My town has never fixed a stop sign that’s angled toward the wrong road. Humans just assume it’s for the smaller road. I’m not sure how a self driving car will ever figure it out.
Well, if the roads would be optimized for autonomous cars then any signs on them would be used as a fallback.
Autonomous cars would mostly rely on something like road databases, active "stop beacons" or passive "stop markers" (like reading a passive RFID tag)
People had similar concerns when motorcars first became available. i.e., my horse can jump over obstacles that motorcars never will, and so on. Eventually humans made roads specifically for motorcars.
That's exactly my point: we'll have self-driving cars when they have their own space. Not before, even given 20 years of progress. Maybe we'll get that dedicated space before then, maybe not. It's a much bigger socioeconomic hurdle and may or may not actually be worth it financially.
Maybe there's a partial solution though: drive your car manually to the next onramp from where on it drives automatically until you arrive in the vicinity of your workplace from where on you'll have to drive manually again for a bit. So sort of like the dedicated bus lanes we already have nowadays. If your car doesn't have autopilot, you're not allowed to use them. If your car has autopilot and detects a car without it in front of it, your car falls back to manual mode...
great question - I assume a set of local knowledge will be added by curators or lawsuits over time... Large tech companies have a lot more pull with government than individual drivers, they might even get that stop sign fixed!