They’re looking for proposals, the title is misleading
> One possibility is to use massive conveyor belts to cover the 500-km (310-mile) distance between the two cities, running alongside the highway or potentially through tunnels underneath the road. Alternatively, the infrastructure could simply provide flat lanes or tunnels, and the pallets could be shifted by automated electric carts.
I remember being really impressed with Adelaide's public O-bahn bus service back in 1999, I'm sure it's improved since then and a quick google shows it still exists, so it's obviously been a success.
At the time these were slightly modified busses that could disconnect the steering (or maybe the driver just let go of the wheel), and were fitted with rubber bumpers and/or wheels on the corners (I can't quite remember) and drove in a concrete channel a bit wider than the bus, but not much, and the bus just kind of bounced off the wall until it settled in a straight line. The bus driver just disengaged the wheel and floored the accelerator and it sped along its section until it got to the suburb it needed to be, then he slowed down a bit, the walls got a bit further apart and he re-engaged the steering wheel and just carried on driving normally as the concrete sidewalls ended and it turned into normal road.
Looking at the pictures now, it seems they've revised this design a bit and there are now 2 sets of concrete channels that the wheels sit in and the concrete doesn't go high enough to require bumpers and just operates against the tyres instead. I guess they discovered that it didn't cause enough tyre wear to be a problem, or they have extra thick sidewall tyres or something. Also possible I've just misremembered that detail after 25 years!
Anyway, these weren't driverless, but there's no real reason why they couldn't be. They could just slow down and stop in a bay at the destination city and then have a driver hop in to take it the last leg of the journey. To fulfil their green ambitions they should maybe add charging and power rails to power the vehicle along the route (also helps avoid inconveniently having one run out of fuel halfway and cause everything behind to be blocked up) and leave the battery with plenty of charge for the local part of the journey.
> One possibility is to use massive conveyor belts to cover the 500-km (310-mile) distance between the two cities, running alongside the highway or potentially through tunnels underneath the road. Alternatively, the infrastructure could simply provide flat lanes or tunnels, and the pallets could be shifted by automated electric carts.