Granted, people are this dumb every single day. But who is liable for the fines here?
The problem here is dispersed responsibility so no one is responsible
The result is that no one takes responsibility for not actually creating blatantly dangerous events, such as blowing through cones, signs and other obvious indicators of a construction / no-driving zone and endangering construction workers & passengers (cones also initially mark a washout/bridge-out problem). To the software developers and managers, it is just some lower-priority edge case they'll handle later. To the corporate promoters, it's just a cost to be externalized on the public. To the regulators, obviously, they don't want to be seen as "Luddites", so they just approved MORE, not less, of these obviously-not-self-driving cars.
If a person actually had both personal responsibility (e.g., they will get fined or potentially imprisoned for approx. negligent homicide if death results) and authority (e.g., they can stop deployment until it is truly fixed after a car mistakes a truck for the sky and decapitaties the driver or blows through a construction zone) to prevent these situations, they would not happen as much. Who should have such responsibility and authority? Start with the CEO and board.
EDIT: stray words, tenses, added examples
Same with emergency vehicles, which self-driving cars have already been shown to ignore.
I'm not debating whether an AI car should "see" possible construction, even when not marked appropriately (most humans can too). Only pointing out we don't know if this zone was marked/flagged - and if it wasn't, there's a higher likelihood of human driver error as well.
Light control at an intersection out? They'll just blink red, indicating a stop sign. Maybe they're off, and they put up temporary stop signs on the corners, or as you mentioned, a police officer redirects traffic. And then a fire engine will run through it, as they need to.
No idea how that would apply specifically here though.