The Problem: HS2 costs are spiralling, and the project will not be completed in full.
The Solution: Create a high-speed self-drive motorway instead to increase capacity and drive the future of travel.
As a massive train (particularly steam train) enthusiast, it pains me to admit that railways are a 19th and 20th century technology.
The future of travel is rail and air.
Railways were always designed primarily to take freight, which makes sense; heavy products can be moved en masse more efficiently via railway than on canals or via roads through difficult terrain, such as in the US and Canada.
However, for passenger travel, they are not the way forward; too few people can fit on a train, and the gaps needed between trains mean capacity is restricted along a system that costs far more to maintain than roads.
HS2 is the very worst of railways; phenomenally expensive, low capacity and far too rigid; people must go from station to station, not start to end as they do in cars, making their journeys longer and more inconvenient.
I therefore propose an alternative to HS2 through the creation of a high-speed autonomous motorway.
The motorway would be four lanes wide each way and fully autonomous; supported by sensors built into the sides of the roads and surface, only vehicles with autonomous software would be allowed to drive on the road.
This overcomes one of the big limitations of the switch to automobile autonomy; that autonomous cars must be able to respond to human drivers.
On this motorway, all cars would be autonomous and all running inter-operable software.
All cars would be electric (helping nudge people into buying electric cars) and the drivers would drive them onto the slip road (the cars would not be autonomous all the time, just when on this road) and then hand over control to the computer system.
They would simply choose where they wanted to go and the computers would assign them a lane and drive them at high speed and high-volume, with cars driving close together as software would enable predictive and immediate breaking and acceleration of all vehicles.
Lorries, too, could use the motorway, but only if they were electric and had the necessary software.
Speeds on the road could be upwards of 100mph, there would be zero accidents and traffic jams due to all the cars talking to each other all the time, and drivers could come on and off the motorway whenever they wanted, allowing point-to-point high-speed journeys.
Buses could also use the motorway, enabling high-speed public transport at much greater convenience to passengers (busses would pick people up close to their homes/work and then drive them onto the motorway, saving a trip to the train station).
And the road would help the shift towards autonomous vehicles more widely, enabling more motorways to become autonomous and therefore increasing vehicle safety and road capacity.
Crucially, however, it would not require all vehicles to be autonomous from the start, as some vehicles would simply not be able to use the motorway, but it would create a major incentive for the adoption of electric and autonomous vehicles.
A chance to drive the future of travel, all at a fraction of the cost of HS2.
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