This is a great question, and I wish it were the direction the larger discussion took instead of hysteria. I'm not sure about other examples, and the USA's offi

This is a great question, and I wish it were the direction the larger discussion took instead of hysteria. I'm not sure about other examples, and the USA's office of emerging technology was more of an advisory body to Congress than a regulatory invention. I'm not certain that any city has had quite the mix of bureaucratic morass and eager solutionism of San Francisco. A single point of contact with latitude to interpret existing law for new use cases is, per many, the advantage of more authoritarian governments. It would maybe behoove our community to capture this office and use it to preempt more conservative city departments. This is coverage of the proposal from a year ago. It is the outcome of a process to actually _improve_ what everyone can agree was a totally disastrous rollout of scooters in SF, with blame to be assigned to both the city and operators: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/01/11/emerging-technologies-scooters-uber-lyft-robots.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/01/11/eme... Furthermore, the above makes it even more clear that the proposal only applies to people who are trying to test products that use sidewalk and road spaces.