Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Sports Driver. On today's show, do smart cars need smart roads?

Driverless cars are all the buzz these days as autonomous vehicles are on the horizon and many are passing bills that allow for testing and we've seen self-driving ubers in pittsburg but there's a big question

how are these cars going to communicate with each other with the roads how is real-time information

going to be collected for cars to be making decisions well my guest says that smart cars need smart

roads and uh he is brent sc, research fellow at the Mercatus Center.

Brent, thanks for joining the show.

Evan, thanks for having me.

So first, let's define our terms of art.

What is a smart road?

Smart roads, I mean, it's kind of like smart cities and that people talk about it.

It's not really clear.

Once you drill down the details, what it all means. But what I and most people

talk about smart roads are essentially a mix of the infrastructure and the broadband and the fiber

deployment and all the systems you need that will communicate with connected cars.

I mean, the cars we have today that are getting more media and broadband capability,

but also autonomous cars where, you know, a big need for autonomous cars

and at any level will be, you know, detailed mapping ability.

And so that's what I mean by smart roads,

just roads and infrastructure that communicate with cars

and other transportation and kind of ease a lot of the frictions people deal with.

And I consider a subset of smart cities as well.

Now, this is not something we have now, right?

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