[dkoston]

This is definitely a major challenge for driver assistance features. Poorly maintained roads are less of a burden to humans who can more easily account for flaws in road design or maintenance.

What is also a major issue is lack of design patterns on roads. Rather than using a standard set of merging lanes, circles, right and left turn lanes, etc, there are hundreds of variations across municipalities. What makes it worse is that even the patterns in a single municipality aren’t often followed. We notice this when driving on 290 from Austin to Houston where the turn lanes are sometimes marked with a white line on the left and other times marked with a yellow line.

It’s going to take a concerted effort by legislature to help driver assistance and self driving cars by adjusting roads to make them safer rather than the free-for-all we have now.