Reid

“When congestion is heavy, humans must not be permitted to drive themselves”

“When congestion is heavy, humans must not be permitted to drive themselves”

We spend so much time on TopGear glorifying the automobile, celebrating the freedom, excitement and adventure that cars deliver. But that petrolhead dream is all too often rare and feeting – driving these days mostly involves staring at the back of a stationary Vauxhall Zafra, inhaling diesel fumes and rueing the existence of your fellow motorists.

The sad fact is that there are too many cars on the road, so many that driving has stopped being fun. The world, particularly in big cities, has become saturated with the things and it’s slowly driving me insane.

Elon Musk recently dreamed up a solution to this vehicular epidemic. He reckons building a network of tunnels, where cars are ferried on electric sleds at up to 124mph, could cut gridlock, but as much as I respect the man, that vision is too expensive, too complicated and sounds like the plot from a disaster movie.

I have a better solution: we must remove humans from the equation. I’m not talking about murder here – I’d settle for the rapid introduction of autonomous cars. Yes, Rory’s banging on about self-driving cars again, but hear me out. You see, humans just aren’t very efcient. We lack discipline, coordination and cooperation, which means trafc doesn’t fow as quickly or as smoothly as it ought to. Tailgating, changing lanes and braking too hard all contribute to inefcient trafc fow and leads to gridlock. Motorways are the simplest example; the road could be perfectly clear in your direction, but all it takes is one driver to slow down, which then causes a concertina efect that leads to trafc further down the chain.

Self-driving cars will allow trafc to move more fuidly through the roads. They’ll be coordinated, predict each other’s every move and – in theory – never have to stop. A lane of autonomous cars will behave like a train, moving as a single entity. We won’t even need trafc lights – as autonomous cars can talk to each other and make decisions in a split second, they’ll sail through intersections from every angle, narrowly avoiding each other as they continue on their merry way.

And even if they do come to a standstill, due to a pedestrian crossing, they’ll get going again without any undue hesitation, every car in the entire queue accelerating simultaneously with purpose, instead of one at a time.

I’m not alone in my thinking. A Department for Transport study, which modelled trafc fow using computer software, predicted that there could be a 40 per cent cut in rush hour trafc if the majority of cars were autonomous. Even if only a quarter of cars were driverless, it could reduce delays by 12.4 per cent. That’s the equivalent of cutting nearly eight minutes of a one-hour journey.

And no, this won’t diminish the pleasure of driving, because my plan caters for that, too. I decree all new cars must have user-switchable autonomous systems. Outside peak hours, humans will be allowed to take control of their own vehicles. However, during peak times, or when congestion is heavy within that vehicle’s immediate geographical area, humans must not be permitted to drive themselves. Rush hour commutes will be a fully autonomous afair.

If you’re desperate to drive like a hooligan during peak times, you’ll have to make arrangements to do so in a safe environment away from people who are trying to get from A to B. Go to a track day, learn to drift, enter a drag race.

This isn’t rocket science, people. This isn’t revolutionary thinking. It makes perfect sense. Yes, driving is supposed to be fun, but, like any fun task that starts becoming tedious, it’s time to let the machines do the heavy lifting.