Seems unlikely that road infrastructure will be upgraded/changed prior to construction of self driving cars.
When developing the self driving tech, a company retains all IP associated with research/development costs. Would they ever instead pay for development of public infra? Would a municipality build roads that conform to Company A's standard of self driving roads, omitting the requests of Company B?
Horse and cart never worked all that well, to the point that long distance travel by land was extremely rare. Deep ruts would form in the dirt roadways and mud would cause constant obstruction. It was easier sail around South America than to travel by land between San Francisco and New York City.
It wasn't until the railroad that travel by land was possible at scale. For the USA and Canada the railroad was seen as the only way to keep the vast land together as a single nation which is largely why it was subsidized. Further much of the subdisdy was land grants to land which would otherwise be economically useless without the railroad to allow transport of goods.
While self driving vehicles may improve efficiency of our roadways it is unlikely to be anywhere near the same scale of improvement that railroads brought, and the need to connect the country for political reasons is not there.
I absolutely agree that it's a tall order, but it seems at least possible that development could happen in tandem, and some kind of standards could be agreed upon for what kind of technologies would be used across the board. I'm picturing that if some new infrastructure and cars implement that, those could be roads on which self-driving cars would be permitted to drive, and a shift would happen gradually.
I kind of liked the idea - it's basically a higher-tech line-following robot concept, and doesn't look too expensive to roll out compare to other proposed infrastructure changes.
However, I haven't heard anything about it since the 2014 press frenzy over the release linked above. Maybe getting road maintainers to make changes like this really is too much to ask.
When developing the self driving tech, a company retains all IP associated with research/development costs. Would they ever instead pay for development of public infra? Would a municipality build roads that conform to Company A's standard of self driving roads, omitting the requests of Company B?