Comparative Local Government Law in Motion: How Different Local Government Law Regimes Affect Global Cities’ Bike Share Plans

At the heart of the contemporary study of comparative local government law lies a paradox. On the one hand, the discipline relies on an assumption that there is a great deal of similarity between different cities across the world—an assumption evinced by adjectives such as “global,” “international,” or “world” that scholars routinely affix to the cities they compare. If no minimal baseline of commonality is assumed, the whole exercise becomes futile. What is the point of comparing things that have nothing in common? On the other hand, what can be more local—as opposed to “global” or “international”—than local government law? The local is in the name, and for good reason. Local government law structures the smallest-scale political institutions, those that are the closest to the specific community. Thus inevitably this body of law reflects the community’s particular culture and politics. Much of local government law is dedicated to the regulation of space: local government law’s scope of interest, indeed its job, is parochial by definition. This Article suggests and pursues one method for tackling this paradox presented by a field of law dedicated to the global attributes of the local (or the local attributes of the global). The Article explores one common, “global,” policy adopted by many cities despite the particular, parochial nature of their local government law regimes. The Article seeks to figure out how the particularities of the local government legal system affect—or do not affect—a policy the city imports from elsewhere.