> My conjecture is we end up building AV only roads. initially one lane of a highway, then ring roads round cities and major warehousing hubs, then across urban

> My conjecture is we end up building AV only roads. initially one lane of a highway, then ring roads round cities and major warehousing hubs, then across urban areas. Walled off in some way they simply become railways with benefits. Close, but I think it's far more probable that we just whitelist roads / intersections / routes known to work well and be reliable--whether with a general-purpose or location-specific algorithm. There's still a ton of value shuttling people to and from the airport and local hotels. Then there'll be incentive for local restaurants to also be included in the available destinations, so there'll be pressure to both improve local roads / intersections to make them more easily navigable by self-driving cars, and on self-driving cars to get better at navigating them. With time, the locations / routes that self-driving cars can reliably reach will expand until it covers the vast majority of desired destinations. We actually are following the same pattern with the horses -> cars transition. There are still plenty of places that cars can't reach and horses can. Over decades, though, we just kind of paved roads everywhere anyone really wanted to go. Nowadays it's more or less a given that if you want people to be able to reach somewhere, it'll need to have a road. We'll see the same thing with self-driving cars. There'll still be roads that self-driving cars avoid and humans drive on, but they'll become less and less relevant as the value of self-driving cars becomes more apparent.