Maybe future roads will be paved with a bacteria that melts snow and increases traction, thus eliminating the need for plowing and chemicals under winter conditions.
This is a nice stunt but I doubt it will work in the real world. My guess is that they are doing this in a relatively sterile environment since Synechococcus grows very slowly (doubling time of a couple of hours) even under favorable conditions. Once the culture is contaminated, it will be taken over by faster growing bacteria and the process will become inoperable.
Another interesting article to accompany the link I sent you yesterday.
I’m having flashbacks to the 1980s post-apocolyptic fiction of a “gas bug”. A series of short stories had a “gas bug” engineered as a Soviet bioweapon that ate gasoline - and got out of control. One novel had a similar germ that ate both plastic and gasoline, throwing us into a steampunk type scenario.