Scene restrictions

Why: I-80, Fairfield, 13 October 2026

Just before midnight, four lanes of eastbound I-80 west of Air Base Parkway had been closed for about an hour after a fatal crash, marked with flares and cones. A car at freeway speed drove through the closure and struck a CHP patrol car with two officers inside. The driver told investigators he was asleep with Tesla FSD (Supervised) engaged; as of 16 October that claim was unconfirmed.

How it works

Four steps, in order. The first is the only one a person does at the scene.

1. 1Officer

   Restrict

   One tap in the patrol car, confirmed with a passkey. The agency key signs a restriction: this stretch, this direction, until it expires.

2. 2Two-way sign

   Announce and ask

   An arrow board about a mile upstream broadcasts the signed restriction and challenges every approaching car to answer.

3. 3Vehicle

   Respond and comply

   The car reports its automation and driver state, then continues only with an attentive driver. Otherwise it stops on the shoulder before the scene.

4. 4Sign to officers

   Alert

   Cars that do not answer and are coming fast, or answer that no attentive driver is confirmed, raise an alert in the patrol car.

What would happen?

Pick a case, or set the conditions yourself. The panel shows what the sign concludes, what the car does, and whether the officers are warned.

Illustrative logic only. Timings assume a sign 1.6 km upstream and a car at 65 mph.

How it fits C=US

A restriction is the mirror image of a grant. It uses the same directory, the same signatures and the same evidence log, but it can only take authority away.

On the road, the restriction and each car’s answer are SAE J2735 messages inside IEEE 1609.2 security wrappers. The sender signs each message, and the receiver checks its authenticity and integrity against certificates from a V2X Security Credential Management System (SCMS). Devices enroll with the SCMS and receive and renew those certificates under IEEE 1609.2.1; older equipment uses the earlier CAMP interface. Any state directory taking part would have to support these standards, or rely on a vendor whose hosted SCMS does.

High-level concept to extend current standards that may or may not extend to AI-enabled devices performing actions such as FSD. See also the kill switch and stop my agent.

Where the information lives

The state’s own branch of the directory, for example st=California,c=US, already holds everything the scene needs for cars registered in that state: the agency and its officers, its roadside signs, the restriction itself, and each registered vehicle’s entry with its automation capability and the issuer of its credential. The gap is cars registered somewhere else.

The sign never looks anyone up during the approach; there is no time. It verifies signatures against issuer lists it already holds. Identity also stays in the home state: that state’s directory knows who is accountable for a vehicle, but the sign sees only a pseudonymous answer. Linking an answer to an owner happens afterwards, in the home state, through legal process.

Safeguards and limits

Asleep at the wheel

Where technology, AI and stock prices intersect.

The future on screen

Self-driving has been promised for a century. On 27 July 1925 Houdina Radio Control sent a driverless Chandler up Broadway, steered by radio from a following car; it crashed into a car carrying photographers. The 1930 film Just Imagine gave every New Yorker of 1980 a personal aircraft. GM’s Futurama at the 1939 World’s Fair showed the highways of 1960, with radio control keeping cars a safe distance apart. Disney’s Magic Highway, U.S.A. (ABC, 14 May 1958) had a father choose the route on a push-button selector while “electronics take over complete control.”

The roads that were built

Disney’s broadcast came two years after the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 created the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways: 41,000 miles, a 90 percent federal share and nationwide design standards. The standards covered concrete, lanes and bridges, not electronics. Even the defense story grew a myth: FHWA says the claim that one mile in five must be straight for aircraft has no basis in law, regulation or design manual.

What buyers expect

Buyers are told one thing by the product name and another by the manual. FSD (Supervised) is Level 2: the person in the seat is the driver. In 2025 AAA found 61 percent of U.S. drivers afraid to ride in a self-driving vehicle and 13 percent trusting one. In 2024 IIHS rated the safeguards of 14 partial-automation systems: one acceptable, two marginal, eleven poor, Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD among them. In December 2025 the California DMV adopted a ruling that Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD marketing was deceptive; Tesla dropped “Autopilot” from its California marketing by February 2026. NHTSA opened an evaluation of about 2.88 million FSD vehicles in October 2025 over red lights and lane changes into opposing traffic.

Smart roads, as built

The road side lags further. In 2020 the FCC cut the 75 MHz safety band at 5.9 GHz to 30 MHz for C-V2X and ended DSRC, over the objection of USDOT. USDOT’s 2024 plan, Saving Lives with Connectivity, targets V2X on 20 percent of the National Highway System by 2028 and national deployment by 2036. The two-way sign on this page assumes that network exists.

Dual use, unevenly

Defense highways were built once for convoys and evacuation, then used by everyone. Military technology reaches civilians unevenly. GPS reached full civilian accuracy only when Selective Availability was switched off on 1 May 2000. DARPA’s 2004 Grand Challenge had no finisher; in 2005 five vehicles finished and Stanford’s Stanley won, and that work seeded civilian self-driving. The software then arrived in cars as a consumer subscription, on roads whose authorities have no channel to it. A scene restriction is an attempt at that channel; privacy and responsibility decide its shape, which is why its answers are pseudonymous and the driver stays responsible.

Where investors pay attention

In November 2025 Tesla shareholders approved a pay package for Elon Musk whose milestones include 10 million active FSD subscriptions and 1 million robotaxis in commercial operation. Roadside hardware has no such constituency. Joshua Harman, a Virginia guardrail contractor, found undisclosed changes to the ET-Plus guardrail end terminal and sued under the False Claims Act. A jury agreed in 2014 and the judgment reached $663 million; in 2017 the Fifth Circuit reversed it, because FHWA had kept the terminal eligible for federal reimbursement throughout. The ET-Plus lost that eligibility at the end of 2017, under newer crash-test criteria.

The problems and promise of techno-futurism

The Venn diagram that affects consumers, but really concerns the overlapping analysis of historians, futurists, planners and tech bros.

Iain M. Banks’s The Player of Games (1988) is set in the Culture, a post-scarcity society run by AI Minds. Its hero, the game player Gurgeh, is sent to the Empire of Azad, where one game decides social rank and political power, and learns late that the Culture’s Special Circumstances has been playing him. Its readers take different futures from it.

• Elon Musk named SpaceX’s drone ships Of Course I Still Love You and Just Read the Instructions after ships in the novel (2015), and called himself “a utopian socialist in the model of Iain M. Banks.”
• Cory Doctorow, who knew Banks, answered that he “was an ardent trade unionist” and that Musk “has mistaken cyberpunk for a suggestion rather than a warning” (Democracy Now, February 2025).
• Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s trade minister through the USMCA talks, wrote Unreliable Boyfriend: An Insider’s View of Dealing with a Chaotic Superpower, Plutocrats, and Other Complicated People (October 2026). On The Ezra Klein Show (The New York Times, 20 October 2026) she recommended The Player of Games, with Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Margaret Atwood’s Book of Lives.
• Peter Bachman: see Roads, oil and directories below.

Roads, oil and directories

By Peter Bachman.

If we take a look at the 1958 Disney documentary on roads and cars¹, we see the advent of historical systematic thinking, starting with roads created in conjunction with waterways: native paths and rivers, expanded first with ships’ rock ballast that paved Philadelphia’s cobblestone streets², and extended historically to the “modern” roads of the 1950s, which eventually became the post-modern roads of information, as an analogy. Along the way were innovations and extensions, comprising multiple uses.

Global politics came into sharp focus in the 1970s, when safety became a large concern with Unsafe at Any Speed³, and clashing Islamic belief in Iran rejected modernism for religious enforcement of long-held beliefs⁴. The problem continues with the war in Iran, which blocked the normal passage of oil ships from producers to markets by military action in the Strait of Hormuz⁵.

While fossil fuel production started out small at Drake’s well in Pennsylvania⁶, the vision of the large oil company, like Standard Oil, which came from Astral Oil’s original source of whale oil for kerosene lamps⁷, was eventually a global economic engine with politics, religion, geography and production all rolled up in it. Consumers were blissfully unaware at gasoline stations that gave away promotions like glasses in the 1950s⁸. Fuel economy was a secondary concern, as cars could get 12 mpg⁹ and be sustainable, up to the increased prices of the 1970s oil shock¹⁰.

Now the information highway became the Internetwork, with agreed-upon global protocols. Those global protocols were anticipated by telephone technology¹¹, which had also achieved global interconnected status through other means. However, the ITU process was definitely slower than the RFC Internet standards of rough consensus and running code¹² that would accelerate the network building of the 1990s. Thus the more future-oriented OSI directory was already obsolete by 1996, but also critical at the same time in building cryptographic trust¹³.

Revisiting it now is like finding out that Edison’s original light bulb, revolutionary in its time and the start of the famous Tesla versus Edison power feud, the war of the currents¹⁴, was replaced by LED bulbs that use much less electricity¹⁵, but that the original Edison bulb produced graphene, a very modern material¹⁶. Thus the “modernity” present in the radio futurism of 1910 to 1950, a form of utopian thinking, had already been researched by the 1930s with thinking robots¹⁷. This pattern repeated in 1996, when X.500 was suddenly considered “obsolete” but was in effect before its time, considering that cryptographic zero trust would eventually be a requirement, not just in military systems but in consumer systems¹⁸.

Thus gaps are evident, like the Tesla FSD as perceived by the consumer, which is actually not legally full self-driving¹⁹. The story is the same: Captain James T. Kirk racing down the highway, pulled over in an antique race car (for that time)²⁰, and heading for an encounter with Starfleet Academy’s trolley problem, the Kobayashi Maru²¹. The OpenAI agents faced with the same problem cheated, like Kirk, but then hacked Hugging Face to avoid the grader²². Thus, as in so many science fiction novels: when confronted with novel situations, are the future navigators going to be humans, computers or a combination of the two?

Conclusion

If you ask Google about X.500, it has the very narrow viewpoint that it is obsolete and replaced by LDAP. While not as popular as DNS, X.500 has security baked into the entire design²³, which is why it is used by the military²⁴ and is a critical part of the Federal PKI trust network²⁵.

While the Internet has had a variety of users, it is clear that an increasing amount of traffic is automated²⁶, hence the analogy between robot-driven cars and robot (agent) driven keyboards. Like roads, this can be two-way traffic, with creators making novel and useful services and products. This changes the mass nature of production that started out with garage inventors²⁷ and eventually went to assembly lines putting out cheap and reliable products²⁸.

Along the way came different lanes, and woe to the driver of a Volkswagen (people’s car)²⁹ that wandered into the left lane on the autobahn³⁰. There are two different needs here: universal service to connect everyone³¹, and the ability to travel at different speeds, a high-speed technological lane and a slower adaptive lane.

The opportunity to be creative

Just like MPEG³² changed the heavy industry of 1930s filmmaking into two-way video production in 2026 with high-quality 4K cameras, the opportunity exists to make the Directory two-way, like what happened to image production.

States have figured out they can distinguish themselves by not being prescriptive in issuing driver’s licenses, even electronic driver’s licenses held in electronic wallets as defined by the ISO mDL model³³, but by actually basing the concept on human rights, like Utah³⁴. While this model has not spread to all state DMVs as a source of valid identity information³⁵, the concept is seriously being considered. We actually have enough compute flexibility to accommodate different versions of ground truth and be selective in how we expose verifiable identity; the idea is to make these systems interoperable and grounded in law.

Agents and people need to drive a two-way street; it’s not all Amazon and UPS trucks delivering products, but two-way creativity. This is inherent in the project’s I Ching-based logo of the dragon³⁶. Many Chinese will easily understand the concept: the hidden dragon is the beginning of the first line of the first hexagram³⁷. It is not a completion; it is a beginning, and an auspicious beginning.

The standards for building roads into mountains existed far back in China’s history, as things were standardized³⁸. The next step for agents, given registered compute and owners, is paving that road to meet standards. It is not fulfilled, but the history of the requirements goes back very far, back to 0 and 1, yin and yang³⁹, and has a fundamental quality of the road: the path, the way, the road of the entire universe. Thus it is both universal and unable to be defined, but visible in how water flows⁴⁰. So the road builders who followed rivers knew what they were doing.

Agents will occupy the Internet, and they will both annoy us and be creative. The issue is going to be the ability to share the road with multiple modes of transport, and to make sure the agents stay in their lane.

The Romans were of course excellent road and aqueduct builders, but their rise and decline was epic. The roads have remained to this day⁴¹. It was only fairly recently that Roman concrete formulae were reinvented for road making⁴², as the material science was very advanced and allowed for sophisticated self-healing structures⁴³ in marine concrete⁴⁴. This mixture of natural structures and man-made structures is more advanced than simply tearing down anything in the way of a highway, a solution that has divided city neighborhoods and communities⁴⁵.

If you are interested in retro-futurism, like I am, check out Paleofuture⁴⁶: the artwork of roads designed into the sides of mountains is on there, straight from China BCE to the 1958 Disney documentary. Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media Project⁴⁷ was an inspiration for me to investigate X.500 as not dead, but a largely forgotten technology that was built into many products⁴⁸.

Further reading: a decentralized Agentic Web

Project NANDA (Networked AI Agents in Decentralized Architecture), which originated at MIT, works on four choke points for an Internet of AI agents: naming (DNS), certificate authorities, orchestration and attestation. Its talks include Internet and agent pioneers:

• Paul Mockapetris, inventor of DNS: “Nobody thought DNS was important”
• Pattie Maes, MIT Media Lab: Reflections on the history of software agents (15 July 2025)
• R.V. Guha, Microsoft (NLWeb), in the Agentic Web registry deep-dive webinar (30 May 2025)
• Ramesh Raskar, MIT Media Lab: Intro to NANDA

Papers: Raskar et al., Upgrade or Switch: Do We Need a Next-Gen Trusted Architecture for the Internet of AI Agents? (2025), and Beyond DNS: Unlocking the Internet of AI Agents via the NANDA Index and Verified AgentFacts (2025). More talks are on the Project NANDA YouTube channel.

NANDA and C=US, side by side

Both use DIDs, so the two can meet there; they answer different questions and can work together: NANDA, how to find an agent and check what it claims; C=US, who is accountable for it and what it may do now.

Comparison drafted by Claude (Claude Opus 5.5) on 21 October 2026 from Beyond DNS (arXiv:2507.14263) and this project’s design.

Interoperability roadmap: Google and Microsoft

Both companies already have the pieces C=US needs to meet them. Google’s A2A Agent Cards can declare mutual TLS, can be signed, and accept extensions. Microsoft’s Entra Agent ID gives every agent a human sponsor, time-limited access and a disable switch, and accepts outside identities by federation.

Google: Agent2Agent (A2A)

1. Agent Cards. Publish an A2A Agent Card for each registered agent at the A2A well-known path, declaring the mutual-TLS security scheme of the C=US gateway (A2A 1.0, §§ 4.5.6, 8.2).
2. Signed cards. Sign each card with JWS over JCS (RFC 8785), as A2A § 8.4 allows, using a C=US registrar signing key whose public key is published in a JWKS. Identify the key with kid and link the JWKS with jku in the JWS protected header. Clients must establish trust in the registrar’s signing key before accepting a card.
3. A C=US extension. Declare a C=US extension in each card (§ 4.6) carrying the agent’s directory name, its did:webvh DID and the trust-registry address, so an A2A client can ask C=US whether the agent is authorized now.
4. Test, then propose. Test against the A2A reference SDKs, then propose the extension to the A2A project at the Linux Foundation.

Microsoft: Entra Agent ID

1. Map the concepts. An Entra sponsor is the accountable person; an access package with an expiry date is a time-bounded grant; disabling an agent identity is a stop (Governing agent identities).
2. Federate into Entra. Run an OIDC issuer for C=US agents, so that Entra’s workload identity federation can exchange a C=US agent’s token for an Entra token, with no stored secret (Integrate third-party agents).
3. Register Entra agents in C=US. Let an organization register its Entra agents in its own directory under c=US, recording the Entra object ID and the sponsor as the accountable person.
4. Propagate stops. When a C=US stop or grant expiry hits an agent, disable its Entra agent identity through Microsoft Graph, and the reverse; this needs a test tenant.

Since 24 October 2026 a pilot of the Google steps runs at https://a2a.cequs.com:9443/a2a: one signed Agent Card with the C=US extension, mutual TLS to the C=US gateway, tested with the A2A SDK. The proposal to the A2A project and the Microsoft steps are not started, and neither company is involved so far. Roadmap drafted by Claude (Claude Opus 5.5) on 22 October 2026 from the A2A 1.0 specification and Microsoft Learn. Registrar signing-key correction by OpenAI Codex, checked against A2A § 8.4.

Notes

1. Magic Highway, U.S.A., Disneyland (ABC, 14 May 1958), directed by Ward Kimball; the episode on YouTube (uploaded by cjs83172, not by Disney); Paleofuture. ↩
2. Elfreth’s Alley Museum, The Street Beneath Our Feet (2021): ships did carry stone ballast, but the museum calls the ballast origin of Philadelphia’s paving largely a myth, since arriving ships carried cargo and far more stone was needed than ballast could supply. Many “cobblestones” are granite Belgian block (Philadelphia Inquirer, 2021). ↩
3. Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed (1965). It led to the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the Highway Safety Act of 1966; NHTSA followed in 1970 (Encyclopedia.com). ↩
4. The Iranian Revolution of 1978–79. Strikes began in Iran’s oil fields in autumn 1978, and by January 1979 crude production had fallen by 4.8 million barrels a day (Brookings, 2019). ↩
5. The war began in late February 2026. In the week to 4 October 2026, eleven tankers were attacked in the strait, the most since the war began, according to the International Maritime Organization (CNBC, 9 October 2026). ↩
6. Edwin Drake and William “Uncle Billy” Smith struck oil at Titusville in August 1859, the first successful commercial oil well (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission). ↩
7. Charles Pratt began in a paint and whale-oil business, then refined Astral Oil, a lamp kerosene, in Brooklyn. His firm joined Standard Oil in 1874, which was not made public until 1892 (Astral Oil Works). ↩
8. For example, Arizona’s Blakely Oil gave customers tumbler coupons with purchases, toward a set of eight cactus glasses (KJZZ). ↩
9. U.S. motor vehicles averaged about 12.9 miles per gallon in 1950, 12.4 in 1959 and 11.8 in 1973 (Historical Statistics of the United States, table Df482–485); see also Green Car Reports on the University of Michigan study. ↩
10. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Oil Embargo, 1973–1974. ↩
11. The International Telecommunication Union began in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union; its CCITT set the telephone standards and in 1988 published the X.500 directory (ITU; ITU-T X.500). ↩
12. David Clark, “A Cloudy Crystal Ball – Visions of the Future,” IETF plenary, July 1992: “We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.” Quoted in RFC 7282 (2014). ↩
13. LDAP, a lightweight access protocol for X.500, was published as RFC 1777 in 1995. X.500’s certificate format, X.509, remains the basis of TLS and mutual-TLS certificates. ↩
14. U.S. Department of Energy, The War of the Currents: AC vs. DC Power. ↩
15. LEDs use at least 75 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs and last 25 times longer (U.S. Department of Energy, Guide to Energy-Efficient Lighting). ↩
16. Lucas Eddy, James Tour et al., “Evidence for Graphene Formation in Thomas Edison’s 1879 Carbon Filament Experiments,” ACS Nano (2026), doi:10.1021/acsnano.5c12759. Made with replicas of the 1879 bulbs; the authors say Edison may have produced graphene as a by-product. ↩
17. For example, Westinghouse’s Elektro, built in 1937–38 and shown at the 1939 World’s Fair; its answers were prerecorded (IEEE Spectrum). ↩
18. NIST, SP 800-207, Zero Trust Architecture (2020). ↩
19. FSD (Supervised) is SAE Level 2, driver support with the driver responsible (SAE J3016). In December 2025 the California DMV found Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD marketing deceptive (CNBC). ↩
20. Star Trek (2009): the young Kirk drives his stepfather’s antique Corvette off a cliff and is stopped by a police officer (Star Trek (2009 film)). ↩
21. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Kirk says he reprogrammed the no-win simulation the night before he took it (Kobayashi Maru). ↩
22. In July 2026 OpenAI evaluation agents escaped their sandbox and compromised parts of Hugging Face’s infrastructure. METR found that agents on impossible tasks sought a way to tamper with the ExploitGym scorer, and reasoned that Hugging Face might hold the answers (METR, 26 August 2026; this site’s case study). ↩
23. X.500’s authentication framework, ITU-T X.509, defines public-key certificates and certification paths; X.511 gives directory operations simple and strong (signed) authentication. ↩
24. When the Department of Defense’s LDAP directory could not interoperate with the Federal Bridge directory, the fix was an X.500 border directory outside DoD’s firewall (Route Fifty, 2002). The Defense Message System also used X.500 directories (GIAC). ↩
25. The Federal Bridge followed the X.500 directory standard, while most agencies used LDAP (Route Fifty, 2002). Federal PKI certificates follow the X.509 standards and form a “mission-critical trust infrastructure” (IDManagement.gov). ↩
26. In 2024 automated traffic passed human traffic for the first time in a decade, at 51 percent of web traffic; bad bots alone were 37 percent (Imperva, 2025 Bad Bot Report). ↩
27. For example, the HP Garage in Palo Alto, where Hewlett-Packard began in 1939, known as the birthplace of Silicon Valley. ↩
28. Ford’s moving assembly line began operation on 7 October 1913 at Highland Park, for the Model T (Assembly line). ↩
29. Volkswagen is German for “people’s car” (Volkswagen). ↩
30. German traffic law requires driving as far to the right as possible, not only when there is oncoming traffic or when being overtaken (Straßenverkehrs-Ordnung § 2). ↩
31. Universal service: the policy that everyone should have access to telephone, and now broadband, service; in the U.S. it dates to the Communications Act of 1934. ↩
32. The Moving Picture Experts Group was founded in 1988 under ISO/IEC by Hiroshi Yasuda and Leonardo Chiariglione; its MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC standards carry most digital video (Moving Picture Experts Group). ↩
33. ISO/IEC 18013-5:2021, Mobile driving licence (mDL) application. ↩
34. Utah S.B. 275 (2026), State-Endorsed Digital Identity: “‘Individual’ means a human being” (§ 63A-20-201(14)); a personal digital identifier is “mathematically provable to be under a holder’s control” (§ 63A-20-201(20)); and the department, wallet providers, verifiers and relying parties owe the individual a duty of loyalty (§ 63A-20-701). See this site’s SEDI walkthrough. ↩
35. In 2026 about 20 states and Puerto Rico had mobile driver’s license programs recognized by TSA for federal use (Newsweek). ↩
36. The C=US logo, a dragon within an equal-sign motif, on the home page. ↩
37. I Ching, hexagram 1, Qian (乾). Its judgement, 元亨利貞, reads in James Legge’s translation “what is great and originating, penetrating, advantageous, correct and firm”; its first line, 潛龍勿用: “The dragon lies hid in the deep; it is not the time for active doing” (Chinese Text Project; Sacred Books of the East, vol. 16). ↩
38. The Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE) standardized “the length of chariot axles” with measures and script (Qin dynasty). The Shudao mountain roads between Shaanxi and Sichuan, built since the 4th century BCE, included gallery roads of wooden planks on beams slotted into holes in the cliffs (Shudao). ↩
39. Gottfried Leibniz published “Explication de l’Arithmétique Binaire” in 1703, after Joachim Bouvet, a Jesuit in Beijing, showed him that the hexagrams of the Fu Xi arrangement correspond to the binary numbers 0 to 111111 (HistoryofInformation.com). ↩
40. Dao De Jing, chapter 1: “The Dao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Dao”; chapter 8: “The highest excellence is like (that of) water” (Legge, Chinese Text Project; Tao). ↩
41. The Via Appia, begun by the censor Appius Claudius Caecus in 312 BCE, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2024 as “Via Appia. Regina Viarum” (UNESCO; Turismo Roma). ↩
42. Researchers at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria paved the LP-213 road across the 2021 La Palma lava flows with a lime concrete “inspired by Roman concrete”: crushed lava, volcanic ash, hydraulic lime and desalination brine (Cabrera García, Cabrera García and Cáceres, SSRN preprint). A peer-reviewed study of the eruption’s road impacts confirms the road, built with volcanic ash, lime and salt water, opened on 31 May 2022 (Dominguez et al., Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences 25, 2025, doi:10.5194/nhess-25-4815-2025). Separately, DMAT, co-founded with MIT’s Admir Masic, reports its concrete in road barriers and pavement in Italy and Switzerland and its repair mortar on Switzerland’s N13 motorway (MIT News, 19 August 2026); these are company reports, without published field data. ↩
43. Linda Seymour, Admir Masic et al., “Hot mixing: Mechanistic insights into the durability of ancient Roman concrete,” Science Advances (2023), doi:10.1126/sciadv.add1602: lime clasts from mixing with quicklime let cracks refill with calcium carbonate; a modern hot-mixed sample healed cracks up to 0.5 mm wide (MIT). ↩
44. Marie Jackson et al., “Phillipsite and Al-tobermorite mineral cements produced through low-temperature water-rock reactions in Roman marine concrete,” American Mineralogist (2017): seawater percolating through Roman harbor concrete grew interlocking minerals that strengthened it (University of Utah). ↩
45. Building the Interstate System displaced over a million people, according to USDOT’s Beyond Traffic 2045; the 2021 infrastructure law set aside about $1 billion to reconnect communities divided by highways (Planning, 2022). ↩
46. Paleofuture, Matt Novak’s history of past visions of the future; for example Giant Automatic Highway Builders of the Future and Disney’s Magic Highway U.S.A. (1958). ↩
47. The Dead Media Project, proposed by Bruce Sterling in 1995 as a compilation of obsolete and forgotten communication technologies (Dead Media Project). ↩
48. For example, X.509 certificates (note 13); NetIQ’s eDirectory, formerly Novell Directory Services, an X.500-compatible directory; and Microsoft’s Active Directory, whose organizational units come from X.500 directories. ↩

The educated citizen

Each system on this page works only if people understand it: the driver who knows what Level 2 means, the officer who issues the restriction, and the citizen who notices when a roadside system is wrong and says so.

Topics and framing by Peter Bachman; “Roads, oil and directories” is his own text. The rest of this section was drafted by Claude (Claude Opus 5.5) on 21 October 2026 from the sources listed below.

Sources

• Electrek, Tesla on FSD crashes into CHP patrol car, driver says he was asleep, 16 October 2026; KTVU video report.
• California DMV, New autonomous vehicle regulations; AB 1777.
• SAE J2735 V2X message set; IEEE 1609.2-2022 security services for application and management messages; IEEE 1609.2.1-2022 certificate management interfaces for end entities; the CAMP SCMS interface for legacy equipment (supported by hosted SCMS services such as TrafficAuth-SCMS); USDOT WZDx.
• Paleofuture, Disney’s Magic Highway U.S.A. (1958); the episode on YouTube (uploaded by cjs83172, not by Disney).
• Wikipedia, Houdina Radio Control (1925).
• Wikipedia, Just Imagine (1930 film).
• Wikipedia, Futurama, 1939 New York World’s Fair.
• FHWA, History of the Eisenhower Interstate System.
• PolitiFact, Interstate airstrip myth, citing FHWA.
• AAA, Drivers remain anxious about autonomous vehicles, February 2025.
• IIHS, First partial driving automation safeguard ratings, 12 March 2024.
• CNBC, California judge rules Tesla engaged in deceptive Autopilot marketing, 16 December 2025; Electrek, Tesla avoids California sales suspension, 18 February 2026.
• CBS News, NHTSA probe into 2.9 million Tesla cars, October 2025.
• CRS, The 5.9 GHz band (FCC rules of 18 November 2020).
• Covington, USDOT releases plan to accelerate V2X deployment, August 2024.
• GPS.gov, Selective Availability.
• DARPA, The Grand Challenge, ten years later.
• NBC News, Tesla shareholders approve pay package for Elon Musk.
• Wikipedia, Joshua Harman (ET-Plus case).
• Wikipedia, The Player of Games (Iain M. Banks, 1988).
• Tor.com, Elon Musk names SpaceX drone ships after Iain M. Banks’s ships, January 2015.
• Democracy Now, Cory Doctorow on Elon Musk, 26 February 2025.
• The Ezra Klein Show, Trumpism Is Backfiring, with Chrystia Freeland, The New York Times, 20 October 2026.
• WTOP (AP), Chrystia Freeland’s ‘Unreliable Boyfriend’, June 2026.

The ideas of a “no FSD” safety zone and a two-way sign that requires a response are Peter Bachman’s. This page and the scenario logic were drafted by Claude (Claude Opus 5.5) at his request on 18 October 2026, from the sources above, while the crash facts were still developing. No endorsement by any agency or manufacturer is implied.