To help PennDOT prepare for the day when autonomous vehicles are the norm, Schoch recruited Carnegie Mellon University.

PennDOT and CMU will look at how to regulate self-driving vehicles and how they might affect policy decisions in a study expected to get under way in about a month and to take a year to complete, said Allen D. Biehler, a former PennDOT secretary who is now a distinguished professor of transportation systems and policy at CMU.