The people who want these rail lines everywhere aren’t being reasonable. There are other reasons besides schedule and routes that people don’t use trains anymore.

Roads are going to need modifications to be made truly safe for self driving. I don’t think it’ll be particularly expensive, either. Some things that would likely help would be reflectors that only reflect a certain spectrum of light, ferrous materials, passive radio equipment, etc. These are all things a machine can slap onto/into asphalt and shoulders without much trouble. It can be done rapidly. It only has to be decided upon and done. On top of these, it’s not like roads are all that dynamic. Sure, there’s always construction, but for the most part, they don’t change rapidly. Any self driving car should have a very up to date model loaded of the roads in the contiguous land it can traverse.

If society really wanted self driving cars to be a safe reality, it would just require a little more focus. Trying to do it with computer vision without road augmentation is clearly problematic. My car has a travel assist feature similar to Tesla’s Autopilot. It is great on well marked roadways without tight curves, but can be dangerous if the driver isn’t paying attention as it will lose the road lines at times and go off on its own.