How big is your laboratory? Is it a space you rent out, or is it all the known Universe and all of its history?
We’ve been learning things by trial and error a lot longer than we’ve been practicing the Scientific Method. You don’t always get the data you want. You don’t always get someone to summarize the data in a nicely formatted paper published in a respected journal. You get what you get and if not quite like it, make do.
If this sort of thing, Solar Roads, doesn’t interest you, that is fine too. Maybe you even have credible reasons to be Anti-Solar Roads. It’s certainly shaky enough ground to start on, but I wouldn’t discredit this road in France as a useful experiment simply because there wasn’t a paper at the end. Thunderstorms and fallen leaves! Maybe they should have known, but they didn’t, and because they didn’t consider that, it’s exciting because now how can we go about addressing the problem if we wish to try this again? Maybe someone can build a road and let it get hit by Thunderstorms just to analyze the rate of fire, so to speak. Maybe someone can build one somewhere else to figure out how it differs from one location to another. Maybe we build a third, and start figuring if a solar road is more likely to attract strikes from a storm than other types of roads? Can we mitigate this with some kind of lightning rod? How many do we need and how spaced apart should they be? Can we capture the energy from the lightning or are they too infrequent even in the vicinity of the solar roads to be worth the bother?
A lot of those questions might already be answered or answerable without having to build all of those roads to figure it out, but at the very least, a little roadway in France can spark a lot of questions that are worth answering for anyone trying this anywhere else.