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There is also a whitehouse.gov petition now: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/fund-solar-roadways-create-national-clean-energy-surplus-and-end-wintery-road-conditions/3hjb7XbS

Maybe not even start with roadways... what if they started with side-walks, greenbelts and parkways... much less abuse than roads also.

That's why it would never be a sudden mad dash to install and replace existing roadways. Maybe a few cities or even communities will get the idea to replace their roads and people will figure out the use over time, maybe. Its a gradual process, but it certainly would lead to an immediate adoption. Existing roads have already been bought and paid for, once their useful life runs out then inevitably the question of how to spend the road maintenance money comes up and that's when these things might be useful, after seeing it work, and are willing to change...maybe

Correct. Tailgating combined with an inordinate amount of meatbots on their cellular devices divided by an inordinate and ever-increasing amount of people who should not be driving given their lack of ability to do so without endangering lives anyhow because of the fact that THEY NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO FUCKING DRIVE ANYHOW given their lack of awareness/motor skills/etc., makes city roadways of today a very annoying place.

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I really despise when people poo-poo this idea because of the "realities". Invariably they're talking about the realities of doing it on actual roads and highways. I think it's pretty obvious you'd start with parking lots and footpaths, then when things are working better you move to some test roadways, then when most of the bugs are worked out and economies of scale are in place you move to a full-scale roll-out.

According to the American Road and Transport Builders Association, the upfront costs of current construction are pretty significant already:

"Construct a new 2-lane undivided road – about $2-$3 million per mile in rural areas, about $3-5 million in urban areas.

Mill and resurface a 4-lane road – about $1.25 million per mile.

Expand an Interstate Highway from 4 lanes to 6 lanes – about $4 million per mile."

So really you'd have to look at the replacement costs of a technology like this rather than just assigning all those initial costs to the category of boondoggle.

But this really points to a larger issue that makes this question very hard to quantify and is actually addressed by the Solar Roadways people:

"For an accurate cost comparison between current systems and the Solar Roadways system, you'd have to combine the costs of current roads (including snow removal, line repainting, pothole repair, etc.), power plants (and the coal or nuclear material to run them), and power and data delivery systems (power poles and relay stations) to be comparable with the Solar Roadway system, which provides all three. So the comparison is more like an apple to a fruit basket."

One further interesting note from their website is that the numbers they used for electricity generation of the solar roadway system came out of their testing. In Northern Idaho. In the dead of winter. In other words, the worst possible conditions for solar panel systems.

The snow melting thing is highly exaggerated. The panels might generate enough juice to keep black ice from forming, but would need to draw power from the grid to do any significant melting, let alone somehow dealing with several inches from a sizable storm.

I do see huge advantages to having roads made of these. The cost would no doubt be enormous, but the long-term advantages could make them a reasonable investment. I don't have any of the numbers to reference, but would guess that we could replace a sizable portion of the US roadways with a fraction of the military's annual budget.