Can’t imagine permitting self-drivers and human operated to coexist. I suspect several lanes of interstate highways will be segregated for automated cars. The distances between vehicles could be compressed and speeds could increase as automation improves. Merging at highway speed would be seamless. And you wouldn’t have to flail away blindly behind your back to get a hold of a misbehaving child.
It’ll begin with large overnight long-haul truckers - no clock to worry about. Long runs, fast speed, and no tired humans will make for safer, faster and cheaper hauling. That’s a lot of high paying blue collar DJT voters who will be replaced.
What’s happening now is what should have been foreseen in this dysfunctional society. feral-Americans are attacking, hijacking, and destroying self-driving cars.
Self-driving is still probably 20 years away from actually occurring and maybe thirty years from acceptance. The thing I see is that the insurance companies are going to have a problem because the cars will take into account weather conditions and traffic patterns, and drive at a lower rate of speed. Fewer accidents will come out of this in the long run...to the degree that insurance rates will have to be cut in half.
A daisy chain of long haul unmanned trucks on dedicated lane tracks is not necessary (but there are commercial interests pursuing it and would reap $$$ for the “new” industry). It’s called a TRAIN and moves cargo interstate in long unbroken lines of traffic.
Separate highways will never happen.
We can’t maintain the ones we have.
They’re already on the roads. As for truckers, if the “long haul” part is automated the cost of the transportation will plummet, leading to more trucks being used. Most likely, at least in the short term, we’ll still need drivers to handle the “last mile” - where more complex driver occurs. This may enable truckers to handle this many times a day but be able to go home as they’re basically doing a local job.
We’ll see - but the industry understands this is a complex change to the economics of things. What if you don’t own your car? What if they hardly ever crash? How does that impact insurance companies? Or income cities get from parking fees, when people don’t need to park?
We’re about to go through some radical changes.