weng (Huang Mingrong) Wong

Centre for Computational Law (2022-2025)

Making a driving decision according to traffic rules is a challenging task for improving the safety of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Traffic rules often contain open texture expressions and exceptions, which makes it hard for AVs to follow them. This paper introduces a Defeasible Deontic Logic (DDL) baseddriving decision-making methodology for AVs. We use DDL to formalize traffic rules and facilitate automated reasoning. DDL is used to effectively handle rule exceptions and resolve open texture expressions in rules. Furthermore, we supplement the information provided by the traffic rules by an ontology for AV driving behaviour and environment information. This methodology performs …

Traffic Rule Formalization For Autonomous Vehicle, Hanif Bhuiyan, Guido Governatori, Andry Rakotonirainy, Meng Weng Wong, Avishkar Mahajan

Centre for Computational Law (2022-2025)

This study devised and implemented a Defeasible Deontic Logic (DDL)-based formalization approach for translating traffic rules into a machine-computable (M/C) format and thus solving rule issues: rule vagueness (open texture expressions) and exceptions in rules. The resulting M/C format of traffic rules can be utilized for automatic traffic rule reasoning to assist the Autonomous Vehicle (AV) in making legal decisions. The method incorporates the components and behaviour of regulations based on the rule's obligation, prohibition, and permission activities.

The need for the encoding methodology is motivated by the desire for automated reasoning over Autonomous Vehicle information involving traffic rules.

A …

Crash Severity Analysis And Risk Factors Identification Based On An Alternate Data Source: A Case Study Of Developing Country, Hanif Bhuiyan, Jinat Ara, Khan Md. Hasib, Md Imran Hossain Sourav, Faria Benta Karim, Cecilia Sik-Lanyi, Guido Governatori, Andry Rakotnirainy, Shansunnahar Yasmin

Centre for Computational Law (2022-2025)

Road traffic injuries are one of the primary reasons for death, especially in developing countries like Bangladesh. Safety in land transport is one of the major concerns for road safety authorities and other policymakers. For this reason, contributory factors identification associated with crashes is necessary for reducing road crashes and ensuring transportation safety. This paper presents an analytical approach to identifying significant contributing factors of Bangladesh road crashes by evaluating the road crash data, considering three different severity levels (non-fetal, severe, and extremely severe). Generally, official crash databases are compiled from police-reported crash records. Though the official datasets are focusing …

Lawbreaker: An Approach For Specifying Traffic Laws And Fuzzing Autonomous Vehicles, Yang Sun, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun, Yuqi Chen, Zijiang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Autonomous driving systems (ADSs) must be tested thoroughly before they can be deployed in autonomous vehicles. High-fidelity simulators allow them to be tested against diverse scenarios, including those that are difficult to recreate in real-world testing grounds. While previous approaches have shown that test cases can be generated automatically, they tend to focus on weak oracles (e.g. reaching the destination without collisions) without assessing whether the journey itself was undertaken safely and satisfied the law. In this work, we propose LawBreaker, an automated framework for testing ADSs against real-world traffic laws, which is designed to be compatible with different scenario …

Legal Frameworks For Autonomous Vehicles, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

SMU’s Assoc Prof Chen Siyuan shares his thoughts on the legal challenges for autonomous vehicles when it comes to road safety.

Important Not To Let Hsr Termination Hobble Further Cooperation, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Strong people-to-people ties can help temper political histrionics, moderate negative impact on political ties. The tantalising prospect of being able to leave Singapore and arrive in Kuala Lumpur in just 90 minutes remains a pipe dream after the High Speed Rail (HSR) agreement was terminated last Friday, along with what could have been an important confidence booster to bilateral ties between Singapore and Malaysia.

Towards A Control-Centric Account Of Tort Liability For Automated Vehicles, Jerrold Tsin Howe Soh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Existing motor vehicle accident laws are generally described as ‘driver-centric’, since regulatory, liability, and insurance obligations revolve around drivers. This is sometimes taken to imply that they cannot apply to automated vehicles. This article seeks to re-centre the liability discussion around the tortious doctrine of control. It argues centrally that properly understanding legal control as influence over metaphysical risks, rather than physical objects, clarifies that automated vehicles are both legally controllable in theory, despite having no human drivers, and legally controlled in practice, despite their reliance on machine learning. Examining today’s automated driving technology and businesses, this article demonstrates how …

China’S Regulatory Approach To The Sharing Economy: A Perspective On Ride-Hailing, Huiqin Jiang, Heng Wang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

While the sharing economy brings significant social benefits in China, it comes with regulatory challenges that are novel and unpredictable. How should regulators handle these challenges? This paper offers fresh insights into the regulatory approach to the ride-hailing industry, the most comprehensively regulated sharing industry in China. A historical review identifies three regulatory approaches deployed to date: self-regulation, market-based regulation and government regulation. Self-regulation relies on the platforms with incentive to provide better service for greater profit, and to deal with sharing-specific challenges. Market-based regulation invites rivals to keep a watchful eye on other players, in order to enhance their …

Deadlier Road Accidents? Traffic Safety Regulations And Heterogeneous Motorists’ Behavior, Christine Ho, Madhav S. Aney

Research Collection School Of Economics

In 2003, China enacted the Road Traffic Safety Law in an attempt to promote traffic safety.We employ a difference-in-differences strategy on province level data, where fire accidentsare used as a control group for road accidents, to estimate the effects of the law on road accidents and casualties. Our findings suggest that while the law was successful in decreasing thenumber of accidents and casualties, the ratio of deaths to accidents and injuries to accidentsincreased. Exploring the potential channels, we find no evidence that “hit-and-kill” incentives,that is, incentives for motorists to kill the pedestrians that they hit due to China’s peculiar personal …

Was Singapore Airlines Liable For Business-Class Seats Sold At Economy Rates?, Yihan Goh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Much has been reported about Singapore Airlines (“SIA”) mistakenly charging economy rates for around 900 business-class seats due to a computer input error. Yesterday, SIA said that it would honour those tickets at economy rates, reversing its previous position that it would not, and closing the episode on a note of goodwill. This blog entry explores the legal analysis behind the episode on the assumption that Singapore contract law applies, so as to maintain its general relevance to a Singaporean audience and its specific application to online retailers concerned about making similar pricing errors. Of course, the analysis would differ …

Tripartism’S Stress Points Are Showing, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

SMU Assistant Professor of Law Eugene Tan discussed the implications of the SMRT strike incident and whether tripartism has lost its relevance. Assistant Prof Tan highlighted that there are deep, systemic issues within SMRT, and that the reach of the triapartism is not enough. He also highlighted the need to stamp out discrimination, and said that employers need to review their mindsets towards workers, especially foreign ones, and act ethically, equitably and responsibly given the default imbalance of power in the workplace.

Have We Become A Template Nation?, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In his commentary, SMU assistant professor of law Eugene Tan observed that last week's three MRT service breakdowns have raised concerns over whether our public transport system is able to cope with the increased commuter load and public expectations. While the road and rail infrastructure has grown significantly in the last few years, doubts now fester as to whether the relevant organisations, the people who run them and the systems and policies, have kept pace.

The Unctad Liner Code: A Dead Letter?, Sock-Yong Phang, Rex S. Toh

Research Collection School Of Economics

The UNCTAD Code of conduct for Liner Conferences entered into force in 1983. The Code's cargo allocation scheme or '40-40-20 rule' aims to provide shipping lines of developing countries with a fair change to compete for the carriage of their seabourne trade. However, the Code has not been effective in meeting its stated objectives for a variety of reasons. Amongst the administrative difficulties are (i) the complications introduced by the EEC's Brussels Package, (ii) the definition of national lines, (iii) the unit of measurement for cargo allocation purposes, and (iv) the monitoring of cargo movements. The tremendous growth in non-conference …