Many conditions are prerequisite to initiate the transition to an automated highway infrastructure. First and foremost among these is a highway corridor with heavy rush hour traffic that is already severely congested, high forecast growth in jobs and housing, and limited space for widening the existing highways any further without encroaching on the property of homeowners and commercial establishments.
To gain better insight into how the transition to an automated highway infrastructure might take place, we have examined two high traffic corridors in the state of California that meet these requirements. In general a corridor of ten to twenty miles length would be adequate to demonstrate the value of vehicle automation and provide sufficient end-user value to stimulate demand for custom vehicles to operate on the system. Once the demonstration corridor is operable, incremental extensions multiply the network effect and amplify the overall value, thereby increasing demand and profitability as the infrastructure expands.