And there's more of it to come. Meanwhile, the federal government and private industry will be spending billions of dollars on research over the next several years, often struggling to adapt megabuck military technology for affordable smart cars and roads. To achieve these goals, fully automated vehicles may one day ask drivers to yield control to onboard computers and an automated highway management system - and thus to the government that runs it. Intelligent transportation systems, as they're called, are bound to change not simply the way we get from Point A to Point B, but also the way in which we interact with our vehicles and how we define our privacy rights. We can add only a few percent more capacity.
Highways are still the Number One killer, and automobiles are a main source of pollution.
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