Christian Wolmar
New technology has its place in railway development, but the industry must continue to focus on using established methods to operate the network efficiently, argues CHRISTIAN WOLMAR
Driverless cars.
SUDDENLY the driverless car seems like becoming a reality in the very near future. Hardly a day passes without news of new developments.
On successive days in the middle week of August, for example, we heard that Ford was promising to develop a car with no steering wheel or any user-activated controls for the mass market by 2020, and that Uber (the world’s biggest taxi company) said that its passengers in Pittsburgh would be able to call up driverless cars next year. Helsinki also announced that it will be introducing driverless buses next year.
So why am I writing about this in a rail magazine? Well, clearly if it were possible in the near future for driverless cars to become the norm, there would be a huge knock-on effect on other forms of transport. Trains are in a way rather like driverless cars - passengers cannot exert any control over where they are going, and simply have to sit back and enjoy the ride. That’s what the driverless car lobby is promising will soon be a reality for all of us.
If the driverless car revolution really was just around the corner, it would certainly raise issues about the continued massive investment in the railways. Except it isn’t. I have followed the progress of the driverless car story for the past couple of years, and my main conclusion is that there is more hype around it than for the England football team at major tournaments - and so far just as little achievement.
The Pittsburgh story is a typical example. Read the small print and you find that actually the taxis will have not just one person in it, a test driver, but also ‘an observer’. Driverless it is not. The Helsinki project, meanwhile, is a trial of two buses and is really an experiment to trial the concept.
Take, too, the massive testing programme of Google in southern California, where the internet giant is claiming that its driverless cars have run nearly one and a half million miles more safely than conventional cars. Except they haven’t. Not only have they suffered a slightly above average accident rate, but on dozens of occasions the test driver - there is always a test driver - has had to intervene to prevent an accident. On one occasion when the driver did not intervene, the car hit a bus and it was deemed to be at fault.
Edmund King, president of the Automobile Association, told me the other day that he had been at a conference of key players in the driverless car market, and the consensus was that it will not be until 2030 that a fully driverless - or more accurately ‘autonomous’- car will be available on the market. Even then it will probably still require a human to oversee its operation, with the possible need to intervene.
He made a further telling point: “The first thing to ask is if drivers want them. A Populus survey of 26,000 drivers found that 69% say they are not ready to take their hands off the wheel because they enjoy driving.”
The danger of all this hype is that policy will start to be made around the notion that this ‘revolution’ (as the protagonists like to call it) is happening, and therefore people may start asking “why do we need all these trains?” or even “Surely HS2 is unnecessary given we will all be steered automatically up the M1 in our own vehicles?”
Apart from my usual desire to debunk hype, I was also struck by some similarities between the technological promises of the driverless car and of developments in the rail industry. Indeed, a key player, Elon Musk, is at the forefront of both autonomous car technology and radical new ideas for rail.
Musk is the chief executive and the key ideas man of Tesla Motors, which produces electric cars with the eventual intent of making them driverless. Musk, who is reckoned to be worth £10 billion and who is one of the main promoters of autonomous car technology, is not averse to a bit of hype. He suggested earlier this summer that “autonomous driving was a solved problem” and that the cars would be available to the public in two years’ time. But he presented no evidence of how this would happen, and the more sceptical motoring journalists expressed bemusement at his confidence.
Unfortunately for Musk, within days of his statement it emerged that an owner of one of his Tesla cars had swallowed too much of the
hype, with fatal consequences.
Teslas are fitted with a range of devices that take over control of the vehicle from the driver, such as cruise control on motorways. Joshua Brown, a keen advocate of the automated features on the cars, was actually watching a Harry Potter film on his DVD screen while driving on a highway. His car ploughed into a lorry and he was killed.
Tesla later admitted that the strong sunlight on the white truck had made it invisible to the sensors controlling Brown’s car, but tried blinding the media with statistics about how even despite the accident the car was still safer than conventional vehicles.
Musk is equally bullish about his rail project. In 2013, he announced plans for a ‘hyperloop’ connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles - a kind of modern version of the atmospheric railway first developed in the 1840s on the London & Croydon Railway, and beloved of Brunel, who used the concept on his South Devon Railway. These were typical heroic Victorian failures, but Musk is confident that using modern technology it will be possible to send small trains down a tube at speeds of up to 700mph, linking the two biggest Californian cities in 35 minutes.
The project has gone quiet recently, but my attention was drawn to the continued interest in this project by a press release from the Railway Consultancy (headed by one Nigel Harris, a namesake of my esteemed editor).
The Consultancy has been looking at routes where the technology might be appropriate, including “a possible link between Finland and Sweden, and one in the North of England”. In its newsletter, the Consultancy suggests that if a journey of 100 miles could be undertaken in a few minutes, urban planning would be radically changed as commuting from much greater distances would become feasible.
I don’t wish to sound Luddite, but much of this strikes me as fanciful. Maglev, which is a similar technology, has been around for decades and has always been beset by cost, energy and safety concerns.
The search for the silver bullet risks masking the need to simply make the best use of what we have. Network Rail’s emphasis on creating the Digital Railway undoubtedly meant it took its eye off the day job of keeping the network operating and undertaking enhancements cheaply and efficiently. Look also at how policymakers of the 1960s effectively wrote the railways off, suggesting that motor vehicles could meet all our transport needs. Beeching was by no means the only one who made that mistake.
None of this is to say that technology is irrelevant, or that we should stick our heads in the sand about its development. It is, though, to sound a warning that we must not be blinded by the prospect of the Holy Grail. It may never be found… or if it is, it may cost too much.