Even when the safety issues are resolved to the point where self-driving cars are at least as safe as humans in construction zones, they may be less safe than the same cars are elsewhere, and it may be a benefit to safety both to use self driving cars without an advance notice system and to use advance notice when available.

OTOH, even if it becomes a safety non-issue, advance knowledge of construction, 911 responses in progress, and other events on the potential routes can be useful to route planning in computer navigation systems whether or not they are used in self-driving vehicles.

Urs Holzle of Google said the following at Structure a couple weeks back: "You don't want to have a self-driving car that depends on an uplink for its driving ability. Vehicle to vehicle communication has to be a plus not a required."

As with detailed maps, other types of information would probably improve the overall safety and reliability of an autonomous vehicle. But, at some level, it needs to be able to drive on its own based on the environment it can directly sense.

That's basically what I was saying uphtread; self-driving cars need to get safe enough in all conditions to replace humans without relying on data broadcasts, but once they reach that point data broadcasts that allow them to identify and avoid situations that are relatively more dangerous and/or improve routing based on dynamic conditions still can have a valuable role.

Your utopia sounds wonderful. However, that's not how bureaucracy and public safety work.

I think you have that backwards.

Bureaucracy and public safety are mis-aligned to the point where a service relying on bureaucracy with a direct impact on public safety is going to be an uphill battle.

It also comes with some very interesting liability issues, such as: if the input data to that service is faulty and you then broadcast it to a bunch of AVs which react to it leading to an accident where would you assign blame?