Self-Driving Cars Will Beat High Speed Rail
The United Kingdom is not a big country. The furthest point you can be from anywhere else is just over 600 miles, as the bird flies. By area, California is 1.75 UKs, and that’s only one of fifty states in America.
We’re also not, contrary to popular belief, a very densely populated country. We have pockets of highly concentrated population, and lots of lovely green space, mountains and lakes in-between.
We have lots of roads, motorways, canals and rivers connecting our towns and cities but, despite this, it can take a painfully long time to get places.
This is where the new rail line High Speed Two is supposed to come in.
But HS2 is limited in scope, connecting just a few key cities on a rough North-South line. While it’s true that a lot of people live along the route, there are plenty who don’t. More importantly, there’s no sign of how any of the £50,000,000,000 will benefit anyone trying to get East-West.
So what? Well, this is where a little bit of research yields interesting results.
Here are the routes I checked (straight lines drawn for ease of visual representation):
The data used to generate this are rough estimates, but also best case — I’ve used the fastest possible trains for the routes and taken the shortest road route as the distance. All numbers are rounded to the nearest whole.
Here’s a more detailed table, which also includes the “without traffic” times provided by Google Maps to drive between the same places:
The rail stats are, in my opinion, the most relevant in viewing whether HS2 is worth it. And, what do you know, the North-South links aren’t that bad. They could be better for sure, and they’re at the limit of what our current rail network can do. But the East-West MPH are roughly half that of North-South, pretty much everywhere you look (Bristol — London being pretty much the only exception I can find).
Now, I’m not suggesting we should put a bullet train between Crail and Oban – it’s never going to be financially worth it. But there must be some way of improving the obvious issues.
Take travel from Birmingham to Norwich:
What is that all about? It’s 130 miles, as the crow flies. It should take 90 minutes. In fact, this is a large part of why I’ve never made it to Norwich – I can be in Italy faster.
So, there are obvious issues with our current network. Yes, the railways need improving across the board, but usually when improving something you don’t tend start with the best bit and make it even better. Yet that’s exactly the plan for HS2.
The other issue this research highlights, along with everyone’s experience of driving around the UK: our road system is creaking too.
Every single day there’s gridlock up and down the county. That 90 minutes between Liverpool and Leeds? In “rush hour” that’s usually more like 180 minutes, and that assumes there hasn’t been an accident or — even worse — snow.
Aside from the stress of it taking so long to commute such short distances, there’s the loss of time and energy. As a country we’re struggling to get our carbon footprint down, yet the solution is literally sitting there in front of us on a motorway for several hours, each and every day.
Technology can save us
Electric cars are coming. Possibly not as fast as they could, but interest is definitely on the up. No matter what you think of Elon Musk, Tesla are doing great things for the image of electric cars because they’re showing the world that they can be better than cars with internal combustion engines.
On top of that, driverless cars are coming. This one takes a bit more of a leap of faith, but within 15 years they’ll be here and we’ll never look back.
But I love driving! I hear you cry. Me too, I cry back. However: sitting on a motorway is not driving.
And think about it: we’re already finding driving is getting in the way of doing other things. Look around you every morning and what do you see? People looking at and talking on their phones (even though they shouldn’t). People putting their make-up on, doing their hair. Trying to placate the crying child in the back. Singing along to the radio. Staring out into the abyss wishing they weren’t stuck in traffic.
As you’re stuck there behind the wheel you’re just one brain taking in the world around you. You’re making decisions based on what you can see which, in a car, is actually pretty limited. You’ve got indicators to let other people know your intentions (assuming you choose to use them), and you’ve got a horn to announce yourself in an emergency (or to emote that you really don’t approve of what someone just did). You might have a sat nav or a phone running a map client giving you traffic updates, but what can you do? You’re just one brain.
Driverless cars can connect to each other, and this is the key to it all. The car you’re in will know absolutely everything about all the other cars around it. Where they’re going, what they can see. That car 6 ahead? It just saw a pedestrian, and can let all the other cars around it know so they can react ahead of time. There’s a car about to merge in, so your car and the one in front seamlessly create a gap big enough to let it in — without anyone having to stop. Traffic lights aren’t really needed in a lot of places because the cars can position themselves accurately enough to cross each others path.
You’ll get to where you’re going and you’ll get out. The car goes and parks itself or gets used by someone else. And then it’s back when you need it to take you somewhere else.
And I haven’t even mentioned self driving trucks.
Hang on, wasn’t this article about HS2?
Exactly. Driverless cars are going to be here waaaaaaay before HS2 is finished. So we need to make sure that it’s still relevant by the time it gets here. We need to plan for the future.
Right now, there’s a MagLev train in Japan that can do 500km/h. It’s expensive, but strangely not as expensive as HS2.
Hyperloop is in active development, and promises speeds of up to 760mph. HS2's top speed? 250mph. The more you look around, the more you realise how antiquated it’s going to be.
There is still a core issue with all of the current solutions though, and that is that they’re still bound by the same rules that trains have been since their invention. You still have to get to A, wait for the right train, stop at C D E, F and wherever else, and finally arrive at your B. And then you still have to get to where you’re actually trying to get to. All the current solutions get from A to B faster, but everything else is the same.
Don’t get me wrong: I love trains. I love all transport – I grew up on a boat, spent happy weekends with my Dad chasing steam trains up and the country in an lovely red Ford XR3i, I cycle to work most days and I still love watching Top Gun. But loving something doesn’t mean that you can’t accept that it can be better.
The simple fact is that trains are really big, and therefore really heavy. Starting and stopping big things takes a lot of energy, and in turn requires a lot of space, so trains have to travel with huge gaps between t em in order to be safe.
So the first design idea: can we mitigate all the stopping and starting? Can we make trains take you straight to your B without having to stop at everyone else’s?
I think we can. If we make trains more personalized to your needs, then the carriage you’re in only needs to go to your B. You might be sharing that carriage with other people, but they’re also going to the same B.
To do this, instead of making trains, what if we instead made trains smaller, and therefore lighter. I don’t mean fewer carriages like the engineering marvel that isn’t sprinter trains, I mean smaller carriages. Carriages more like the size of a car.
They would be bigger than a car of course, but probably half the length of a current train carriage. Each carriage is a train in itself, fully functioning, all electric, and fully automated. Able to run much closer together than current trains do, and more specific to your needs.
If you change the lines into stations so that there is always a bypass, then only the carriages that need to stop there have to. Everyone else just zooms on by.
There could be many different types and sizes of carriage — ones for foot passengers and ones for cars. Yes, cars.
We can already transport other vehicles very effectively inside trains — the Channel Tunnel’s made trade is from doing just that. The biggest thing holding back adoption of electric cars is range, that inherent fear that you’ll run out of power in the middle of nowhere.
We can keep waiting for battery tech to improve, but ultimately there’s still an outside chance that it’ll run out. And the bigger the battery, the more weight you have to shift around. By putting cars into train carriages and whizzing them up and down the country we solve the range issue. In fact — we can massively improve the experience.
Why not drive to a railway station, drive into the carriage (possibly with one or two other cars, depending on the size of the carriage), and zoom down the railway at 300mph? Your car charges up along the way and because the train is tailored to you it doesn’t need to stop and start. You get to the other end and drive off. You’re 150 miles from where you started half an hour ago, and haven’t left your seat.
Of course; we should put freight back onto the rails in bulk too.
I’m under no illusion that this is a massive change to infrastructure. For it to work effectively there would need to be a huge array of things built; new stations, full electrification of the system. It would also be tricky to phase something like this in without just building a new network. We’ve built it before though, first with the canals, then with the existing railways, more recently with motorways.
We’d need a lot of money. But £50,000,000,000 is a lot of money. A hell of a lot of money.
Even if it’s not this idea that takes off, hopefully I’ve at least managed to make you also feel like we can do much better than HS2.
