[ramboldio]

I'm wondering why there is so little talk about changing road infrastructure to make self-driving easier to pull off.

E.g. dedicated lanes for self driving or hand-off stations where human drivers can take over etc etc.

Amid the massive potential upsides, any reasonable government would invest in measures that turn out to effectivley improve self-drivability of the respective national grid.

[jackvalentine]

If we’re going to be investing public money and ripping up/modifying the current infrastructure I’d actually prefer we just focus on the usual goals of urbanism and deprecate the car from the picture.

[Workaccount2]

Only a small fraction of people will give up their cars, but I do hope the no-car evangelism takes off. Y'all can ride the trolley with stops every quarter mile while I just cruise on the now empty roads in my own personal car, parking right next to my jobs front door. Thanks.

[jackvalentine]

What an odd thing to say.

[ZeroSolstice]

This is my thinking as well. We need to build for the task at hand not try and integrate into what we already have. The first sentence in this article is where the failed assumptions are.

  "Trucking was supposed to be the ideal first application of autonomous driving. Freeways contain predictable, highly structured 
  driving scenarios.."

When sharing the road with human drivers this statement makes no sense as all. Vehicle's are their own entities with no connection to each other outside of the road, signage and defined lanes. Instead of trying to build sensors for a existing 8-lane highway just do it for (2) isolated lanes. You don't have to plan for 100% of human scenarios if they are mostly removed. We don't fly airplanes adjacent, behind, ahead, etc of each other why is the assumption that autonomous trucks need to be on the same road as everyone else.

[mcmoor]

Well because if we're going that way, we might as well use trains, as lots of other comments unhelpfully mentioned. The strength of a car is supposed to be that they are more flexible in how to go from A to B and may even stomach less than ideal road conditions. Dedicated self driving infrastructure may negate those advantages.