June 15, 2026
Meet the Smart Freeway: It Tells You to Slow Down
This post is part of my Medium blog.
California just turned on its first "smart freeway." $33 million for eight miles of northbound I-15 between Temecula and Murrieta. Sensors in the road. Ramp meters at the on-ramps. Digital signs that tell you how fast to drive. Here's what the driver actually experiences: you sit at a ramp meter for up to four minutes waiting to merge, and then a sign suggests you slow down. That's it. The road doesn't talk to your car. Your car doesn't talk to the road. It's a traffic light and a suggestion.
This isn't a smart road. It's a more sophisticated, technical apology for having too many drivers and not investing in public transportation.
The story nobody is telling about smart roads is that every feature is a workaround for the same problem — the driver.
The ramp meter exists because humans are not good at merging. The variable speed limit exists because humans don't adjust their following distance. The sensor network exists because humans are unpredictable. Every dollar spent on smart road infrastructure is a dollar spent accommodating the least reliable component in the system: the person behind the wheel.
Now, I get it — if you live out in the middle of nowhere, you are going to have an allergic reaction to the idea that we need to take the human out of the driver's seat. But if you live in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver… just any large city, you have probably started to wonder during your endless commutes if there's a better way. So what would it take to get there?
Evicting the Driver from the Driver's Seat
Taking the human out of the loop only works if the loop reaches everywhere. And right now, California's talking about 8 miles — that barely reaches anywhere.
That also had a $33 million price tag — roughly $4 million per mile. What cost money here was a full traffic management system with ramp metering, variable speed limits, and custom software. Apply that rate to the 47,000 miles of US interstate highway, and you get $188 billion. Expensive, but not impossible — except the I-15 approach isn't the only architecture.
Running through Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado is a 1,200-mile V2X network called "Connecting the West." Roadside units broadcast messages to vehicles. Onboard units in fleet trucks receive them. USDOT's V2X Accelerator funded 1,200 miles at roughly $17,000 per mile. Put a radio on a pole, connect it to the network, let the cars do the computing.
If you naively divide the Utah-led Connecting the West grant by its 1,200-mile corridor, you get a rough order-of-magnitude cost of about $17,000 per corridor mile. That doesn't mean the entire Interstate system could be equipped for exactly that amount — urban corridors, maintenance, backhaul, security, and vehicle adoption would all change the cost — but it does show that V2X is a very different cost model from California's $33 million traffic-management pilot.
The I-15 pilot made smart roads look expensive because it was solving the wrong problem. V2X doesn't manage the driver. It just gives the cars data to work with, and this is the key to how we're going to manage traffic — more intelligent, more collaborative vehicles.
So the coverage problem isn't really about money. It's about which problem you're trying to solve.
The missing piece: cars that can collaborate
The V2X approach is closer to where public infrastructure needs to go. The infrastructure is cheap, the architecture is right — put the intelligence in the car, not the road. But there's something missing, and it's the part nobody wants to talk about: a standardized approach to self-driving.
I drive around Seattle a lot. I see Teslas everywhere, and at this point, when I'm on the highway, I just assume they're running some version of automated driving. Maybe Full Self-Driving, maybe Autopilot, maybe whatever Tesla is calling it this week. I also have a Jeep with adaptive cruise control. It's not nearly as complicated or sophisticated as what Tesla is doing — it just maintains speed and distance. But I trust it more than I trust myself to react to every change in speed on I-5 or I-405. It doesn't get distracted. It doesn't check a notification. It just keeps its distance.
Here's the problem. My Jeep and that Tesla are not talking to each other. They're not talking to the road. They're not talking to anything. Each one is a smart device operating in isolation — using cameras, radar, and AI to figure out what's happening around it, but never sharing what it knows. That's the gap. We're building cars that can drive themselves, but we're not building cars that can coordinate with each other.
The problem is not that nobody has written standards. (These standards exist in SAE J2945/1 and SAE J2735.) The problem is that the market has not made interoperable vehicle coordination a default behavior, and no one's stepping up to require it.
The next step isn't just computer vision and AI driving the car. It's cars that talk to V2X systems on the roadside and talk to each other — exchanging speed, position, intent. A Tesla that knows the Jeep is three car lengths back is braking. A Jeep that knows the truck ahead is about to change lanes. That's how you get from "each car figures it out alone" to "the traffic system actually works as a system."
The biggest problem? I don't see the market encouraging this. Every automaker is building its own stack. Tesla, Waymo, etc. — they're all competing on whose AI is better, not on whose cars cooperate better. There's no commercial incentive for Tesla to share data with Ford or for Waymo to broadcast its intentions to a Jeep. The business model is "our car is the smartest," not "our car plays well with others." And without standardization — without a common protocol for vehicles to exchange information — V2X is just a radio on a pole talking to itself.
Instead, we're just celebrating that California dropped $33 million on a system to make us wait longer for the on-ramp traffic light to go green.
References
- Riverside County Transportation Commission, "I-15 Smart Freeway Pilot," rctc.org/i-15-smart-freeway
- Carscoops, "An Algorithm Now Tells You How Fast To Drive On California's First Smart Freeway," June 12, 2026. carscoops.com/2026/06/california-smart-freeway
- "Connecting the West" — joint V2X deployment by Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming DOTs. 1,200-mile network with roadside units, onboard units, and situational data exchange. itsa.org
- USDOT V2X Accelerator program awarded $60M collectively to Maricopa County DOT, Texas A&M Transportation Institute, and Utah DOT (Connecting the West) in Fall 2024. itsa.org
- Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics 2024, Table HM-41. US interstate system: ~49,000 miles. fhwa.dot.gov
- Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics 2024, Table HM-12. Total public road length: ~4 million miles. fhwa.dot.gov
- Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics 2024, Table FA-4A. Federal highway spending approximately $50B/year.
Part of why this interests me is that I explored it in my near-future novel, Essential. Set in 2033, it imagines a world where urban drivers are increasingly being evicted from the driver's seat while people in places like the Yukon Territory are still driving themselves. I don't think this transition is as far away as most people assume. The technology is already here; what's missing is the infrastructure and coordination to make it work at scale.
Essential is available on Amazon.